We had some room in one of the garden boxes and I saw some melon starts at the local hardware store, so I decided to purchase and plant one. I started French melons from seeds last year and that process was successful. I even dehydrated some melon, which was really cool. We had many small cantaloupes that were delicious.
This year, I started my garden boxes late because I was working overtime (way overtime) in one of my work projects and didn’t get to planting my seeds. Once I ended the work project, I decided to skip past the seed stage and purchase a small start that was ready to be planted.
Weeks later, I am starting to see little fuzzy baby melons!
Melons develop right beneath the flowers. There is one melon that is far beyond the rest in its development.
I don’t know what variety of melon I am growing because the container at the hardware store said “melon,” and that’s really the downside of not starting something from seed. The hardware store doesn’t care about specifics. “It’s a melon, deal with it.”
One thing to know about melons is they really fill an area that is at least 8 feet square—for each melon plant. They really do take over the garden. We have a 4×8-foot raised bed with a few tomato plants in it and I am trying to get the melon to spread over only one side of the bed so that the tomatoes don’t get suffocated on the other side. In the photo below, you can see the melon pouring out of that large raised bed.
I have one little basil plant buried somewhere in there. Can you find it?
Remember to water melons (like cucumbers) a lot. Twice as much as everything else. I have my beds on drip and I have twice as much volume per hour going to the melon as the tomatoes. They’re kind of “tropical” in that way, so here in Northern California I make sure they get that moisture, because they aren’t getting it from the sky right now in July.
Savillum 