The application of electricity to horticulture

The scale of growing covered by commercial market-gardening and nursery production, and by amateur gardening, offers wide scope for the application of electricity in ways which contribute materially to the prosecution of these activities. Such applications are regarded in two main categories: those concerned with actual growth processes, e.g. soil warming, space heating and illumination, and those for ancillary purposes such as soil sterilization, pest destruction and water pumping. Soil warming is now largely effected by the low-voltage transformerfed system and is applied to hotbeds, propagating beds and benches, to cloches, and to beds and borders in glasshouses. It provides an economical way of producing localized warmth in such particular cases and by so doing can sometimes result in other economies, e.g. in space heating. Electrical space heating of glasshouses must be handled very carefully and at present can be applied with justification only in certain classes of glasshouse work, principally in the high-grade propagating house and the amateur´s greenhouse. Electrical methods are already improving the technique and simplifying the operation of various sterilizing processes, both of soil and of plants, and certain possibilities of future developments are discussed. Electricity also offers considerable mechanical aid in the form of water pumping, ventilation, lawn-mowing, etc., and there is a distinct possibility that methods will be developed for the successful operation of small-plot cultivating appliances.