MELONS UNDER CLOCHES

By

EDWARD HYAMS

FABER & FABER LTD 24 Russell Square London

First published in mcmlii

by Faber and Faber Limited 24 Russell Square London W.C.I

Printed in Great Britain by Latimer Trend & Co Ltd Plymouth

All rights reserved

Inscribed to my wife, who taught me gardening

PREFACE

n the writing of this short manual I have drawn not only on personal experience, but on the experience of my friends Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Hartley, notable market gardeners at Harrietsham in Kent, and on the help of Mr. Alan Jackson of Wye College of the

University of London, and I am most grateful to these friends for their generosity in putting their knowledge at my disposal. I am indebted to my friend Mr. R. J. Ballard for drawing the diagrams.

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

Part One: MELONS

I. THE NATURE OF MELONS

II. RAISING THE PLANTS

III. PREPARING THE MELON BEDS AND PLANTING OUT

IV. GROWING THE MELON PLANTS CORRECTLY

V. CROPPING AND FRUIT CONTROL

VI. HARVESTING AND SELLING MELONS

VII. A SECOND CROP

VIII. PESTS AND DISEASES

Part Two: CUCUMBERS AND MARROWS

IX. CUCUMBERS

X. MARROWS INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATES

A good crop of melons under cloches. The variety is 'Tiger' Dutch Net melons Melons raised in Glasshouses being planted out under cloches.

Showing mound of soil around plant instead of a continuous ridge

Young melon plant after first stopping Better than laying the melons on glass or tiles is to stand them on end

in the soil (Photograph by courtesy of Chase Protected Cultivation Ltd.)

Melon Dutch Net. Sown in heat April 22nd. Planted out under cloches May 25th. Photograph taken 19th July 1946

Melons, large Rock Prescott. Many weigh 10 lb. each {Photograph by courtesy of Chase Protected Cultivation Ltd.)

At Wye College melons are grown under Dutch light The variety 'Conqueror' is exceptionally hardy

(a) Marrows, 'Stonor's Universal', sown in heat February 25th. Transplanted and cloched March 28th. Photographs taken 17th May 1946

(b) Marrows, 'Stonor's Universal', raised February 10th. Planted out March 15th. No soil warming. Photograph taken 22nd May 1946 facing page

Marrows, 'Stonor's Universal'. These were planted out under cloches the second week in April

24th July 1947 in Surrey. Marrow (Bush Green) planted and cloched 23rd April 1947, decloched 5th June 1947 when cloches transferred to cucumber 'Conqueror'

DIAGRAMS

1. Electrical Germinator, vertical section 2. Electrical Germinator

top: General view bottom: Side elevation

3. Section through cloched melon bed 4. Correctly trained melon plant in diagram 5. Training of cucumbers under cloches

Part One

MELONS

I

THE NATURE OF MELONS

elons belong to the genus Cucumis L., and a family native to many warm and sub-tropical countries, but notably to Africa. Edible species of the genus can be very roughly,

unscientifically, arbitrarily and conveniently divided into two groups: that of those which are sweet or sweetish in taste and roughly globular in shape, which we call melons; and those which, although they possess, of course, a measure of sugar in their composition, do not taste sweet and are, generally, elongated or oval, which we call cucumbers. Esculent gourds also include the marrows, in great variety of shape, flavour and size, and pumpkins which, by the way, stored after harvest, are quite good winter feed for cattle.

In addition to edible species, many Cucumis are grown for decorative gourds, principally in North America. Personally I find them quite hideous, but there are those who like them, even going to the length of arranging various shaped gourds of repulsive colours on platters, as interior decoration. Species of related genera are used in the same way—Cucurbitae, Lagenaria, Momordicae, Trichosanthes, and others. At least one of the gourds grown in the Americas has a very curious history. When the ex-slave, the negro Henri Christophe, succeeding the great Toussaint l'Ouverture in the government of Haiti, made himself King of that country, he wished both to fill his treasury with some valuable and portable article which would serve as a currency to pay for his civil and military budget, and to give his people a stable money. Almost the only household vessels in general use were the halved skins of gourds, which served as cups, bowls, plates and so forth. The King called in all the gourds in the island, and reissued them as payments made by the Crown for services rendered, thus giving them a monetary value, and causing them to be used as current coin. By this means the gourds became the currency of Haiti, and when, at a later date, the currency was metalized, the basic coin was, and is, called the gourde. The device was a clever one, and it demonstrated a fundamental truth of economics too often ignored by us: that all wealth is of the soil. The peasant who grew gourds could not increase the coin in circulation without also increasing the real wealth in food and domestic appliances of his country, thereby checking inflation.

Among the most interesting and useful gourds are the Luffas, several species, the vegetable sponges or, as they are hideously called in America, Dishcloth gourds. These are tropical plants, but some species are commercially cultivated in the United States, and they are being grown in greenhouses and, what may be of interest to the reader, under continuous cloches in this country. Young, green luffas are eaten by Arabs, and could presumably be eaten by Englishmen, but Miss S. M. Crowe, the scientific chief of the Chase Guild, assures me that they smell so unpleasant she would not like to try a dish of them. Luffas require the warmth which cloches will provide but no other particular care, and the small gardener can easily provide his family and friends with bath luffas and washing-up luffas.

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However, our proper subject is those sweet, edible gourds called melons, of the species Cucumis melo, cultivated in very numerous and diverse varieties. The origin of their cultivation is obscure, but such evidence as there is points to S.W. Asia as the source of the original esculent species. Pumpkins seem to have attracted more attention from the ancient writers than any others of the family: the parodist Matronius called this fruit after Homer's Titan, Tityos, Son of Holy Earth. Callimachus and Heraklides have fancy names for pumpkins. Virgil describes the 'serpent cucumber', coiling through the grass and swelling its belly. In Numbers, xi, 5, we have the Israelites complaining, 'We remember the fish which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers and the melons.' This would have been late in the second millennium B.C., by which time most fruit plants were well established in the ancient Near Eastern civilizations, and had long evolved into many varieties. The spread of the plant into the West seems to have been slow. If the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness sometime during the thirteenth century B.C., it is odd that neither Hesiod nor Homer have heard of cucumbers or melons during the ninth—at least, those parts of the Homeric texts which are supposed to be the most ancient have no reference to these fruits. "The fruit', says Heyn, in The Wanderings of Plants and Animals, 'is mentioned twice in the Iliad, but only in passages which are later insertions.' Sicyon means 'cucumber-town' and in Hesiod the same town is called Mekone, 'poppy-town', so perhaps cucumbers and melons arrived in the West between the ninth and eighth centuries B.C.

Of the whole family, the pumpkin seems to be the most ancient in cultivation: it is evidently to this gourd that Phanias, a pupil of Aristotle, refers by the name Kolokyntha, saying that it was unfit to eat unless cooked. The fruit is also called Indike, implying that it came from India. On the whole we can conclude from the Greek literature that cucumbers and pumpkins were known in remote antiquity, but melons only much later, when, in the second half of the Roman imperial epoch, they are first noticed as a product of Campania. Types of cucumber which, if allowed to ripen, grew sugary and full of aromatic juice, were called pepones (Gr. pepon, ripe). Pliny says that in Campania a cucumber seedling bore fruit of the nature of a quince (Gr. melon, quince) and of a golden colour, and that its seeds being planted produced similar plants. Victor Heyn, typical nineteenth-century rationalist scholar, says of this story, 'None will believe that the melon was produced from the cucumber in Campania by a freak of nature.' But the freaks of nature of 1880 have become the genetical commonplaces of 1952, and it is perfectly possible that Pliny's account of what appears to have been a chromosome mutation may be perfectly true. This is not to say that something of the kind had not happened before and in some other place. Décandolle believed that melons came from Transcaucasia, that the proto-species was taken into cultivation in 'Tartary' (Bactria, Sogdiana ?) and carried as seed to the Neapolitan gardens in the first century A.D.

Marco Polo praised the melons of Balkh, where they were cut into slices and dried in the sun and were then 'sweeter than honey'. This dried melon was a considerable article of commerce. In Persia melons were important as a staple of the diet, and it was said that every village had a different variety. The fruit was eaten or dried, but the gourd rinds were kept, as in Haiti, and used as domestic utensils, and this was the case all over near Asia.

The Byzantine Greeks cultivated cucumbers for cooking and salads: they called them angourion, a Persic-Aramaic word, so they evidently had this fruit from the east. In Russian, ogurets, in Polish, ogorek, the word persists, becomes gurke in German, and survives with us for pickled cucumbers, gurkins. This clue of fruit-names often enables us to trace the origin of a fruit-plant, for it is customary, when one people receives a new plant from another, to receive the name with it and incorporate that name in the native language, with suitable modifications (Mexican, chocolatl; English, chocolate). A case in point is the watermelon, C. citrullus, called in Italian anguria, a Greek word which indicates that the plant came from Byzantium. Probably the Arabs had it from the same source, but they had their own name for it, which they passed on to the French who must have had the fruit from the Arabs, perhaps by way of Spain. The French name is pastéque. But in the S.W. Asiatic part of the USSR this same fruit, almost a food staple, is called arbuzes, a Slavonic corruption of the Tartar word Kharpuz. The Tartars can only have had the fruit from Persia, where water-melons are also called hindévane—'Indian fruit'.

The diffusion of the musk and honey melons is much less clearly defined in its nomenclature, but such evidence as exists does point to S.W. Asia as the place of origin unless Pliny's story is true.

There is no need to describe a melon or cucumber plant since everyone is familiar with them. A few species of Cucumis are dioecious, that is the male and female (and stamenate pistillate) flowers occur on different plants: cultivated species are monoecious, but none bear hermaphrodite flowers, so that pollen must be carried from flower to flower for fertilization, and, in the case of melons, fertilization is necessary to the development of the fruit. (In the case of C. sativus var. Anglicus, the frame-cucumber of commerce which makes the most delicious of all sandwiches, fertilization is not necessary, in fact it is undesirable, and the good gardener picks off the male flowers. To do this with melon plants is to get no melons.) The sex of the flowers is easily distinguished, the females being larger and rising from an embryo melon, the males small, generally more numerous, and without, of course, a fruitlet. The flowers are trumpet-shaped and a bright yellow.

C. melo has in the course of time given rise to so many and diverse varieties, differing in size, colour, shape, flavour and hardiness, flourishing from the tropics into northern Europe, that it seems probable there must have been more than one wild species taken into cultivation, or more than one mutant of the cucumber. Some plants, V. vinifera silvestris Gmel. is a case in point, when shifted to new ground and new climate, adjust themselves to the changed conditions by undergoing almost an epidemic of mutations.

