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Mr & Mrs Vinegar. Illustration by Arthur Rackham. From the book ‘English Fairy Tales’, first published 1918.

I have often heard the pleasant sound of the spade even by moonlight.

By George Johnson
The Cottage Gardener
Volume 4, London
1850

Excerpt:

There is some spare time for labourers, in the long days when work is over, that might be profitably spent in cultivating vegetables; and this makes it sad to see idle men and boys lounging in a village street, having nothing to occupy their evening hours. The allotments, indeed, where they exist at all, employ many who frequently toil on them till it is quite dark; and I have often heard the pleasant sound of the spade even by moonlight. But still, in a populous village there are a great number who really have no ground to till, except, perhaps, an atom of damp earth behind their dwellings. It would be a work of ‘rational’, doubly-beneficial charity – a means of doing unspeakable good – to let, or rent for the purpose of letting, to the poor pieces of land near every village; so that as many as possible, if not all the cottagers, should have a portion of ground to cultivate. Industrious characters would thus be materially assisted in providing for their families, and men of lazy habits ‘might’ be encouraged to amend.

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