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. 



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 40 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. 



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 when a 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. 



