Edwardsville Spectator

CUCUMBER.

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 them, do this. Make a hole and put into it a little hot dung: let the hole be under a warm fence. Put six inches deep of fine rich earth on the dung. Sow a parcel of seed in this earth, and cover it at night with a bit of carpet or sail cloth, having 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 into 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 fix it in the hole. These plants will bear a month sooner than those 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 hand lights, 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 of all the pumpkin and squash tribe; 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 in a square foot; and then you will have no fruit at all! Let any one try 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. The 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 earth in every direction. Judge then, how ten plants, standing close to one another, must produce mutual starvation. If you 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. Care should be taken 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 is the same.