Our own interest here, since we are limited to those musk and honey melons which will ripen under continuous cloches in our climate, is confined to two strains of two principal varieties, both of considerable antiquity. These are not the musk melons properly so called, but the varieties reticulatus Laud., the netted or, as the Americans, say, nutmeg melons; and the cantalupensis Naud., cantaloupe melons named for Cantaluppi near Rome where, according to Bailey {Manual of Cultivated Plants) these melons were early grown, having been introduced into Italy from Asia. Within these varieties there occur numerous strains, differing slightly in their fruit, hardiness, facility of setting fruit, date of ripening and flavour. Among

these we propose to select as typical and easily grown only those three with which we have personal experience, for it is ill writing a practical handbook by hearsay.

C. melo var. Cantalupensis strain Tiger

This hardy melon was originally preferred by growers on the grounds that it was 'self-fertile'. All monoecious melons are self-fertile, and all that was meant was that Tiger is easily fertilized by bees and sets its own fruit where the conditions provided by the gardener are suitable, correct humidity being important, and also ventilation, but within wide limits. Musk melons and water melons grown in heated frames and hothouses were set by hand pollinating, and this is sometimes but rarely necessary with cantaloupe melons under cloches. Perhaps bees were not active in hothouses, or the melons were grown out of the bees' season. This is not the case with cloches, and bees will eagerly work melon flowers once they find them. The flowers, at all events to the human nose, have no scent, and we have had a case in one season of bees being plentiful in the garden but refusing to visit the melon cloches. It is evident that Gilbert White of Selbourne once had a similar experience, but with cucumbers which, in those days, still required fertilization. He wrote:

'If bees, who are much the best setters of cucumbers, do not happen to take kindly to the frames, the best way is to tempt them by a little honey placed on the male and female bloom. When they are once induced to haunt the frames they set all the fruit, and will hover with impatience round the lights in the morning, till the glasses are opened. Probatum est.'

For cucumbers, read melons, and for frames, cloches, and we have a simple method of setting fruit should bees be at all shy of the cloches row, which, we may add, they very rarely are.

Tiger cantaloupes, when small, are nearly spherical, when medium sized oval and when large either ovoid or globular. They are green, striped and blotched with white, the markings supposedly suggesting a tiger skin. When fully ripe, the green turns golden yellow. The flesh is pale orange or salmon, firm, sweet, musky and altogether delicious. Tiger is an early strain.

C. melo var. reticulatus strain Dutch Net

This is another early, large fruited strain which seems to belong to the honey-dew rather than the cantaloupe group. In appearance the melon, when fully grown, is a flattened globe of clearly delineated segments. The skin is a golden orange covered with a close and elaborate net pattern of warty white lines. The flavour is said to be superior to cantaloupes in general and to Tiger in particular. There is certainly a difference but it can hardly be called a superiority. Dutch Net set quite as readily as Tiger, and there is very little to choose between them, except that the latter fetch a slightly better price in the market.

C. melo var. Cantalupensis strain Charentais

Is this a cantaloupe, a honey-dew, or something else again? We cannot be sure. Charentais are certainly not reticulatus, so perhaps we shall be safe in classifying them as cantaloupes, and in any case they are very good. They belong with such small-fruited strains as Belgarde

and Noir de Carmes, very delicious and later in season than either of the foregoing so that they provide a successional crop. We are assured by keen melon eaters that Charentais are of very superior flavour, but tests which have brought us to the verge of indigestion in the public interest and that of scientific accuracy have revealed that this is a little snobbism, so common in gastronomic matters, and really traceable to the small size of the melon which suggests that the flavour must be more delicate. Delicacy of flavour often means insipidity ; Charentais are not insipid but they are rather slight when compared with the robust flavour of Tiger.

Charentais when fully grown are about the size of a large orange or small grapefruit, and so convenient at the rate of one melon per person. They are green with tiger-like markings, rather faint; they turn yellow when over-ripe.

The gardener who makes a beginning with these three strains, Tiger, Dutch Net and Charentais, will soon grow sufficiently experienced to try other varieties, although the differences from variety to variety are so small that there will be little point in abandoning these three easily cultivated melons, excepting, of course, for the curious gardener or the epicure.

Something should be said concerning the commercial status of varieties. It is easy to sell either Tiger or Dutch Net if they are well grown and without flaw. They must be prime fruits because they have to compete with Dutch and French imports; for, as we know, no British government can ever be induced to regard the market-gardener or farmer as anything but a public nuisance interfering seriously with the buy-it-abroad-in-exchange-for-plastic-soap-dishes policy. The grower who can ripen perfect melons early in August should get a fair price and make melon growing pay. Later in the month the price comes down with a rush and melon cultivation becomes dubiously profitable. At one time the best prices were fetched by very large fruit, but there is now a tendency to prefer smaller melons. This is worth watching, for the gardener must decide whether each plant is to be allowed to carry one enormous, two large, three medium or four small melons.

However, the fruit must not be too small. Charentais, at least in provincial markets, does not meet with approval, although in the more sophisticated London market there may be a sale for these and similar small melons.

In any case, the gardener who is going to grow melons for sale, whether locally or by sending fruit to the central markets, should do a little market-research by consulting greengrocers and market salesmen to discover what size melons to grow. For, with melons, the size of fruit is, within certain limits, controllable.

II

RAISING THE PLANTS

elon seeds being large, and germination of fresh seed a very high percentage of the total number planted, the seedlings can be raised in pots, one to a pot; and the pots can be of sufficient size to make pricking out unnecessary. Various

special composts are sometimes recommended, but for melons as for other seedlings the John Innes formula gives the most satisfactory results. Broadly speaking, the soil required by the seedlings is a sandy loam, very rich in organic material; soil taken from under old turf will do very well. Two- or three-inch pots should be used, and the seed sown late in April.

To raise melon seeds, heat is required, germination being best at between 70° and 80° F., for the varieties in which we are interested. The number of gardeners with heated greenhouses at their disposal is now small, and even commercial growers have to arrange for an accommodating nurseryman to raise their plants for them, the seeds being provided, however, by the grower. This unusual arrangement is due to the fact that as comparatively few gardeners grow melons, plants are not raised for market by nurserymen. For the same reason, it is not altogether easy to obtain the seeds; that is, the varieties required are not as a rule stocked by the great firms of seedsmen whose names are best known. Some of these stock seeds of their 'own' hardy melons, and of the melons which are grown in hot-beds by head gardeners of rich men. Tiger, Dutch Net and Charentais, as well as some others can be bought from Messrs. Chase Protected Cultivation, and probably from other sources. Chase's seeds are expensive but good.

The gardener who has no heated greenhouse can raise the seeds in a cool-house, or even under a single cloche, provided he has a source of local heat. The following description of two methods concern home-made devices, both of which have proved perfectly satisfactory in practice. A third method is to buy an electrically heated seed germinator, which are expensive but save much labour and care.

METHOD 1

Where a cool-house is available: for raising either melon or cucumber seeds.

The apparatus required is one of those paraffin-burning greenhouse heaters, the fire of which consists of an ordinary duplex burner with a metal chimney. Such devices are usually topped by a shallow tray which is kept filled with water in order to maintain atmospheric humidity. The water in the tray gets warm, even hot, after the lamp has been alight for some time. This kind of device is useless to provide general heat, unless for the tiniest greenhouse, but is useful if confined to providing local heat. Some growers have assured me that the burning of paraffin in a greenhouse causes or gives rise to fumes which are very bad for plants. I can only say that I have used such primitive contraptions in a greenhouse in which we grow peaches, grapes, tomatoes, cucumbers, aubergines, twenty kinds of seedlings and a home-grown grapefruit seedling tree, and that all these plants flourish. I can also add that a careless adjustment of the lamp, on the other hand,

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resulted in a fire which did quite a lot of damage and cost me 120 lb. of fine muscat grapes.

When the melon seeds have been sown in pots of compost, placed with the long axis vertical and only just covered with soil, stand the pots in the warm water of the heater tray, which will take about eight at a time. This sounds an odd thing to do, I know, but it results in rapid and healthy germination. The soil in the pots should not come up to the rim, but about half an inch below it, so that the pots can be covered, as soon as they are in the tray, with a sandwich of two sheets of glass with a sheet of white paper between them.

Care must be taken to see that the oil reservoir of the heater is filled before you go to bed or to the office or factory or wherever it is you have to waste time earning a living when you ought to be in the garden. A certain amount of experience is necessary in managing the lamp. The manufacturers provide a miserable little reservoir. But that is not the only snag: if the ambient temperature rises, as it will when the sun shines on the greenhouse, the lamp burns up and may flare and smoke, filling the greenhouse with noxious clouds of half-burnt oil; on the other hand, if the wicks are turned down too low, the lamp will go out.

Twice a day remove the cover from the pots to watch for germination. This will be rapid, a matter of a day or two, and as the seedlings grow fast in their locally tropical environment, the young plants are too easily drawn up and etiolated, and often damaged by pressing on the under side of the glass cover. Therefore, as soon as the two oval cotyledon leaves are visible, pushing up a lump of soil, remove the cover and expose the young plant to as much light as possible. Leave the pots in the warm water until the leaves have opened and turned green, then take them out and stand them on a batten of wood laid across the edges of the water tray.

For several days after germination you will be engaged in a close battle with the seedlings: you require them to make true leaves quickly, on a short and thick stalk. They, as if the stimulus of hot water provides them with growing momentum, try to do with only cotyledon leaves on the end of a long thin stalk of watery substance, very liable to damp off or to bend and break in the middle. The secret of getting good seedlings is to keep them warm enough but not too warm, to be sure that they are well aired, and to keep them close under the glass of the house or cloche, and in the fullest possible light. Growth must be maintained while forcing is avoided. Move the pots daily a little further from the source of heat; turn out the lamp altogether when the sun is on the greenhouse or cloche and the temperature high; bring the seedlings back within the influence of the lamp at night. Some ingenuity is needed when the source of heat is so small, and we may well sigh for the days when coke-fired boilers were possible, and a proper control of greenhouse temperatures. However, it can be done. For example, to get the seedlings near to the glass you will have to raise them too far from the heater; so raise the heater on pots or a box. If all goes well, the stalk of the seedlings will grow stout and hairy, and the tiny pointed bud between the cotyledon leaves will soon open into true leaves, and healthy growth will be established.

The manoeuvring of the seedling melon (or cucumber) plants about the greenhouse, to maintain satisfactory conditions, must continue throughout the month of May, although as the plants grow older and acquire more leaves, they can gradually be hardened by

reducing the temperature, but not by much. They will not grow at all without at least the warmth of the unheated house, but they can be emancipated from their juvenile dependance on artificial heat. At the end of May the plants should be short, stout, bushy, with eight or a dozen good leaves, measuring from the base of the stalk to the tip about eight inches, and rising from a stout little central stalk with a good growing tip.

METHOD 2

Where no greenhouse is available. The following germinator can be used of course for any seeds.1

I publish the simple details of this device for the benefit of those gardeners who happen to be instructed in and used to handling electricity. Those who are not so instructed and accustomed are strongly advised not to make the germinator. Electricity at mains voltages, in the presence of water and damp soil, is extremely dangerous.

