Green gardening: Growing melons

Although they are fruits, melons are usually grown in the vegetable garden and while growing it is difficult to distinguish them from their close relatives, cucumbers and squashes. Melons need a lot of room, warm weather and moisture to grow.

Like cucumbers and squashes, melons are vines and need a lot of room, warm weather, and plenty of moisture to grow properly. In recent years, horticulturists have developed hybrid varieties of honeydew, Crenshaw melons, and miniature watermelons that mature in 80 to 90 days and so can be grown in many cooler regions.

Melons will not flourish in areas where temperatures fall below 13°C (55°F) at night and below 27°C (80°F) during the day. Unless you can count on these temperatures for three months, grow quick-maturing varieties.

• Cantaloupe: Burpee Hybrid, Pulsar, and Earlisweet
• Watermelon: You Sweet Thing; Sugar Baby; Sweet Beauty; and Yellow Baby
• Casaba: Golden Beauty; Amy; Angel
• Honeydew: Earlidew

• If you live in an area with a short growing season, start melon seeds indoors in pots, sowing them three seeds to a pot.
• Use eight-centimetre (three-inch) peat pots or large paper cups that you can tear away when the seedlings are set out, because melons will not tolerate root disturbance when transplanted.
• Do not use compressed peat cubes.
• Sow the seeds about four weeks before the date of the last expected frost, and leave the pots in a warm place.
• Melon seeds need constant soil temperatures of about 21°C (70°F) in order to germinate.
• When the seedlings are about five centimetres (two inches) high, thin them to the single strongest plant.
• Set out when you can be sure of the required minimum daytime and nighttime temperatures, and preferably before the seedlings have started to grow vinelike tendrils.
• If melon seedlings are exposed to temperatures below 10°C (50°F), they will continue to grow, but they may never bear fruit.
• Before you transplant melons into the garden, be sure to harden them off by exposing them gradually to outdoor conditions.

• To prepare a melon hill, dig a hole 30 centimetres (12 inches) deep and 60 centimetres (25 inches) wide, piling the excavated soil to one side.
• Fill the bottom of the hole with 10 to 15 centimetres (four to six inches) of compost or well-rotted manure. Return the excavated soil to the hole until it forms a slight mound, about 10 centimetres (four inches) high.
• Space the hills one and a half to two metres (five to six and a half feet) apart, except for those intended for large watermelons, which should be spaced approximately three metres (10 feet) apart.
• Cover the mounds with an organic mulch and let them settle for a few days before planting the seedlings in them.
• Be sure the rims of seedlings in peat pots are set well below the ground surface so that the entire pot will remain moist and decompose. Slit the pots down the sides so that the roots can grow through the sides more easily. Paper-cup containers should be carefully cut away from the root ball.
• Make two planting slits in the plastic mulch covering each mound. Plant no more than two seedlings in each one. Immediately after transplanting the seedlings, cover each one with a plant protector.
• Remove the coverings in a few days when the plants have become established.
• Water each hill thoroughly. If you are using a plastic mulch, water the mounds through the slits in the mulch.