Page:Farmers of forty centuries.djvu/300

282 time for transplanting the rice, when the plants are already provided with a strong root system and are capable of at once appropriating any soluble plant food which may develop about their roots or be carried downward over them.

Fig. 154.—Watermelons, with the ground heavily mulched with straw, growing on low beds under conditions similar to those of Fig. 153.

Although the drains are of the surface type and but eighteen inches to three feet in depth, they are sufficiently numerous and close so that, although the soil is continuously nearly filled with water, there is a steady percolation of the fresh, fully aerated water carrying an abundance of oxygen into the soil to meet the needs of the roots, so that watermelons, egg plants, musk melons and taro are grown in the rotations on the small paddies among the irrigated rice after the manner seen in the illustrations. In Fig. 153 each double row of egg plants is separated from the next by a narrow shallow trench which connects with a head drain and in which water was standing within fourteen inches of the surface. The same was true in the case of the watermelons seen in Pig. 154, where the vines are growing on a thick layer of