CHAPTER XX.
SUMMER CUCUMBERS AND SEEDLING PELARGONIUMS.
The cucumber properly belongs to the kitchen-garden aud frame-ground, but a few words on our mode of producing summer cucumbers will probably be valued by many readers of this volume, for we have, during many years past, very profitably occupied with them a house that during winter is filled with seedling pelargoniums. It happens, too, for our encouragement, that about nine-tenths of all that has been written about cucumbers in horticultural papers has related to the winter management, an implication, perhaps, that to grow cucumbers in summer needs so little skill that there need be very little said about it. To be sure, it is easy enough to grow them, even in common frames, with or without fermenting material, yet the cutting of a cucumber fit for the table is an extraordinary event in some few gardens where only one man is kept. But never mind about relative difficulty, and all that sort of thing: cucumbers are much more in demand during summer than winter, and our way of growing them is the most simple ever heard of, and the results are all that could be desired, and much more than, in ten thousand like cases, would be expected.
To begin, then: we do not employ artificial heat at any stage of the business, not a particle of fermenting material, and the plants are positively ornamental, and when full of fruit present a most beautiful appearance, which cucumbers in frames never do. The summer cucumber house is a narrow span-roofed “Paxtonian,” put up about twenty years ago by Hereman and Morton. There is simply nothing at all peculiar in it, save and except the well-known Paxtonian principle. On each side of the central path is a border of earth supported by skirting-boards. On the lights are fixed stout iron brackets for the support of open shelves, and from October to
