MELONS AS A FIELD CROP. 21 5 



Fourth : Careful attention to bugs. 



Fifth : Picking at the proper time and marketing at once. 



Air. Taylor: How many seeds do you plant to the hill? 



Mr. Lord : Three, sometimes four. To many it may seem 

 close planting, but I have found it successful where proper cultiva- 

 tion is given. The common method is to grow under glass. If 

 you have facilities for growing them very early you will be sur- 

 prised how large the plants can be grown and still set out without 

 being injured, and you will be surprised how fast they will grow. 

 By shading them they will grow quite rapidly, and the bugs will 

 rarely touch them. The larger they are the less liable they are to be 

 injured by the bugs. 



Mr. J. V. Bailey : I would like to ask whether growing plants 

 in beds and then setting them out is profitable? 



Mr. Lord : I would consider it so because we get early fruit. 

 One year another grower, who is a competitor of mine, raised five 

 acres of melons, and I had all mine disposed of before he got his 

 on the market. 



Mr. Bailey : I found that growing melons under glas^ in the 

 field last year was about as satisfactory as raising them in the hot- 

 bed and then setting them out. I mean just setting glass over each 

 hill. 



Mr. Lord : I use a small frame ; part of them are wooden, but 

 some I used were of tin and some of pasteboard. Those were very 

 inexpensive. 



Mr. Bailey : Our first were grown in the hotbed and then 

 set out. We had little wooden boxes four or five inches square 

 and set them out in the ground after they had started, but we found 

 it more profitable to start them in flats and transplant them into 

 pots and let them get as full of roots as they would hold and then 

 set them out properly. In that way we had better success.' 



. Mr. Lord: I would like to say again in regard to the striped 

 bug, my experience has been that we can get rid of them altogether. 

 By planting Hubbard squash near the melon patch and then using 

 'air slaked lime you can drive the bugs on the squash vines, and by 

 the time they are through with the squash the melons are too large 

 to be injured much. 



Mrs. H. K. Eves : What size pot do you use ? 



Mr. Lord : Thumb pots, but they can be shifted into two inch 

 pots ; they have more room. 



Mr. Oliver Gibbs : Upon this matter of growing musk- 

 melons for market perhaps I can say something. I never grew 

 then on a large scale ; about 1 ,200 per week was all I grew. I 

 learned the business by main strength, and I think I learned some 

 things that might with advantage be communicated to others, al- 

 though I know very well I cannot teach practical horticulture by 

 telling how we did it. To avoid danger of late frosts in the spring 

 and early frosts in the fall is one of the essentials of melon grow- 

 ing. Saving my own seed and having plenty of it I would plant 

 three crops in succession, putting in the first as soon as I could work 

 the soil, then the next on the same ground in a week or two, and af- 



