THE FLORAL WORLD AND GARDEN GUIDE. GS 



FEAME CULTURE OF THE MELON. 



{With Coloured Illustration of Little Heath and Queen Anne's Pocket Melons.) 



[HE melon is the noblest production of the kitchen garden, 

 and well worthy of the high fame it has always enjoyed. 

 The position it holds at exhibitions and in seedsmen's 

 catalogues indicates its importance and value, for it 

 rarely happens that there is a tame competition in the 

 classes for melons, while the annual supply of new varieties that 

 supersede all the old ones is great enough to show that honour and 

 profit are regarded as the sure rewards of those who may succeed in 

 effecting and establishing improvements. The melon agrees with 

 most other garden plants in this, that its real improvement is a slow 

 process, quite misrepresented by the so-called new varieties that are 

 always current, and that appear to exist only to pi'ove that between 

 names and things there is often a great gulf fixed. Amongst these, 

 however, occur from time to time distinct and useful kinds that mark 

 a real advance in quality ; and one of the most satisfactory imjjrove- 

 meuts effected of late years is seen in the scarlet-fleshed clase, the 

 best of which are scarcely inferior in flavour to the best of the 

 green-fleshedj which, until recently, enjoyed pre-eminence. 



The best melons are produced by rough-and-ready methods, and 

 yet the fruit is not in any way adapted for the poor man's garden, 

 for there must be a plentiful and constant supply of fresh manure to 

 carry on the cultivation, and the produce is an article of luxury 

 adapted only to the tables of the affluent. In great gardens melons 

 a,re grown in houses heated with hot-water pipes, but they may be 

 grown quite as well in frames, and in truth there is no system that 

 suits the plant so well as the old-fashioned hotbed, for its vapours 

 and gases suit the plant better than the purer air of the nicely built 

 melon-house, heated with hot water, and kept as dry and as clean as 

 a drawing-room. \V^e purpose to ofter our readers a short code of 

 directions for the culture of melons in frames, and those who need 

 any aid towards the cultivation by means of hot water will find it 

 an easy matter to adapt our rules to their own practice, the prin- 

 ciples being in both precisely the same. 



The First Stage in the cultivation comprises the sowing of 

 the seed and the nurture of the plants until they are strong enough 

 to be planted out. The first requisite is a good hotbed, and it need 

 not be a large one, as another will be required for fruiting the 

 plants. We raise a lot of melon plants with tomatoes, capsicums, 

 globe amaranths, and celosias, in a frame only three feet in length by 

 two and a-half feet wide, and find one good horse load of stable- 

 manure twi(!e turned to suffice for the purpose. 



A thin surfacing of rich mellow soil is spread over the manure to 

 form the seed-bed, and the seeds are sown in rows across the bed 

 when the heat is steady at 75 '^ to 85'^. In great gardens this sort 

 of work is begun in January, and is carried on in substantial brick 



March. ^ 



