Juli Lawrence – Rakish Gardening

August 26th, 2007

I still haven’t harvested and eaten them, but they look pretty. I don’t understand, though, why I only have two melons. I grew three or four vines, did a lot of hand pollinating, got lots of baby melons, but only two actually grew into full melons. Now those two look wonderfully robust and healthy, but I just don’t get it.

However, this IS an improvement over the last three years since I started trying to grow melons. (Cantaloupes and honeydews, not watermelons. I don’t like watermelons.)

Year one I bought a honeydew plant at a QUALITY nursery. In fact, the plant was a Chef Jeff, which is, IMO, really good. It was a gorgeous, healthy plant and since I’d never grown melons, the fruits looked weird to me. Turns out they were weird because they were PATTY PAN SQUASH, not melons. Apparently the plant was mislabeled, which pisses me off still. Tried to eat the squash and hated it. But then, I don’t really like squash much. They were pretty, though.

So that was year one. Wrong plant.

Year two was last year, and I got lots of melons. But they grew to about the size of a plum or lemon, then turned funky shapes and got some kind of scab stuff on them. They never rotted, but they never grew beyond the weird shape. At summer’s end, I finally cut one open, expecting an alien inside, but it was fresh and springy melon flesh. Not ripe or sweet, but fresh.

I still don’t know what happened. These were just some kind of honeydew I bought somewhere as plants. Don’t remember what kind. That was the summer I was invaded by cucumber beetles – striped and spotted – and they wiped out my cucumbers with bacterial wilt. I always blamed them for the melons, but later saw a show on melons. The guy talked about bad pollination causing stunted and freakish fruits. So I learned to hand pollinate and did that all summer.

DH said I was a little too into making the males and females couple. Perhaps, but I was determined to get a melon this year, and looks like I’ll have two. But I just don’t understand why those other baby melons fell off. Pollination just can’t be the reason, because they were VERY pollinated. In fact on some of them I used two males just to give plenty of pollen.

I grew ananas variety (heirloom) because those are supposed to be most hardy against cucumber beetles and their diseases. My vines are still gorgeous, healthy and making about twenty flowers a day. I just don’t get it.

• Trap Crops
• Summer crops

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