In 1871, the Nottinghamshire Guardian carried an article about St Ann’s Allotments and the joy of manure…
“The gardens average 400 square yards, and one of the gardeners told me that he generally bought from 4 to 5 tons of manure each year!… All the crops grow, as it were, in dung; the roots find dung above, dung below, dung on each side, dung wherever they go. The consequence is that everything, whether it be pears, potatoes, leaves, flowers, or fruits, are as near perfect as may be.”
Hence, the old expression of gardening by muck and magic came to be used. Towards the end of the 19th century, the number of horses on city roads throughout the world resulted in manure piling up in the streets faster than it could be cleared away. The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894 resulted in The Times predicting that within 50 years, every street in London would be buried under 9 feet of manure. Gardens were clearly one of the beneficiaries of this surplus, but the carting of “4 to 5 tons of manure each year” up the steep hills of St Ann’s Allotments would have been a good workout.
The manure crisis was solved by the gradual replacement of horses with motor vehicles from the beginning of the 20th century. One hundred years later, the air pollution caused by motor vehicles has become a challenge. Bring back the horse, along with those muck and magic times?
