CUCUMBERS 219 



to stop further cultivation. The crop is always cut with a small piece of the 

 stem attached, and the cucumbers are shipped in slatted crates. One thous- 

 and bushels per acre of marketable cucumbers is a common crop with the 

 gardeners of the South Atlantic coast, and the same method of culture is 

 equally well adapted to the crop in any section, but the planting season must 

 follow the disappearance of frost from South northward, as the cucumber is 

 a tender plant and must not be planted till the soil is warmed. 



VARIETIES OF CUCUMBERS. 



The standard variety with the market gardener is the White Spine. 

 Every enterprising seedsman has his special strain of this variety, and it 

 has never been superseded as a variety for field culture, and is also grown 

 to a large extent under glass. For the late crop, for pickles, in the North, 

 some of the strains akin to the Long Green are used. The Perfected Jersey 

 Pickle is one of the best of these. There are some small varieties that are 

 earlier than the White Spine, but they are of no value to the truck farmer 

 and only of use in the private garden for their earliness. The little prickly 

 Gherkin is also grown to some extent for pickling. The late crop of pick- 

 ling cucumbers belongs almost exclusively to the Northern gardener and 

 farmer, since the late crop is rarely a success in the South, owing to the 

 drought and the borers. But in low, moist, bottom land they may be well 

 grown even in the South. These pickles are planted in mid-summer, and 

 commonly occupy land from which an early crop that was heavily manured 

 has been removed, and no special manuring is given on such land. 



FERTILIZERS FOR THE CUCUMBER CROP. 



As this crop is fertilized, as noted, entirely in the furrow, the fertilizer 

 need not be used heavier than 500 pounds per acre. Just as the plants ap- 

 pear through the ground it has been our practice to keep them dusted with 

 fine bone meal, to keep off the bugs. This also helps the growth of the 

 plants. For a fertilizer mix acid phosphate, 900 pounds ; fish scrfp or tank- 

 age, 700 pounds; nitrate of soda, 200 pounds; muriate of potash, 200 

 pounds. In localities where the phosphate made from bone black, or the 

 Thomas slag phosphate, can be had more cheaply than the acid phosphate 

 made from the dissolved rock, they can be used in place of acid phosphate in 

 any of the formulas, and fish scrap, a good article of tankage, or dried blood, 

 may be used indiscriminately without any serious change in the nitrogen con- 

 tent. Where cotton seed meal is used as a source of nitrogen it must be used 

 in larger quantity. The tables appended in the back part of this book will 