Needless to add, this method will only do where electricity is available.

Obtain sixteen feet of 8"x 1" plank and make a rectangular frame, the internal dimensions being 23½" x 19½" and the external measurement therefore 24½ x 20½". Nail a plank across the bottom of the frame to make an open-topped box. Obtain a two-foot length of the enclosed, tubular heating unit, and mount it in the bottom of the box, diagonally. Fix up a switch under cover and remote from the place

1 Melons and cucumber seeds can be germinated in thirty-six hours in an ordinary poultry-farmer's incubator.

where the germinator is to be used. This place will, of course, have to be near to the house, and the switch can then be inside the house. The switch should either be of the two-pole type, so that both conductors of the wire are broken by it; or the utmost care should be taken to see that the conductor broken by the switch is, in the case of A.C., the live one. To find this, fix a length of flex into an ordinary bayonet lamp socket, and put a lamp in the socket. Unravel a couple of feet of the flex. Fix one of the wires to any good 'earth'. With the other, touch alternately the two poles of the main supply at the point where you are tapping it for your germinator current. One of these is virtually at earth and no current will flow; the other is live, and your lamp will light.

When the heater unit is in place and wired and tested, nail 1" x ½" slats of oak, or some equally rigid wood, across the open top of the box so that their ends fall half an inch short of the outside edges. The pots containing melon seeds and boxes of tomato or other seeds will be

stood on these. Let them be half an inch apart. Finally, at the end of the box, that is the shorter sides, nail a vertical batten 18" long. If these instructions are not perfectly clear, the diagram should help.

The germinator is completed by standing a large barn cloche on the frame, and closing the end by glasses held in place by wedges. Again, see the diagram.

A proper routine of handling this jury-rigged device should be established. The current should always be switched off before handling, and especially before watering; it should not be switched on again before the work is finished and cloche replaced. Ideally, there should be a separate fuse in the circuit, which the gardener can remove and keep in his pocket until he has finished. The glass should be removed as rarely as possible, and a thermometer installed permanently inside so that it can be seen through the glass. It is surprising how much work can be got out of this contrivance early in the season, and how many seedlings raised in it.

If melon seeds are raised in the germinator, the pots should be stood in shallow trays of water. In any case, whatever the seeds, a jar of water kept in the germinator will maintain atmospheric humidity. Electric heat is not so drying as gas heat, but drying it is.

Melon seedlings should not be watered from above. Their sappy stems are liable to damping off when very young and to bacterial stem canker later, and both conditions are encouraged by moisture. Stand the pots in water about half-way up and allow them to soak up what the soil requires, to be moist without being wet. Water will pass through the substance of a pot, which is porous.

The grower who uses our rather amateurish germinator must, like the grower who has a greenhouse, remove the seedlings away from the heat as soon as they have two true leaves. At first it will be sufficient to open the ventilator slot while leaving the heat on, or to switch off the heat during sunny weather. Later, the pots can be taken out of the germinator and placed under tall barn cloches or low barn cloches in full sun, the ventilator being adjusted according to weather until the time comes to plant out in the rows.

It is very easy to raise melon plants, less easy to raise good ones, but even that, with the minimum of equipment, can be done, given patience, ingenuity and enthusiasm.

III

PREPARING THE MELON BEDS AND PLANTING OUT

he size of the melon beds is a function of the dimensions of the cloches to be used, and of their number. These may be either large barn cloches or low barn cloches; the only difference is in

their height, both being 24" long and 20" wide. Melon plants being recumbent in their habit, height of cloches is not very important, though the taller ones give more room for the foliage. The melon plants will be planted one to a cloche, that is at 24" intervals, and it follows that the beds must be less than 20" wide and a multiple of 24" long.

The site should be in full sun and on good, mature garden soil, though it is surprising what melons will put up with. It should be borne in mind that the grower's object is not to grow excessively vigorous plants but fruit, and masses of foliage are a nuisance under cloches. What is wanted is healthy but restrained growth.

The following method for making up melon beds for use with cloches is the one with which the author has personal experience, which is in use at Wye College, in association with Dutch lights, and also with the most successful commercial growers of my acquaintance. There are probably other methods: the gardener who makes large quantities of compost may well find that he can make up the beds with that and get good results, but I shall confine myself to describing the method I know.

Take out a trench the width of your spade and one spit deep. It will be as long as the bed you wish to make, a multiple of two feet. Make a clean-sided trench, really clear of spoil. Pack into it fresh, unrotted farmyard litter, mostly straw with not much dung—in short, the easiest kind of farmyard manure to obtain! Where even this cannot be obtained, as often in town gardens, half-rotten straw mixed with a small

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amount of poultry droppings and with grass cuttings, could be used. Or half-rotten straw with some mature compost as an activator. Tread the litter into the trench really firmly, then flood the trench with the garden hose, add more litter, more water, and so on, treading all the time, or rather stamping it down. There is no need to do this in one day; take a week, returning several times to the job until you have the trench quite full of a tightly jammed mass of sodden matter, with no soil at all. The trench filling must come level with the soil.

This being done, shovel the topsoil which was taken as spoil from the trench back on to the litter, patting and smoothing it down until you have a long, rounded hump or ridge the length of the row. For the sake of good drainage and results, it is worth taking a lot of trouble with this ridge, making a really tidy job of it. You may find this either tedious or amusing, according to your nature, but do it anyway. For a diagrammatic section through your completed melon bed, see the drawing on the opposite page.

The beds should be prepared during March, April and May and given a little time to settle down. If the cloches are free for use, it is a good idea to cover the beds at once, instead of waiting until the plants are in place, for the soil will then be warmed and the conditions more favourable for the seedlings.

It is useless to plant out on a certain date, regardless of the weather. It is very important with melons, as with cucumbers, that growth should be steady and continuous, allowing the plants no pauses in a half-grown state, when they are susceptible, by reason of the sappiness of their stems, to all sorts of troubles. The gardener's object must be to get the melon plants to grow away as soon as they are in place under the cloches, and for that purpose fairly warm weather is essential. If the seedlings get a good start, they seem to gather growing momentum, and a check later, due to cooler weather, will not be very serious, whereas if they are planted out during a cold spell, they will only start to grow reluctantly, if at all. The time for planting should not be before the last week in May and ought not to be later than the second week in June. If the last week in May is fine and warm in the daytime, it is possible that, with clear, still nights, the temperature will be very low during the dark hours and, in bottoms, there may even be slight frost. Closed, continuous cloches provide good protection against

several degrees of frost, but in such conditions, and where only a few melons are being grown, there is advantage in trying to conserve the heat accumulated during the day by covering the cloches, after sunset, with sacks, and removing these first thing in the morning, as soon as the sun is up.

When planting the seedlings, provision can be made for subsequent tidy and therefore safe watering as follows. Mark the place on top of the ridge, where the melon plant is to go. On each side of this spot, on the slopes of the hump, take out a hole with the trowel and bury an empty three-inch pot, base downwards of course. The edges of the pots should not be quite level with the soil, but a shade above it. Between these, on the crest of the hump, take out another hole with the trowel, knock the melon seedling out of the pot with the soil intact and without disturbing the roots, plant it firmly in the hole and smooth off the soil to restore the slope of the hump.

Now this is important: when you are doing this do not plant so deep that the top of the pot soil comes level with the ridge soil; on the contrary, allow the top of the pot soil to be at least half an inch (preferably an inch) above the level of the ridge soil, and do not smooth

the ridge soil up to the pot soil, but leave the latter sticking out. By this means the crown of the plant is held well above the soil level, and as the pot soil will slowly crumble down, the plant will be left supported by a kind of low tripod of root-tops. The object of this exercise is to prevent the true stem of the plant from coming into contact with the soil surface and to minimize the chances of bacterial stem canker, which appears to be soil-borne.

The sunken pots on one or both sides of each plant serve a similar precautionary purpose. Watering will be done direct to the roots by filling the sunken pots, and the stem of the melon plant will always be dry, or if any water is splashed about, it will rapidly drain away from the stem. All this sounds as if the danger of bacterial stem canker is very great: it is not. But there is no harm in taking every possible means to prevent it and it is better to be safe than sorry.

There may possibly be a disadvantage in this method of watering. It is our own device, and the more usual method is to draw out a ring trench round the plant and fill that with water. But the trench is always collapsing. Our method means that in going direct to the roots, the water has no opportunity to dissolve soil mineral plant nutrients in the surface soil, and is simply water, not fertilizer. However, this is probably of very little importance in the case of so short-lived a plant as the melon and, apart from those mentioned, there is another great advantage: the maintenance of drought conditions on the surface of the ridge means that weed seeds do not germinate, and it is surprising how clean of weeds the ridge remains.

When planting is complete go over the ridge with a small hand fork and a small rake, making a shallow, even, tidy surface tilth and rounding the ridge nicely so that the plants are well up and clear of soil. Then put the cloches in place, the glasses of each touching those of its neighbour to exclude draughts. Close the ends of the rows in the usual way.

IV

GROWING THE MELON PLANTS CORRECTLY

bout 90 per cent of a melon plant and of a melon fruit is water: the plants must have ample moisture. On the other hand, if they have too much, growth will either be checked, or it will be very

lush and unfruitful. Or, even if fruit is borne and matured, where water is excessive the flavour of the melons will be insipid. It is always difficult to give advice about watering plants because the amount of water required and the frequency invariably depend on the microclimate, as the scientists ponderously call the local weather conditions.

In the making of the melon bed an immense amount of water was used, and this will be conserved by the packed straw of the bed. There will be losses through the top soil by evaporation, and from the foliage of the plants by transpiration. Watering will balance these, and maintain conditions of moisture as they were when we started.

My own method, in the relatively very dry climate of east Kent, is to fill the buried pots once a day, in the evening during dry weather; to do no watering whatsoever during wet weather, for although the melons are protected from rain by the cloches, and horizontal movement of water in soil is negligible, the atmospheric humidity is high. In really hot weather the pots are filled twice a day. The best guide to watering is the plants themselves : if growth remains adequate and the leaves remain turgid and cool under the midday sun, then

watering is right—you are giving enough. The least sign of wilting or flagging means that watering is very insufficient, for there is drought at the roots. Excessively lush growth, on the other hand, may be evidence of excess moisture at the roots.

In practice, the way of making the melon bed in the first place means that so much water was stored and trapped, that it is very

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unusual for the plants to show any sign of distress even when watering is neglected.

SHADING AND VENTILATION The subjects of shading and ventilation are closely connected.

