and you will get a great growth. They will grow luxuriantly
in a pile of chips, with a little soil, in a door-yard, where hardly any
other plant would flourish. The water-melon does best in almost pure
sand, if it be enriched with liquid or some other of the finer manures.
Plant musk-melons six feet apart, and water-melons nine feet each way.
When the plants become established, never leave more than two or three
in a hill. The product will be greatly increased in number and size, by
picking off the end bud of the first runners when they show their
blossom-buds; this causes them to throw out many strong lateral vines,
which will produce abundantly. The attacks of striped bugs, so well
known as the enemies of vines, and also of the black fleas, or hoppers
(very minute, but quite destructive to tender vines when first up), may
be prevented (says Downing) by sprinkling near the plants a little
guano. As but a small portion of cultivators will have it, or can obtain
it, we recommend to put many seeds in a hill, to provide for the
depredations of the bugs, and sprinkle offensive articles around them.
These will not always be effectual. We have recommended elsewhere to
fence each hill, as the most effectual method. A box, with gauze or a
pane of glass over the top, is a certain remedy in every case; it also
greatly promotes the growth of the young vines. This is equally
effectual against the cutworm and all other insects; and, as the boxes
will last a dozen years or so, we should use them if we had ten acres of
melons. But by early and late planting, and watchfulness, and
replanting, you will succeed without protection. An excessive quantity
of stable-manure does not increase the growth, especially of
water-melons. Plaster, bonedust, and ashes, are good applications;
hog-manure is the best of all. The seeds should be soaked two days, and
planted an inch deep on broad hills, raised in the centre four inches
above the level of the bed, that water may not stand around them;
planted low, they sometimes perish in a few hours in a hot sun, after a
rain. Hoe them often, but never when they are wet, and never hoe near
them after they have commenced running; the roots spread, about as much
as the vines, and hoeing deep near them cuts off the roots, and
materially injures them. Many a promising plat of melons has been ruined
by stirring the soil when they were wet, and hoeing around them after
they had begun to run. In walking among melon