this brief video covers a lot of
different
aspects of growing melons and
watermelons which i've got
both growing here in the same piece of
ground about one metre square
not a huge space and so i'm kind of
making more of it by growing a melon
up a string as well as growing planted
quite close to each other a watermelon
that is its actual center is somewhere
there it's actually really hard to see
now because
the watermelon has sprawled all over the
soil
and if i just lift this up a bit you can
see
the roots there and this is what many
cucurbits do including squashes
and as they're sprawling along the
ground they put roots down
so that gives them extra power to grow
more
even though you know there's not a huge
space here and then
they kind of escape so we've got a
watermelon
fruit over here this variety is
early moon beam i'm actually going to
harvest it because
i think you'll find it interesting to
see it's
harder with a watermelon to judge
ripeness than
it is with a melon because you don't
really get the aroma but
delicious tale of slovenia actually
katya she put this in one of her posts
that when this
little tendril is going brown that's a
sign of
ripeness having said that it's not
really brown but then
our weather here is not as hot as in say
slovenia
we're temperate not continental so like
today the temperature is
barely 20 centigrade 68 fahrenheit
here we have a fruit of early moon beam
so
let's just have a quick look it's a
yellow
flesh variety so it's not going to be
dark red it's more a question of
how it looks whether we can see those
little black seeds
i did grow it by the way from oh yeah
it's looking promising
oh wow how about actually oh yeah there
are just a few seeds in there i don't
know if you can see them
and that looks right you can see the
juice coming out
look forward to eating that later and
that's from a home-safe seed i wasn't
sure that it would work but actually
last year
i had a watermelon growing right there
and i thought well i'll repeat it
because it's got the space to run a bit
and you can see there's another
watermelon quite close to that first one
i've just harvested
which will now swell more that's part of
the reason i wanted to harvest that one
because then that allows the
new ones to come on a bit whereas here
these ones this is minnesota as
normal melon you can see there's one two
three and they're on the main stem and
then i made a mistake growing it up
the string in june i managed to snap the
top i was twisting it around
and then i took a leader to carry on
growing up
and didn't know how well that would work
for a long time it wasn't fruiting or
anything i thought
it's just going to make loads of leaves
and our summers are a bit marginal for
growing melons because they need a lot
of warmth but look what happened and we
got three more up here as well
and that's minnesota again from
home so seed so i'm pleased with that as
well it's a bit of a
first time for me and when you're
growing them off of strings just like
cucumbers
twist the leading stem around and just
by way of contrast i want to show you
three more melons in the polytunnel
where it's not quite as warm as in the
greenhouse here
you can see the garden looking very lush
at the moment because of
the rain we've had recently we actually
had 18 millimeters already today three
quarters of an inch
and brassicas celery courgettes they
love that
in here we have the summer plants
entering their final phase of fruiting
cucumbers still going and these melons
these plants were present from stephanie
hafferty who has a good account to
follow
and there are three different varieties
from real seeds
tiger melon early granite
and kazak and just seeing those three
together
gives you an idea of the variety that's
possible in home growing
and just today i noticed this one had
fallen off
i've not grown these tiger melons before
so again i'm going to cut this open
because i think it'd be really
interesting to see
it's clearly ripe you can see the
difference in color yesterday it looked
just
pale yellow compared to that green and
just you know overnight it had gone that
incredibly extra right
what it doesn't have is the strong aroma
of melon that you get from the charante
for example
oh yeah it's a white one how interesting
oh really um i'll put a note in the
video description
actually it smells pretty nice so that's
tiger melon
and then this one is early granite
and you can see there's four lovely ones
hanging there again growing the same way
up a string
and what you need to do when you're
doing that is
let's the melons grow on a side sheet so
they're not like cucumbers they're not
growing on the main stem
you let a side shoot grow but once they
got going a bit and then
pinch off the leader coming off it so
you just got a melon there
and then it's pruning pruning pruning
after that and then this one i want to
harvest as well
because this is
kazak again i've not grown it before
it looks ripe you see that extra color
there
often you'll see a little cracking there
that's another sign of brightness
and again smell you should be getting an
aroma
this one is not doing a lot of that it's
a green flesh
melon i'm noticing it shows how
different they are that's just amazing
and yeah that looks pretty ripe actually
you can see by the seeds as well and
everything
uh let me have a little sniff oh yeah
that smells nice
yeah so some of it with these new
varieties is getting to know
them how they react and when they're
right and i hope you've enjoyed this
little tour of
melons and watermelons don't so any now
you've got to wait until next i saw mine
april undercover
trying to transplant them here after
last frost in the middle of may onwards