AND CONSEEVATORT. 235 



CHAPT£E XX. 



SUMMER CUCUMBERS AND SEEDLING PELARGONIUMS. 



The cucumber properly belongs to the kitchen-garden aud 

 frame-ground, but a few words on our mode of producing 

 summer cucumbers will probably be valued by many readers 

 of this volume, for we have, during many years past, very 

 profitably occupied with them a house that during winter is 

 filled with seedling pelargoniums. It happens, too, for our 

 encouragement, that about nine-tenths of all that has been 

 written about cucumbers in horticultural papers has related to 

 the winter management, an implication, perhaps, that to grow 

 cucumbers in summer needs so little skill that there need be 

 very little said about it. To be sure, it is easy enough to grow 

 them, even in common frames, with or without fermenting 

 material, yet the cutting of a cucumber fit for the table is an 

 extraordinary event in some few gardens where only one man. 

 is kept. But never mind about relative difiiculty, and all that 

 sort of thing : cucumbers are much more in demand during 

 summer than winter, and our way of growing them is the most 

 simple ever heard of, and the results are all that could be 

 desired, and much more than, in ten thousand like cases, 

 would be expected. 



To begin, then : we do not employ artificial heat at any 

 stage of the business, not a particle of fermenting material, 

 and the plants are positively ornamental, and when full of 

 fruit present a most beautiful appearance, which cucumbers in 

 frames never do. The summer cucumber house is a narrow 

 span-roofed " Paxtonian," put up about twenty years ago by 

 Hereman and Morton. There is simply nothing at all pecu- 

 liar in it, save and except the well-known Paxtonian principle. 

 On each side of the central path is a border of earth supported 

 by skirting-boards. On the lights are fixed stout iron 

 brackets for the support of open shelves, and from October to 