From about late June most growers paint the insides of the top glasses of the cloches with whitewash, to soften the impact of the sun on the plants. If one suggests that this is not necessary and that melons can thrive on all the sun they can get, are tropical plants in origin, and will be all the better for a roasting, the answer given by the experienced grower is that this is all very well in theory, but that in practice it is found that without such protection the high sun of midsummer will scorch melon plants under cloches or lights. I believe that such scorching is due to poor ventilation: if the plants have enough water at their roots, and there is a constant draught of air through the cloches, as there should be in fine weather, it stands to reason that the foliage will be consistently cooled by transpiration and the immediate evaporation of the water at the leaf surface. I am certain that shading with lime wash is quite unnecessary in June or July; I have never made use of it at all, but since there may be an explanation of our immunity to scorch in the high airiness of our garden, it may be that, in late July and August during very hot weather, shaded glasses are needed. Personally, in weather that hot, I should be inclined to remove the top glass on the south side altogether.

When the sun shines in high summer on a row of continuous cloches the temperature goes up like a rocket, and in closed cloches may easily reach 110° F., far higher than any cool-house, and far too high for any plants one is likely to be growing in England. It is therefore obvious that cloches must never remain closed in such conditions.

To lay down rules for ventilation is as difficult as to do so for watering. It depends on the local conditions. Melons thrive in a fresh atmosphere and pine in stagnant air. In warm weather the cloches over our melons are always kept with the ventilation slots open. In a heat wave, some of the top glasses are entirely removed between noon and three o'clock in the afternoon. In dull, close weather, every other cloche is opened at the ventilation slot. In cool weather the cloches are closed

entirely, as they are at night unless the weather is very warm indeed, when every third cloche is left open all night long.

CONTROL OF GROWTH

I have already written that the size and number of melons to a plant are controllable, within certain limits, by the gardener. He will decide whether he wants many small melons or a few large ones, and act accordingly. However, before coming to crop control there is the question of growth control.

A day or two after planting out, and when sure that the melon plants have taken their move well, the gardener should remove a top glass from the cloches, or shift the whole cloche, and pinch out the central growing tip of each plant. This probably sounds an odd thing to do but the object is to concentrate the strength of the plant in lateral growths, which will at once begin to shoot from below the pruned tip. There is, for the really skilful gardener, a new and arresting method of achieving the same result —or rather, it is by no means new, having been practised during the seventeenth century and being now revived. This method entails checking central tip growth at a very early stage in the plant's career, and in such a manner that it is never resumed. In the very young seedling, when it consists of no more than a pair of cotyledon leaves, there can be seen between these a tiny pointed bud, which later opens into two true leaves, roughly the shape of vine leaves, and revealing between them another minute pointed bud which represents the next pair of leaves. It is possible, using a sharp budding knife, a scalpel or even a razor blade, to cut this bud out when it is still minute, without damaging the plant. Where this is done, no more central growth will ever be made by that plant and from its infancy its energy will be diverted into lateral growths.

After the pinching out of the growing tip the melon plant will produce a number of lateral shoots which grow with great rapidity. Only two of these are required. Remember that there is very little room inside a cloche for so rampant a plant as a melon, in fact only ten inches across the cloche on each side of the plant, and a foot on each side along the cloche before you come to the next plant. Only two laterals are therefore allowed to grow, one on each side of the stem in the long axis of the row, until each has four leaves. They are then stopped by pinching out the growing tips.

At this point you have under your cloches a continuous row of foliage, the laterals on the right of each plant meeting the left-hand laterals of their right-hand neighbours. Up to this point almost all growers seem to be agreed about the right way to control melon growth. But thereafter opinions begin to differ, and there are several ways of treating the plants, two of which have merit. Before coming to them, however, there is one important point to make which remains true whatever kind of pruning is subsequently adopted: you do not want fruit on the main laterals, and if any pistillate flowers appear thereon, they should at once be removed. The fruit is to be grown on the sub-laterals, and it is, moreover, important that each fruit be at about the same distance from the centre of the plant as all the others, for it is a fact that if one melon be much nearer the centre of the plant than the others, it will draw all the energy of the plant to itself, grow very large, and prevent the other fruit on the same plant from growing at all, so that they are at best very small and more often remain immature,

ultimately withering away. Any fruit allowed to develop on the main laterals will certainly inhibit the development of the rest. It would perhaps be possible to regard this as a method of growing large melons, one to a plant, the number of plants being increased by setting them a foot apart, but this would entail excessive labour in pruning to keep the plants in order.

Now for the two methods of pruning: I shall, rather arbitrarily, call one natural, the other artificial. In the natural method, after stopping the main laterals after the fourth leaf, no more stopping is done until much beyond and the plants are allowed to grow more or less freely, to produce numerous sub-laterals, flower and set lots of fruit; only thereafter is a second pruning thought necessary. By the artificial method, on the other hand, regular inspection and stopping is practised as a routine, so that only just so much growth as is required to bear the amount of fruit decided on is permitted, and the plant is kept firmly under control.

THE NATURAL METHOD

After stopping at the fourth leaf allow the plant to grow as it pleases; take no notice of it at all, and when watering turn away the eyes from the apparently frightful tangle of sideshoots and foliage which is filling the cloches and promising you a terrible job when the fruit is set. The sub-laterals will produce numerous flowers of both sexes as well as a mass of sub-sub-laterals.

In theory always, in practice nearly always, bees will work in the cloches and carry pollen from the male to the female flowers. If they seem reluctant to do so the gardener may like to try Gilbert White's method of touching the flowers of both sexes with honey. In any case the bees must be given every encouragement by having all ventilators open from early in the morning. In really hot weather, during the heat

of the day, where the cloches are provided with 'panels', one of the top glasses can be entirely removed.

In fairness to the reader I must here intrude a personal experience : I have not found this 'natural' method satisfactory; for some reason bees would not work in the cloches when they were filled with foliage, as they tend to be when so little stopping of growth is done. My experience is not of general validity; other growers use this method with success. In the case in question, after scores of female flowers had mysteriously withered still virgin, I had to resort to hand-setting and the removal of surplus growth in such quantities as would have made a haystack, and did make a nice addition to the compost heap. After that the plants looked terrible and all matured at least three fine melons.

THE ARTIFICIAL METHOD

In this case the argument runs as follows: we want, say, four fruits to each plant; and to get even size we aim to set one fruit per sub-lateral on four sub-laterals equidistant from the centre of the plant. We therefore allow one sub-lateral to grow out on each side of each lateral, and we stop all other growth whatsoever by pinching out the buds as soon as we can. This entails daily inspection—not a hasty glance but a thorough going-over —for melon plants grow very fast in midsummer. Diagrammatically, the perfectly grown plant will then look like the diagram shown on the previous page.

The sub-laterals will flower: as soon as each has a couple of female flowers, stop growth at the tips, and continue inspection and the pinching out of new growth.

V CROPPING AND FRUIT CONTROL

THE NATURAL METHOD

s I have said, the plants are left more or less to their own devices until fruit has set; but before continuing with these instructions two points raise themselves here: how to be sure

that fruit has set; and, if it has not, how to set it by hand. One is told by experts that if the petals of a female melon flower

wilt and fall, leaving the fruitlet unadorned, then that fruit is set and will swell. With all due respect to the pundits, this is not necessarily true; I have seen scores of female flowers shed their petals and the fruitlets fail to develop. The gardener will very quickly come to recognize a fruitlet which has set: it remains bright green whereas the failure rapidly gets a yellow tinge; it becomes pubescent—that is, hairy—and it looks fatter, as it were, even before any measurable swelling has taken place. If it is not set it soon turns yellow, the stalk dries up and the fruitlet falls off the plant at a touch. Then there is an indirect way of telling whether fruit is set: if bees are working in the cloches then the gardener can be tolerably sure that most of the female flowers will be set, provided that the flowers are in sunshine and the humidity is adequate. If there are no bees, then the fruit will not be setting, in which case hand-setting, at one time considered essential in melon growing, must be undertaken. It is perfectly simple and nearly always successful.

When plenty of flowers are in full bloom, during the early forenoon and on a day of bright sunshine, remove a top glass from 'panel' type cloches or the whole cloche in the case of the simpler kinds, decide upon which fruitlets you want to set and, for each one to be treated, pick a male flower. The male flower must be fully open and in a state to supply pollen, and the sun must be shining on the site. Hold the male flower firmly and gently by the stalk and, carefully pulling downwards, peel off all the petals leaving the other organs of the flower intact. These will include the pollen-bearing parts. Place these organs in contact with the heart of the female flower, pressing gently, and carefully releasing your hold on the male flower, so that it is left in position in the centre of the female flower. Leave it there. Do the same for each fruit to be set, and replace the cloches in position. If fertilization has been achieved, the petals of the female flowers will wilt and fall on the evening of the same day. And that is all there is to it.

THE ARTIFICIAL METHOD

In the last chapter we had already established, for this method, a double cruciform plant in flower on all four sub-laterals. Here again, if bees are at work, wait until the fruit is set on all four sub-laterals. If bees are not at work, then hand-set the four fruits. As soon as an initial swelling announces that you have four set fruits, remove any other fruitlets, set or otherwise.

Thereafter continue the daily inspection and stopping of new growth, carefully preventing the production of new sub-lateral growths and of new flowers. The whole energy of the plant is thus directed into the four melons, or whatever number you have chosen to grow.

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With experience of both methods I have no hesitation in preferring the one I have called artificial. Plants of the rows grown by the natural method look much better, green, healthy and flourishing, whereas the strictly controlled plants look wretched, thin and wanting in foliage. Yet the fact remains that the artificial method seems to produce fruit of superior size and, what is more, matures it a good deal earlier. I find a time difference of nearly two weeks. This is not only important from the market point of view, but for another reason which will appear hereafter.

BACK TO THE NATURAL METHOD

As soon as the fruit is set, the time has come for a second pruning, which will be rather drastic. Chose the four fruits you are going to keep, or whatever number you have decided upon, and remove all the laterals other than those bearing these fruits. As by now the stems will be quite tough, you will have to use a knife. You need not reduce the plants to quite such attenuated creatures as those of the artificial method, but you will have to remove an enormous amount of surplus growth, and bring the plants down to something like the controlled ones. But whereas, thereafter, you may again let the plants go, in the case of the artificial ones control is maintained all the time.

Very early in the career of the young fruit, on plants grown by both methods, long before ripening time, it is a good plan to water for three successive days with an infusion of cow dung or horse dung, if you can get it, instead of pure water. This gives fruit growth a stimulating start. But after that, as soon as the fruit of Tiger and Dutch Net are as big as billiard balls, and of Charentais as big as golf balls, watering should be slowly and progressively reduced. By the time the larger sorts of melons are the size of cricket balls, watering will be down by a third of the original daily ration unless, indeed, the weather is exceptionally hot and dry. When the melons have reached the requisite size and should begin to ripen off, then watering should cease entirely.

