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. 



