Abstract
It is believed that expansion of truck gardening areas is related to that of the urban district. Two indicators concerning truck gardening areas were used: one is the supply of human manure (used as fertilizer) from the urban district; the other is the supply of fresh vegetables provided theurban district by the villages. Documents show that the former practice developed in the middle of the 18th century at the same time as the development of the latter (Figure 1 and Table 1). The villages which supplied Edo with fresh vegetables are shown in Figure 2.
On the other hand, according to Yosuke 'Watanabe, in the middle 17th century the outline of the urban area of Edo was almost the same as that of Tokyo in the 1930's. Therefore, it may be deduced that a broad truck gardening area had already developed by the middle of the 18th century as shown in Figure 1.
In the case of Nichome (Shiodome-mura of Minamisaitama-gun in Saitama Prefecture), farmers purchased the human manure which was carried to them by river craft along the rivers and canals in and around Edo as shown in Table 1. In connection with dealing, in human manure, there were occasional quarrels over conflicting spheres of interest.
These two indicators have not yetbeen surveyed as they apply to, the western part of Edo in the same period, but it appears that the gardening area of eastern Edo was greater than that of the western part chiefly because the former has many more rivers forming networks which could be utilized as transportation media.