Now, the most difficult part of melon culture is to know when this pre-ripening stage has in fact been reached, for until some experience has been gained you will not know how big the melons are going to be. Although you have created the conditions in which the plants are growing, and should be able to rely upon a certain definite performance, you cannot altogether do so. The size of melons depends not only on having the right seed to begin with, on soil, watering, the amount of skill and care applied to keeping the plants in hand, it depends also on temperature, and therefore on the season and the gardener's skill in manipulating ventilation. Melons will, for a variety of reasons, grow up to a certain size and then stop. They may begin to ripen at almost any size, and fruit which I have written off as a failure because they stopped growing when not much bigger than a tennis ball, but which I have lazily left on the vine, have turned out at the end of the season to be perfectly ripe and edible.

So one can give no exact indication of what to expect. But if the melons are well grown it would be roughly true to say that, at four to a plant, they will be about the diameter of a breakfast-cup saucer, and at

three or two to a plant a good deal larger. This holds for either Tiger or Dutch Net; Charentais are never bigger than a large orange. Some Tiger will be much bigger than average—as big round as a soup plate. Dutch Net can also be very large.

Before coming to the question of when to pick melons, there is one more comparison to be made between the results to be expected from the two methods. The melons grown by the natural method are not only later, they also tend to be smaller than those grown by the artificial method. This is no disadvantage, since the market for very large melons is failing in favour of a market for medium-sized and even small melons. Families in the melon-buying classes of the community are rarely large, and nobody wants half of an enormous melon hanging about for days. Personally, I can eat a whole four pound cantaloupe at a sitting, but my appetite for fruit is exceptionally robust. Smaller melons are, therefore, preferable and it is possible—I am not sure of this— that melons grown by the natural method are better flavoured or at least sweeter than those grown on rigorously controlled plants. It happens that I have had to train myself to judge, roughly, by the palate, the sugar content of grapes and half-made wine. The palate is far from being as accurate as a saccharinometer, but it seems to me that I have detected a superior sugar content in melons grown on uncontrolled plants with ample foliage. If this is so—and one of these seasons it will be worth making a refractometer test on comparable fruit—it would be accounted for by the superior area of leaf surface exposed to light, for it is of course in the foliage that sugar is made.

Now there are some trifling matters concerning the disposition of the fruit as it grows. The whole melon vine lies, of course, on the soil. Being under cloches it will suffer no harm from weather, but at watering time a certain amount of water is sure to be splashed about, there are quite likely to be slugs and they may bite into the rind of young fruits which lie on the soil. The swelling fruit can be laid upon a tile or a piece of glass to keep it dry and clean, but if a growing melon be placed on its side on a hard surface, it will not grow into a regular shape. The weight of the fruit will cause the side upon which it is placed to flatten with growth, and the finished fruit therefore will be misshapen and unfit for market although perfectly good to eat. The correct method is to stand the fruit on its end and it will then grow into a regular shape. You can try to balance each fruit on its end on a tile or a piece of glass, but I don't fancy your chances of keeping it balanced. The melons grow so fast, increasing their weight and changing their centre of gravity almost from hour to hour, that they easily topple over. At Wye College, a great place for fine melons, no hard base is used; the melons are stood on end in the soil, making a little saucer for themselves, and their shape being what it is any splashed water runs off at once and they remain perfectly dry and clean.

VI

HARVESTING AND SELLING MELONS

ow, ripeness: I know no more difficult task in gardening than that of gathering hard-skinned fruit at the right moment. In the case of pears, for example, about three-quarters of all the pears

which come on the market are not fit to eat, being either never ripe because they have been picked prematurely for the convenience of marketing, or mealy through being left too long on the tree. Apples are easier, though a perfect apple from a shop is a rare thing. Melons are the devil. If they are required for home consumption, there is no difficulty whatsoever; they can be left on the vine until they turn yellow, when they are at their delicious best. But this will not do at all for melons which are to be sold and it is of the first importance to gather these at the right moment. When they arrive at the central market the salesman will grade them; the price you get depends on the grade; the grade depends on condition, which is a matter of ripeness; and that depends on the moment of picking, remembering that you have to allow for ripening to continue while the fruit is reaching the shop.

The first evidence of ripeness which the tyro grower of melons is likely to notice will be the scent, one morning or evening, when the cloches are opened. Like all scents this is indescribable, since we want terms to describe them, but it so pleasant that I wonder no perfumier has tried to make use of it; but perhaps it would be difficult to suggest in the advertisements that the perfume was guaranteed to provoke sexual excitement. All it does excite is appetite, and cannibalism is deprecated in good society. When they smell delicious then, melons are fit to eat; but you have missed the moment at which they should have been cut for market.

For that purpose you must catch the melons when ripening has started but is not anything like complete. Once the rather mysterious bio-chemical change called ripening has begun, it will continue though the fruit be separated from the plant. In short, your melons should ripen off in the time which elapses between their leaving your garden and arriving in the greengrocer's shop. When a melon is nearly ripe there appears, in the stalk, at the point where it joins the fruit and plant, a sort of dry crack, rather like that produced in the human skin by 'chapping'. The commercial grower has to recognize the moment before this crack appears, when it is about to appear. I cannot tell you how to do this; I suppose it is a matter of the appearance of the skin of the stalk. At all events, you will learn, and that soon. Cut melons for market just before this crack appears.

There are three ways of disposing of ripe melons, the first and best being by eating them at once. You can sell them; and you can keep them until Christmas.

To keep melons: pick them as if for market, handle with the sort of care you would use if they were made of fine porcelain, and place them in nests of wood wool in boxes, in a dry and cool place. Do not, thereafter, move them at all, and if they have to be handled it must be done with elaborate gentleness. A melon without the slightest shadow or suggestion of a flaw or bruise will keep for at least eight weeks and perhaps longer. A melon with a slight bruise on the rind, not bigger

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than an old threepenny-bit, will not keep at all; the bruise will go watery, spread, and the melon will rot.

There are two ways of selling melons: the least troublesome, for the small grower with a few rows of cloched melons, is to come to an arrangement for direct sale with a local greengrocer or with one of those fruit stalls which have sprung up in the last thirty years on all the arterial roads through fruit-growing regions of the countryside. This phenomenon is widespread: I have seen such stalls, very numerous, in France, Italy and the United States. I believe they ought to be encouraged, for the consumer thus gets his fruit fresh and cheap, and the grower a fair price without heavy freight charges to pay. Moreover, no elaborate packing is necessary. It is true that this starves the town of fruit, but townsmen seem to prefer fruit of inferior quality from as far away as possible in exchange for the manufactured articles with which it is their business to clutter up a world already overfull of junk. The last thing they like to eat is home-grown fruit, as this has a definite flavour which they, used to flavourless food, naturally find frightening and even offensive. Moreover, it is good for their health, and by keeping them fit deprives them of their fair share of the National Health service.

If melons are to be sent to central markets, packing is the grower's first headache. As all British governments, regardless of colour, are elected by urban masses, they are as hostile to the home grower as their constituents, and make quite sure that they shall not have even half as much material for packing as the Dutch or French or Italians. The large market gardener will know far more about this than I do. All I can say is that melons must be packed in boxes or trays, nested in wood wool, and carefully insulated from contact with anything hard, which would bruise them. Whether they go to market by train or by dealer's lorry this will be necessary. The cost of freight is enormous, and will probably eat up any profit the grower might otherwise earn, but I know of no way round this until every grower in the country raises his voice in constant, unremitting and loud nagging, and in drawing the housewife's attention to the fact that she is paying for a thoroughly out-of-date transport system which has been foisted on the nation by the relieved shareholders of the old companies.

It is possible, in the absence of better packing material, to send large melons to market, two to a twelve-pound 'chip', packed in wood wool. But this means arranging for the return of the chip, which is expensive. Packing melons in cardboard boxes is risky, as these are liable to be insufficiently rigid and to result in bruising of the fruit. However, it can be done, with care.

VII

A SECOND CROP

n a cool, wet summer it will be difficult to ripen melons much before the first week in September, but given a fine July and early August, and supposing the gardener to have grown his melons well

and kept the plants under control, it will be possible to cut fruit from the middle of August onwards. The plants being cleared of fruit, the usual practice is to dig them up and forget melons for that season. For the commercial cloche gardener who has his cropping plan worked out to a fine thing and will want the cloches for the next crop, this is certainly the best thing to do, but the amateur may be able, with reasonably good weather, to get more out of his melon plantation.

Provided that the plants are healthy and vigorous, so that it has been necessary to continue stopping fresh growth even while the ripe fruit was being gathered, and provided that the first harvest has been completed in August, say not later than August 15th, a second crop of fruit is a possibility.

Using a sharp knife, cut off all the growth which has borne fruit, as near to the leg of the plant as possible though leaving, of course, one or two good buds to grow out, either on the basal stem itself, or on the laterals very near to the stem.

Having cut all the plants down to this mere stump, clear the bed of weeds, cultivate it with a hand fork, drop half an ounce of nitro-chalk into each of the watering pots and, for five or six days, water the plants rather lavishly with an infusion of dung— that is, a rather weak manure water.

This stimulus will set them growing again very rapidly, and as late August and early September usually bring the finest weather of the year, the plants should, with luck, have the help of the climate. Ventilation can be rather restricted while the cloche row is not full of foliage, but it must be increased up to normal as soon as fresh foliage begins to open and a new lot of leaves to form.

One or two good laterals are required from each plant, and all other growth should be stopped as soon as it is noticed, so as to concentrate energy into the chosen shoots. If a weak plant throw one good lateral and one poor one, take the former and remove the latter, and content yourself with one. As before, stop the growth of laterals after the fourth leaf, by pinching out the growing tip, and so provoke the rapid development of sub-laterals. For the time being, allow all the sub-laterals which appear, to grow, but as soon as flowers of both sexes appear on two of these—one to each lateral—remove all the others and force the strength of the plant into the chosen two. It is advisable to aim at not more than two melons per plant as a second crop, and even to be satisfied with one, if it be of good size. In this connection there appears, in my experience of such fast-growing fruit plants as melons and grape-vines, to be some connection between the rate and degree of ripening and the size of the crop. The ability to ripen fruit seems to be limited, and an overloaded grape-vine will, in a bad year for weather, ripen its crop less completely than one with a lighter load of fruit. Thus a small crop has a better chance of reaching perfection than a large one, quite apart from the question of the size of fruit. The limiting factor—I make the suggestion with diffidence—may be the capacity of the plant

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to absorb and make use of potassium and phosphorus salts. A brief digression is perhaps justified here: gardeners who have late muscat grapes in greenhouses and who can no longer afford fuel or labour for heating the house, will find that if the crop be reduced by 50 per cent—removing half the bunches as soon as fruit is set—the remainder will ripen without heat. If my guess at the reason—and it is no more than a guess—be correct, it would serve no purpose to feed potash and phosphates to the plant, since my argument is not that these are deficient, but that the plant can only use a limited quantity.

Possibly the same phenomenon is operative with melons. At all events, aim to get no more than two melons per plant thus late in the season.

