146 MISCELLANEOUS COOL PLANTS. 
best adapted to forcing. Carrots are slowest to mature, 
and also find the smallest demand in the market. From 
three to four months are required to secure good bottoms 
on carrots. For home use these root crops may be grown 
in a few square feet of soil on benches which grow lettuce 
and carnations or even roses. 
POTATO: 
Potatoes can be grown on spent rose or lettuce beds, 
or under benches which open out to the light. We have 
grown a bushel of tubers in a thick row under the edge 
of a carnation bench some 4o feet long. They need no 
special care. Potatoes are sometimes planted in ground 
beds in forcing-houses in late winter or early spring after 
the legitimate winter crops are harvested. 
PEPINO. 
The pepino or melon shrub is practically unknown as a 
forcing-house product. The first critical study of the plant 
in this country was made at the Cornell Station in 1891, but 
Professor Munson, in Maine, seems to have been the first 
person to make a success of it as a fruit-bearing plant under 
glass.* The plant is an undershrub, making a neat and 
spreading bush 2 or 3 feet high whena year old. The fruits 
are oblong and somewhat egg-shaped, with a solid and seed- 
less flesh and a cantaloupe-like flavor. It more closely re- 
sembles the eggplant in botanical features than it does any 
other fruit plant of our gardens. It is propagated by cut- 
tings of the young shoots in the same way as the geranium 
or tomato. Cuttings made in March or April may be ex- 
pected to make fruit-bearing plants by the following January 
or February. The plants should be carried through the 
summer in 4-inch or 5-inch pots and transferred to 6-inch 
pots on the approach of winter. They should be grown in 
__ *W. M. Munson, in Garden and Forest, v. 173 (Apr. 13, 1892), with 
illustration. 
