Growing Cucumbers In Your Garden
- Author Juliet Sadler
- Published May 21, 2009
- Word count 668
To give minute rules for the propagation and cultivation of this plant, in a country like this, would be waste of time. However, if you wish to have them a month earlier than the natural ground will bring then, do this.
Make a hole, and put into it a little hot dung; let the hole be under a warm fence. Put 6 inches deep of fine rich earth on the dung. Sow a parcel of seeds in this earth; and cover at night with a bit of carpet, or sail cloth, having first fixed some hoops over this little bed.
Before the plants show the rough leaf, plant two into a little flower pot, and fill as many pots in this way as you please. Have a larger bed ready to put the pots into, and covered with earth so that the pots may be plunged in the earth up
to their tops. Cover this bed like the last. When the plants have got two rough leaves out, they will begin to make a shoot in the middle. Pinch that short off.
Let them stand in this bed, till your cucumbers sown in the natural ground come up; then make some little holes in good rich land, and taking a pot at a time, turn out the ball and fig it in the hole.
These plants will bear a month sooner than those sown in the natural ground; and a square yard will contain 36 pots, and will of course, furnish plants for 36 hills of cucumbers, which, if well managed, will keep on bearing till September.
Those who have hot-bed frames, or handlights, will do this matter very easily. The cucumber plant is very tender and juicy; and, therefore, when the seedlings are put into the pots, they should be watered, and shaded for a day or two; when the balls are turned into the ground, they should be watered, and shaded with a bough for one day.
That will be enough. I have one observation to make upon the cultivation of cucumbers, melons of all sorts, and that of all the pumpkin and squash tribe; and that is, that it is a great error to sow them too thick.
One plant in a hill is enough; and I would put two into a pot, merely as a bar against accidents. One will bring more weight of fruit than two (if standing near each other,) two more than three, and so on, till you come to fifty ill a square foot; and then you will have no fruit at all!
Let any one make the experiment, and he will find this observation mathematically true. When cucumbers are left eight or ten plants in a hill, they never shoot strongly. Their vines are poor and weak, the leaves become yellow, and, if they bear at all, it is poor tasteless fruit that they produce.
Their bearing is over in a few weeks. Whereas, a single plant, in the same space, will send its fine green vines all around it to a great distance, and, if no fruit be left to ripen, will keep bearing till the white frosts come in the fall.
The roots of a cucumber will go ten feet, in fine each, in every direction Judge, then, how ten plants, standing close to on( another, must produce mutual starvation! If not save a cucumber for seed, let it be the first fine fruit that appears on the plant. The plant will cease to bear much after this fruit becomes yellowish.
I have said enough, under the head of Saving Seeds to make you take care, that nothing of the melon, pumpkin or squash kind grow near a seed bearing cucumber plant; and that all cucumbers of a different sort from that bearing the seed be kept at a great distance.
There are many sorts of cucumbers: the Long Prickly, the Short Prickly, the Cluster, and many others; but, the propagation and cultivation of all the sorts are the same.
Visit the Plants And Flowers website to learn about types of ferns and australian tree fern.
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