The routine will be exactly the same as before. Set the fruit by hand on a day of sunshine and early in the morning, unless you are sure that bees are working in the cloches. Stop the sub-laterals at the growing tip as soon as the fruit is set, prevent the development of new and unwanted growth by pinching out new buds, and generally follow the same course as for your first crop.

The same double-crop technique can be followed with cucumbers, but it is, as a rule, not necessary as a clever gardener can keep a cucumber plant growing and bearing all through the season. If, however, the leaves of the plant begin to go limp and yellow, and growth to stop, it is quite a good plan, early in the season, to cut the plant down and start a fresh lot of growth to bear a second crop.

The second-crop melons will ripen early in October and can be allowed to turn golden and mellow on the vine. It may be my imagination, but it always seems to me that these late melons are particularly luscious and sweet, and coming in as they do at the same time as the autumn fruits—the apples and mid-season pears, grapes and autumn strawberries—they give to the fruit gardener a fin de saison, rather nostalgic satisfaction which midsummer melons can never confer.

Melons which are not really ripe when first frosts make it necessary to bring them indoors, will ripen off quite well in any dark, cool place—a dresser drawer, or a box in a corner of the garden shed for that matter.

VIII

PESTS AND DISEASES

am handicapped in writing this chapter because as it happens I have never had any pests or diseases afflict my melons, and am therefore writing from the literature of the subject and from the

experience of other growers known to me. However, when I say 'never', this is not quite true; melons are

affected by a number of creatures ranging in size from a virus to a schoolboy. Among these are slugs and mice, with both of which we have had to cope. These are, as it were, casual and promiscuous and not to be considered exactly as pests and diseases of the melon, but they can be troublesome. Slugs like eating the rinds of ripe melons, but they prefer metafuel which poisons them with gratifying certainty. They are, therefore, easily got rid of by baiting the cloches with one of the slug-bait poisons on the market. The bodies of their dead should be removed.

Mice are extraordinarily troublesome in our garden, but other growers may not find them a bother in the melon bed. Not being a naturalist I don't know what kind of mice these are, but their colour is a dark, rich red, like fine old mahogany, and they are rather large. They were once confined to the garden, but we now have them in the house also, as our imbecile of a cat spends hours catching them and bringing them indoors, taking great pains not to do them any harm.

However, that is beside the point. They also get under the cloches, where it is nice and warm, and eat the melons, being particularly fond of the just-set fruitlets which they entirely consume in great numbers. Fortunately, whereas the setting of mousetraps in the open border invariably results in catching dozens of bluetits, and the placing of poison baits in the death of domestic animals, neither of these disadvantages attends the use of traps and poisons under cloches.

BACTERIAL STEM CANKER

There is, I have already mentioned it, a bacterial stem canker which can, and sometimes does, destroy a whole commercial plantation. The planting of the melons on top of a ridge or mound of soil, and the raising of the plants by shallow planting so that the actual stem is above soil level, are measures we have already discussed to avoid the danger of this disease, and apart from these precautions there is nothing one can do, and an outbreak of the disease on a serious scale generally means the failure of melon growing for that season. On the other hand, the trouble is not very common and no grower need be discouraged by the threat of it.

Writing about the pests and diseases of melon plants is unrewarding, as there is no useful help one can give concerning preventive or curative treatments. For all practical purposes, there are none, and the grower's only safety lies in growing his plants so well that they will be healthy.

There is a physiological malady of melons, possibly due to a virus, and which generally affects one or two plants in any considerable plantation. I am not aware of its scientific name, if it has one, but I can describe the symptom. The disease, if disease is the right word, does

I

not appear to affect the plant as such, nor even all the fruit on the affected plant, but, as a rule, only one or two fruits. These melons are misshapen in such a curious manner that they are vulgarly but arrestingly referred to as 'monkey bums'. As this name implies, there occurs at the base of the afflicted melons an irregular area of rind which is not green and characteristically marked, which, in fact, usurps the place of the proper skin and is greyish, with a surface texture like hard felt, for all the world like the calloused skin of the hind-quarters of certain apes. The area in question may be considerable—perhaps as much as a third of the total area of skin— and associated with it is a warping of the shape of the fruit, so that such fruit is misshapen and invariably small. On the other hand, the affected fruit is perfectly good to eat, although useless of course for market. 'Monkey bums' never amount to as much as 1 per cent of a crop of melons, and there is nothing to be done about them except to admire the odd phenomena which occur when the metabolism of a living creature is disturbed.

Some of the less discriminating aphides may occasionally set up a small colony on melon leaves, but they seem never to establish a flourishing settlement, and they can be wiped off with a damp cloth. No sprays need be or should be used. No caterpillars feed on melons, at least in England.

RED SPIDER

This is a very general term given to a whole genus of mites without distinction of species, apparently on the grounds that they are rarely red and never spiders. They can be a serious nuisance under cloches, but I have seen them on melons only so late in the season that their presence was not important, the crop being mature.

If some of the leaves of your melon plants begin to look rather as if they are drying up, not from the margins, but from the interior, and have a tired, rather discoloured, greyish-yellow look about them, they are probably infested with Red Spider. If you examine the underside of an affected leaf, with the naked eye if you have 6/4 eyesight, otherwise with a magnifying glass, you will see a small buff-coloured blob on numerous legs, moving about in a rather weary and sluggish manner. This is Red Spider. The miserable appearance of the leaves infested is due to thousands of punctures made by these creatures, which are sap-suckers. One of their less endearing attributes is that whereas you can kill the adults with various things, from cold water and Derris dust to such horrors as Parathion, you cannot, in my experience, kill the eggs which they lay with disconcerting industry and frequency. In any case, you must not use sprays on melons under cloches, and certainly not such phosphorus poisons as might be effective against Red Spider, which, not being an insect, is indifferent to DDT, and although alleged to be controllable with Derris, is only very partially so.

If the plants are strong, watering adequate and your luck normal, you probably will not get Red Spider on melons under cloches. The best control is to watch for the first appearance of the wretched thing, and then wipe it off with a damp cloth. Red Spider is supposed to favour plants suffering with drought at the roots—goodness knows why. Hence the importance of adequate watering.

FUSARIUM ROOT-ROT This is a fungus disease of melon roots and extremely rare in

England, so that if you get it you will probably be overwhelmed by scientific persons wishing to carry off the plants. It is, however, only too common in Holland, and if it were not ill-natured to rejoice at the misfortunes of one's neighbours, this might give the English grower some hope of being able to compete with the Dutch in selling melons in English markets—until, that is, fusarium root-rot arrives in force in this country. If it does we shall have to adopt the control measures applied by the Dutch who, being a persistent and ingenious people, have overcome the trouble. Their method is rather laborious, and was perhaps suggested to them by the French solution of the Phylloxera vastatrix crisis, or even by the Russian device of grafting melons on to pumpkin stocks in soils unsuitable for melons. Dutch melon growers in soils affected by fusarium spores, graft seedling melon plants on to stocks of Cucurbita ficifolia plants, as the root of this congener of the edible melons is resistant to the fungus. Green grafting, however, is a very tricky business, frequently giving rise to conditions favourable to bacterial stem canker. It would certainly not be a measure practicable by the ordinary amateur gardener, however enthusiastic. Fortunately the disease has not yet assumed any commercial significance in Britain, and perhaps the Dutch can be persuaded to keep it at home.

So far as I know there are no other diseases and pests of the melons with which the grower need concern himself, and there appears to be little reason to fear those I have mentioned provided the plants are well grown, and watering and ventilation managed in a sensible manner.

Part Two

CUCUMBERS AND MARROWS

IX CUCUMBERS

losely related to melons, as we have already seen, the cucumbers are all of the species Cucumis sativus L. There are two principal edible groups: varieties of C. sativus L. with small

oval or elongated oval fruits and a half hardy habit, which are generally referred to as ridge cucumbers, since they are commonly grown on a ridge; and sub-varieties of C. sativus L. var. anglicus, known to us as frame cucumbers and to the Americans as 'English forcing cucumbers'.

It would seem that the honour of having created the frame cucumbers belongs to English gardeners, as the varietal and English colloquial names both imply. But when this sub-variety developed is not clear at all. A peculiarity of this very long, very fine-flavoured type of cucumber is that it requires, as I have already recalled, no fertilization with pollen in order to develop fruit: this habit was perhaps the result of a bud mutation, but when and where did it occur? As we have already seen, in the eighteenth century the cucumber grown in frames like any other fruit still required fertilization, as the ridge cucumbers do today.

Since the sweet melons which have been dealt with in the previous chapters either developed out of cucumbers as b d mutants, or perhaps as a chromosome mutation, or came to us by similar routes and perhaps at an even earlier date, there is little more which need be said about the antiquity of this fruit. Columella, the Roman agronomist, gave directions for their cultivation; the Emperor Tiberius, says Pliny, was so fond of cucumber that he caused it to be served at his table every day. The date of the introduction to England seems to be obscure: in a booklet by 'Richard Gardiner of Shrewsburie', Profitable Instructions for the manuring, sowing and planting of kitchen gardens (1599), the cucumber is dealt with at the same time as other salad plants, and it occurs thereafter in most kitchen garden treatises. Probably it was well established in England long before this time, and perhaps more than a thousand years before, for it may well have been cultivated in the Roman villa gardens.

FRAME CUCUMBERS

The raising of cucumber plants does not differ from that of melon plants, and nothing further need therefore be said concerning the seedling stages of the work. Timing, too, is much the same, or perhaps rather earlier, for cucumber plants should be ready to plant out by early or mid-May.

In the preparation of the cucumber beds, however, there should be a difference. The trench can be dug out in the same way as for melons, but instead of being filled with litter which is very largely straw, a richer mixture can be used, either a supply from a dung heap which has been turned at least twice, or from a mature compost heap which has, if possible, been made on the Howard principle, with plenty of animal as well as vegetable matter. The still warm dung-heap material is preferred by some growers as giving some bottom heat; and indeed, in

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the glorious past of English gardening, cucumbers were normally grown on hot beds.

The dung or compost must be trodden into the trench with plenty of water, though not so much as for melons. Nor need the treading be quite so thorough, although the dung must not be left loose after being thrown into the trench, for in that case it will settle and let down the topsoil, which should be a good, mature loam replaced on top of the dung in the form of a long, well-rounded and smoothed ridge.

PLANTING OUT

Here again the treatment is much the same as that of melon plants, but the planting distances can be greater, about three or even four feet between plants. Empty pots can be buried beside the plants, as for melons, so that water is supplied direct to the roots. Planting out should be done between May 1st and May 20th, depending on the weather and the state of the soil; the latter should have been warmed up by having the cloches in place for at least ten days.

