44 MELON CULTURE 



will exercise his ingenuity in trying to meet those 

 conditions. There are sections in the melon grow- 

 ing regions where the soil is a very light sand and 

 the country generally level, where the melon vines 

 are sometimes injured to a considerable extent by 

 being blown around by the wind and the conditions 

 have to be met. 



Here is the way one of our very successful grow- 

 ers meets this obstacle. He says: 1 "I plant our 

 watermelons 9 by 12 feet apart, and immediately 

 after the third plowing I plant a catch crop, as I call 

 it, and for this I prefer to use navy beans. Follow- 

 ing the row in which the hills are 12 feet apart, I 

 plant a hill of beans 4 feet on each side of the melon 

 hill. They will come up just in time for a thorough 

 plowing, following the rows in which the hills are 9 

 feet apart, plowing a row of melons and then a row 

 of beans, and so on. This gives clean ground for 

 the vines to run on and mellow beds for the feed- 

 ers to run through. The vines are now reaching for 

 something to catch hold of to keep the wind from 

 tossing them about; and they will soon find the 

 bean hill ; or, if they do not, they should be laid in 

 that direction, when they will anchor to it, and the 

 plowing from this time on must be in only one direc- 

 tion." 



" I now discard my shovels, take a one-horse 

 plow, and get a set of sweeps 12 inches wide for can- 

 taloupes and one 12 inches wide for the center, and 

 one 18 inches on each side for watermelons. The 

 plow has a depth regulator enabling me to run the 

 sweeps about one inch deep. The outside sweep 

 will run partly under the vines and shove them to 

 1 Indiana Horticultural Report for 1909. 



