Market gardening

In this part of the course, we will look at the crops used by man for food, as leafy vegetables, fruits, roots or bulbs. We will also look at some vegetables that have not yet been cultivated, but which are eaten as foraged produce. These vegetables deserve to be studied in order to bring them from their spontaneous or subspontaneous state to the state of domesticated cultivation. Market gardening is therefore a branch of agricultural production that includes the technical, economic and food-related activities involved in obtaining food vegetables. We will refer to the main groups of vegetables, classified according to the edible part of the plant: leaf vegetables, fruit vegetables, root vegetables, bulb vegetables and tuber vegetables. The general aspects relating to working the soil, production, cultivation techniques, fertilisation and pest control have already been covered in Part One of the course and we will not return to them, except in specific cases.