TYPES OF CLOCHES AND TRAINING

Cucumber plants can be allowed to creep along the ground in the same manner as melon plants, or they can be tied to a wire running high through the cloches. In the latter case tall tomato cloches should be used, or at least tall barn cloches. There is advantage, although more labour, in this type of training for it is rather less convenient to have cucumbers lying on the soil than melons, which can be stood on end; moreover, cucumbers seem to me to grow straighter when hanging down than when they are left to sprawl.

UNDER LOW BARN OR BARN CLOCHES

As soon as the plants have four leaves, stop them by pinching out the growing tips and so allow laterals to develop. Wait until the strength of growth is apparent, and then remove all but the three best laterals, one on one side of the plant, let us say the left hand, and two on the right hand. (Or vice versa, of course, it does not matter which way.) Treat all the plants identically, even as to the choice of which side to grow the single lateral, and which side the two laterals. This is made necessary by the subsequent arrangement. The single lateral on the left hand of plant B must be arranged to lie along the soil between the two laterals on the right hand of plant A, and so throughout the whole row.

TALL BARN OR TOMATO CLOCHES In the case of cloches with more vertical space available, the

method will be different. In the long axis of the cucumber bed drive stout, short stakes into

the soil at intervals of about six feet. Use stakes at least a yard long and drive them in two feet or thereabouts, so that they will stand rigid without bracing, and so that, where tall barn cloches are to be used, they protrude about twelve inches above the level of the ridge, and more than this in the case of tomato cloches. In fact, arrange to have the tops of these stakes as far above the soil as possible while still clearing the insides of the top glasses of the cloches by so much as will allow room for foliage, for the cucumber vines are to be trained along a wire stretched between the tops of the stakes, and the cucumber fruit will hang down from that wire and should, if possible, quite clear the soil even when over a foot long. (It is possible for frame cucumbers to be a great deal longer than this: three feet is not unknown. But twelve inches is usual.)

As to this training wire: along the tops of the stakes and drawn as taut as you can get it, stretch a galvanized iron wire, or ex-telephone wire, or even rope. Whatever you use see that it really is tight and secured so that it will remain so throughout the season.

Do not stop the plants as in the case of cucumbers to be grown under grower's barn cloches, but on the contrary allow them to continue growing until they are long enough for the vines to be raised and tied to the wire. Then as they continue to grow train them along the wire with ample ties which will be helped by the tendrils of the plants lashing themselves to the wire. As soon as a plant has reached its next neighbour, however, stop it. Side shoots will develop which must either be stopped when they are rather short, or, if you like to provide a more elaborate grid with three wires, one on each side of the principal one, then the side shoots which break nearest the base of the main shoot can be trained along wires parallel with their parent shoot. There are numerous and obvious variations on this theme and one of the best I have seen was arranged as follows. At about sixteen inches from the top of the ground of the cucumber bed was stretched a grid made of pea-guards of wire-netting supported on legs of stout bamboo to which the grid was firmly wired. The cucumber plants were trained straight up on canes until the growing tips had come through the wire, and then allowed to grow as they liked, excepting that all growth below the wire grid was stopped as soon as it appeared. When the fruit developed some of it hung down through the grid; some of it lay on the grid among the foliage. The whole arrangement was covered with tomato cloches. It seemed to be uncommonly neat and effective.

FLOWERING

There seems to be no limit to the crop which a healthy cucumber plant can bear, but the operative word is healthy, for in an extremely high proportion of cases the plants become infected either with Red Spider or with a fungus disease some time after the middle of the season, and cease to flourish. In the absence of some such trouble, the plants go on growing and flowering and maturing fruit until, in the natural course of the season, the temperature falls below that at which the plants can grow.

Flowers of both sexes are produced in great numbers but, as we have already said, the male flowers are redundant on frame cucumber plants, and if they are not removed the female flowers will be pollinated and the fruit will be a bad shape and full of seeds instead of long cylindrical and almost seedless. A sort of bulb will swell out at the end of each fruit, this being the seed case, and although this bulb can be eaten it will be no better in flavour and texture than a rather inferior ridge cucumber. It is sometimes claimed that the 'setting' of cucumbers results in the bitter flavour which spoils some of the fruit. I have experimented with this theory and find that it has no foundation: bitter fruits occur among the 'unset' and are by no means disproportionately numerous among the 'set' which frequently remain perfectly sweet. Nor, by the way, have our small but perhaps adequate experiments tended to show that it is the slow development of fruit during a cool season which gives rise to this bitterness, as is claimed by some growers. The fault appears to be due rather to some attribute of the soil in the near neighbourhood of the roots; or, possibly, to the occasional and rather frequent emergence of some primitive character, an atavism as it were, for many wild cucumbers are said to be bitter, and some are unquestionably poisonous. As far as I know no biochemist has yet isolated the substance to which the bitterness is due, and until that is done nothing much can be known about it. It might also be interesting to know whether the character is innate, which could perhaps be done by breeding from bitter fruits.

However, to return to the flowers: the devil who fights against good gardening while making certain that bees who are badly needed in the melon bed shun that place like the plague, directs as many bees as he can muster to the cucumber beds, where they are not wanted.

Consequently, the male flowers must be removed as fast as they appear, or at least as often as the gardener can find time to attend to his job. The male flowers are distinguishable from the females since they have no embryo cucumber at their base, whereas the females have, of course.

WATERING, VENTILATION AND SHADING

Cucumber plants should be watered as often as and perhaps more often than melon plants. Moreover, whereas in the case of melons watering is discontinued as soon as the fruits reach maturity and begin to ripen, this is not possible in the case of cucumbers, since the plants go on producing fruit until the end of the season, provided they remain healthy. Watering must therefore be maintained. It does no harm because there is a difference between the two kinds of fruit in that whereas melons have to ripen, cucumbers are really eaten when they are still green: they are picked before much more than half their 'natural' life on the plant is passed.

Ventilation should be as for melons, although some frame cucumbers flourish at extremely high temperatures and in high humidity. As I wrote in another chapter, there is room for much doubt about the necessity for shading melons by whitewashing the inside of the top glasses of the cloches. The case of cucumbers is different: they definitely require some shade and are not altogether happy in the full glare of the sun.

In midsummer and at the decline of the sun or rather early in the morning there is something to be gained by syringing the foliage of

cucumber plants with clean water, which is not straight from the mains but has been allowed to stand long enough to take the ambient temperature. Syringing melon plants is also common form, but we have not found it at all necessary, nor have we noticed any benefit to be derived from it.

CROPPING

Cucumbers are not, as we have seen, really allowed to ripen, and when they are at their best the seeds are still rather soft. The moment of cutting is therefore not 'critical' as in the case of melons, and the fruit will not spoil for being left two or three days more or less on the vine. Readiness for harvesting is not, however, merely a matter of size. Cucumbers are ready for cutting when the skin loses its rather light green and matt appearance, and darkens while acquiring a gloss or bloom. This bloom is looked for by the knowing housewife or shopkeeper, so that growers who propose to sell cucumbers—a profitable crop by the way—should handle the fruit with as much care as if the cucumbers were grapes.

For market, cucumbers must be straight as well as large, but a certain number will always grow in the shape of a comma. For show purposes gardeners used to fit the immature fruit with a wooden strait-jacket which forced it to grow straight, and such mathematically straight cucumbers were sometimes as much as three feet long. This was very nice, but it is not practical gardening and you will have to rely on your plants producing a predominance of straight fruit.

DISEASES

Like melons, cucumbers suffer from fungus and bacterial parasites, but if well grown and vigorous the incidence of these miseries is low, and for practical purposes, especially as there is nothing one can do about them once they develop, they can be ignored. There is far more point in growing cucumber or any other plants so well that they can resist any parasitic organism which attacks them, and build up their resistance, than in dosing the plants with poisons.

Red Spider, in the old days, could be almost ignored by the grower who knew that his plants had the strength to cope with this pest, as in 'nature'. For, of course, since no parasitic creature is naturally destructive of its host plant or animal, that is no living organism is so stupid as to kill its own source of food, where the powers of parasite and host are properly balanced the host plant can be left to look after itself. However, when a plant is infected with a parasite which is new to it, as occurs when plants are transplanted from their natural habitat to other places far from that country, they often possess no powers of resistance, and the scientists take jolly good care that they never have a chance to develop a resistance by carefully poisoning the parasites. In the case of Red Spider the poisoning has been far more effective in making this creature more active, than less active. The natural predators of the mite have been destroyed, so that the mite is more aggressive than ever, and in some cases and places very nearly uncontrollable. The only way for the cucumber grower to deal with it is to maintain in the cloches conditions of humidity so high that the Red Spider, which dislikes moisture, will be discouraged. It is, however, uncommonly hard to discourage since science came to its assistance by killing its predators.

VARIETIES

Practically any variety of Frame cucumber can be grown under cloches. Our own preference is for Telegraph. This variety is long, dark, crisp and well-flavoured. Conqueror, however, is hardier, so much so that it can be decloched at cutting time; but the quality is not so high. There is a disease resisting variety of quite good flavour, Butchers Disease Resisting. Lockie's Perfection is a fine shape and colour, dark green with black spine. There are other varieties, but these four should be enough to choose from.

Marrows, 'Stonor's

Universal' sown in heat, February 25th. Transplanted and cloched March 28th. Photograph take 17th May 1946

Marrows, 'Stonor's

Universal', raised February 10th. Planted out March 15th. No soil warming. Photograph taken 22nd May 1946

RIDGE CUCUMBERS When Frame cucumbers of fine quality, admirable for home

consumption and fetching a good price in the market, can be successfully cultivated under cloches with very little trouble, there does not seem to be much point in planting Ridge cucumbers which are in every way inferior unless you want gherkins or small cucumbers for pickling. It is possible to arrange contracts with pickle manufacturers and to sell a crop of cucumbers in advance, but it is doubtful whether the price would justify the use of cloches.

There is, however, this to be said for Ridge cucumbers: that whereas Frame cucumbers engross the cloches for their protection throughout the season, Ridge cucumbers can be given an early start under cloches and then decloched and left to fend for themselves. In fact, if the planting out of the Frame cucumbers be left until the third week in May, the cloches which have been covering the Ridge cucumbers can be moved on to the Frame cucumbers. Ridge cucumber plants are raised in the same way as Frame cucumbers, in the greenhouse early in March. The plants are then put out under cloches early in April. Alternatively, although this makes the plants rather later, of course, the seeds can be sown in situ on the ridge, which is prepared in the same way as for Frame cucumbers, during the last week in March. In either case the cloches can safely be removed at the end of May.

Ridge cucumbers require setting, and therefore, of course, the male flowers are never removed. In all other respects their cultivation resembles that of Frame cucumbers.

The best Ridge variety is Hampshire Giant, the fruits of which sometimes reach the size of a good Frame cucumber and are almost without spines. Clock Barn Perfection is smaller but of good flavour. For damp and cool climates, Winter's Prize Ridge is suitable, since it is resistant to mildew.

