Country Life
MINING GARDENERS.
It would perhaps be to the good if some of the attention devoted to " Family Farms "—a good phrase for a good thing—were exteLded to the home allotment. No one yet has ever given the allotments credit enough for their supply of food during the War ; and now they are beginning in a very real sense to give wholesome food and healthy work to the unemployed. It is a very curious—and, I think, unnoted —fact in the social history of to-day that the countryman is surrendering his allotment while the townsman is demanding both garden and allotment. If you want to see vegetables well grown go to Leicester, Wolverhampton, Shrewsbury (where I have seen carrots and leeks and such-like of almost sesquipedalian proportions). If you visit county allotments it is odds that the only highly productive plots belong to, say, a railway porter or a worker in a gravel pit. The younger agricultural labourer, quite naturally, finds the allotment too much like his professional work.
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