X

MARROWS

ince it is possible, indeed normal, to grow marrows without any kind of cloche protection, there does not, at first sight, appear to be any point in using valuable cloches in the cultivation of this

commonplace, if esteemed, vegetable. There is, however, this to be said, that by cloching marrow plants early, and removing the cloches later when they are required for some more tender subject, it is easy to get a crop of marrows in June, and quite early in some Junes, which is not only useful to the private gardener trying to keep up with the voracious appetites of his family, but even profitable to the market gardener, since whereas marrows in season are a drug on the market hardly worth the trouble of growing commercially, marrows out of season fetch a good price and are, in fact, one of the most remunerative of all crops.

VARIETIES

For cultivation under cloches it is convenient to grow bush marrows rather than the trailing kind. The latter can, of course, be grown under cloches by those who adhere to the myth that the trailing varieties produce a superior fruit, but in that case they must be stopped and controlled, like melons, whereas the bush varieties require no such attention and are by that much less troublesome to grow. But for those who want marrows for domestic consumption as early as possible with the minimum of trouble, seeds may be planted directly in a compost heap which will not be required for use until the autumn and which has been turned three times, each group of three seeds being covered with a lantern cloche until the seedling has come up and made two true leaves (the pair of vine-shaped leaves which follow the oval cotyledon leaves). The young plants must then be protected with a low barn cloche until after the middle of May, against frost, but thereafter can be uncovered and left to themselves.

For serious cultivation, however, rather than mere casual growing, we shall stick to bush varieties. The two earliest, and earliness is the first quality to watch for in the case of any cloched crop, are Stonor's Universal, which is striped pale green on a mottled ground, and Green Bush, with dark green fruit not quite so early as Stonor's Universal. Both of the above are suitable for market. For domestic consumption something smaller and of more interesting flavour is desirable, for example, Rotherside Orange, best picked small, when it is a light, creamy colour, or Table Dainty, short, fat, striped and early.

For those who feel that despite the advantage in earliness gained by starting marrows under cloches, they really must have some special excuse for cloching these plants, there are certain more elegant and delicate varieties whose domestic value is high, but whose market value is dubious. The Custard Marrow is an engagingly absurd looking vegetable, modestly described in nurserymen's catalogues as ornamental. It looks like an underdone pie growing, improbably, on a marrow plant: it is in shape a flattened semisphere, with scalloped edges, creamy gold in colour and a very useful variety for taking the attention of the more phlegmatic type of visitor to one's garden, and

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giving them something to look at. It is, however, quite as edible as any other marrow, and has a distinctive flavour.

There is, if you can get the seeds, a small, round marrow, product of a bush which is so immensely prolific that disposing of the crop is a problem unless you can find a good market. This is the Zucchini of Italy, greatly superior in flavour and above all, in texture, to most ordinary marrows and, for the small household, of more convenient size. These small marrows should be picked very young, even with the debris of the faded flower still adhering to them, and they should be cooked, if possible, with butter.

Finally, there is the so-called Avocadella which is, presumably, a marrow, but which is, in our opinion, in a class by itself among the savoury esculent gourds.

The plant is like any bush marrow and quite as easy to grow, and where cloches are used an early crop of fruit can be made available in June: it speaks well for this vegetable that at this time, when the green peas are in full first flush, the crop will still be welcomed. The gourds are about the size of a grapefruit and the same shape, clustered round the crown of the plant in great numbers, with a dark jade-green skin but orange pulp. The texture of this pulp is buttery and the flavour excellent when cooked like other marrows. But these marrows should be eaten as a salad. They should be picked young, boiled very lightly, say for ten minutes, in the skin, bisected at their equator, cleared of seeds, allowed to cool. The hollow centres are then given a dressing of a spoonful of oil and vinegar salad dressing, or a dessertspoonful of dry sherry, as if the vegetable were an avocado pear. Eaten in this way Avocadella are excellent. It is claimed for them that they resemble avocado pears, and their name draws attention to this claim. We are not of this opinion: we do not believe that there exists, this side of Heaven, any food as good as avocado pears which, together with chocolate, are certainly the principal justification for the life and works of Christopher Columbus. But Avocadella can stand on its own merits without resort to proverbially odious comparisons: they make an admirable salad and an original hors d'oeuvres, and seem to us to be by a great deal the most worthwhile marrow to grow.

So far as we know, seeds of Zucchini and Avocadella are not. widely distributed in this country, but they are or were obtainable from the Six Hills Nursery at Stevenage in Hertfordshire.. Possibly other seedsmen now stock them.

PREPARATION OF MARROW BEDS

It is generally held that a marrow bed need not be so richly or carefully prepared as a cucumber bed, and it is true that an ample crop can be obtained from a normal, unmanured garden soil. Our own method is to take out a one-spit trench and fill it with mature compost, but the stuff from a mellow dung heap will do as well, and good results are obtainable from grass mowing rotted with poultry manure, and used sparingly. For commercial cultivation, heavier manuring pays in larger crops.

RAISING SEEDLINGS AND PLANTING OUT

Seeds are planted and seedlings raised in exactly the same way as those of melons and cucumbers, but earlier, late in March, which will produce young plants ready to go out late in April, or early in May. Or

the work can be done without artificial heat. In that case prepare the bed early in March and cloche it at once if you can spare the cloches. This will warm up the soil. Early in April plant the seeds, say two to each position, allowing one plant per cloche, directly where they are to grow. When both seeds germinate, pull one seedling out, of course, and if any groups fail to germinate altogether, these extras can be used to gap-up, though they will grow later than the others. As this method entails no moving of the plants, with its consequent disturbance of the roots, and change of microclimate, there is little danger of a check to growth and the plants will not be much later than those raised earlier and in heat. It is, however, advisable to have half a dozen reserve plants raised in heat, for a spell of really cold weather, not at all unusual in April, will check the growth of marrows rather sharply, and one or two weakling seedlings may never recover and will need replacing.

Still another way of raising the seeds, useful where cloches cannot be spared for warming soil or even covering plants until late in April, is to place each couple of marrow seeds in place in the prepared bed and cover them with a lantern cloche or, quite a proven method, with a two- or three-pound jam jar, although the latter do tend to fall over, or to be knocked over by animals and even high winds. The seedlings can be kept under this protection until they are too big for the 'cloches' or until the big cloches are free. If jam jars are used they should be slightly raised from time to time during the heat of the day, as they afford absolutely no ventilation.

CARE WHILE UNDER CLOCHES

Lantern cloched seedlings will be covered with the normal cloches, or the seedlings raised in heat will be hardened and transplanted under cloches, late in April.

If bush marrows are being grown there will be no stopping; if the trailing kinds, then stopping will be identical with that used for melons, that is, aimed to encourage growth of laterals until the cloches are conveniently filled with foliage. After that, unlike melons, no further control will be really necessary, as the cloches will be removed and so will not be there to impose a strict limit on the convenient size of the plants.

Watering should be as for melons. Marrows under cloches, or which have been cloched, may be in

flower when bees are either few or so well provided with nectar by the simultaneous flowering of thousands of spring plants that they will not take the trouble to enter the cloches. As a rule this is not the case and pollination is thoroughly attended to; but even so the bees must have time to locate the marrow flowers and it thus often happens that the earliest flowers are not fertilized. It is therefore worth hand-setting the earliest blossom for an early crop, leaving the late flowers to the insects.

While the marrows are under cloches ventilation should be as for melons, or rather more free. At the end of May, when the frost danger is passed, the cloches can be removed from the marrow bed to, for example, the melon bed; the marrows no longer need them.

CROPPING

There is a pernicious practice, wickedly encouraged by village horticultural societies, of growing marrows to a gigantic size: for that

matter, not only marrows are the objects of this cult of the gigantic, and every sort of vegetable and fruit is grown beyond the stage at which it is really fit to eat. Such monsters fill the eye and sometimes impress the judges at shows, but they are not palatable food, being coarse and, in the case of marrows, watery.

For domestic consumption cut marrows when they are not more than eight inches long and preferably smaller, say six inches. For sale, consult the market salesman or the shopkeeper as to the size of marrow his customers prefer. But it should be remembered that unless marrows are cut before the seeds in them mature, the plant, having gained its end, will cease to produce fruit, whereas if you frustrate it by cutting the fruit young it will obstinately persist in trying to ripen seed by producing more and more fruit to replace what has been taken from it. It is a good rule to ignore the more austere of our scientists and to treat all plants as if they were intelligent and wilful and know their own business best, and to shape your behaviour as a cultivator accordingly.

PESTS AND DISEASES

We have never found marrow plants much subject to pests and diseases. Slugs like young marrow-leaves and mice young fruit but these thieves are easily thwarted.

Powdery mildew sometimes occurs as a silvery grey deposit on the underside of the leaves. This affliction is only serious if it appears when the plants are young; later, it may usually be ignored. When young plants in a bed of marrows are infected remove them and dust the underside of the leaves of those remaining with flowers of sulphur, which will prevent the fungus from colonizing other plants. It is usually claimed that sulphur will prevent Powdery Mildew from establishing itself, but will not 'cure' it once it is established on a leaf. We have found, however, that established colonies of this fungus can be sterilized with sulphur, the damage being then confined to the area of leaf actually attacked. There is probably some connection between susceptibility to Powdery Mildew and drought at the roots; we are by no means certain of this, but it may be so, and attention to watering may, for the time being, be regarded as a prophylactic measure.

Marrows are also subject to virus disease. These plant viruses are rather mysterious phenomena belonging somewhere between the world

of living creatures and that of those crystals which possess powers of growth. They are complex molecules which, when present in the substance of a living plant, are able to break down or otherwise employ the body of protein molecules, part of the system of the plant, using the material so acquired to increase their own numbers. The viruses are carried from plant to plant in various ways but principally, it seems, in the blood stream of leaf-puncturing, sap-sucking insects such as aphides. The virus diseases cannot be 'cured' by treatment because the causative viruses in an affected plant have, by the time symptoms of trouble appear, become intimately part of the structure of the plant and inseparable from it. The symptoms, in most plants, are much the same. There is a mottling of the leaf, due to the appearance of yellow marbling among the green, a change in leaf shape (as in black currant reversion); a mottling or marbling of the flower colour (parrot tulips are virus-infected tulips); and often a distortion and warping in the shape of the whole plant (as in the dégénéréscence infectueuse of grape-vines).

Marrow plants suffering from virus disease—we have never seen one so far—should be removed from the bed and burnt, not composted.1 But it is possible, if not probable, that healthy and well-grown marrow plants, like other plants, can harbour virus in their systems without going down to disease at all, in short they can resist. So the general health of the plant is what counts, and that depends on good cultivation as much as anything. The grower who gives his plants good conditions and takes sensible care of them need hardly concern himself with the virus disease of marrows.

1 On the other hand, there seems to be no evidence that healthy plants have ever

been infected with virus by compost made from diseased plants.