Fabulous!! Charentais is one of my all time favorites! So sweet and what a dense flavor. Mine never grew over 5-6" wide. Also had the deepest beautiful orange color flesh. It was like eating a cantelope sugarcube!
1 Like
Savor is a real melon. Sugar Baby is an imitation melon. Thereâs still time to grow Savor.
2 Likes
I donât think so. First, sugar babies are one of the fastest plant-to-harvest melons that exists. The seed packets say 75 days from seed planting to harvest and if you got plants you will be a TINY bit ahead of that. Second, even if they are late, watermelons will generally continue to bloom and produce right up until the frost kills them IF they havenât produced already. In other words, once a plant/vine produces a lot of melons for a few weeks, it will decline a lot and perhaps (but certainly not always) die of what would equate to âold ageâ. Some may disagree because it is true that many vines will bloom long after their peak, but in general even though they bloom their production and health and growth declines a great deal after they peak (say 120 days for most watermelons). But a watermelon planted quite late that hasnât yet produced will continue to bloom, put on healthy new growth, and produce new melons right up until frost kills them. Even RI is more than 75 days from your first frost (I think!) so I bet you will be ok.
On the downside, and I hate to ever rain on anyoneâs parade, but sugar babies arenât a great watermelon to me, in large part because the ratio of seeds to flesh is just crazy. They are probably the seediest watermelon of the 58-60 Iâve grown. But theyâre good tasting. Enjoy!
UPDATE: Iâm with fruitnut all the way! Youâve still got time for a better melon than sugarbaby!! 
1 Like
Thanks to you and fruitnut! Will try and find another melon!!!
1 Like
My watermelons planted in my greenhouse in april are starting to put out flowers too. The only problem now is, there are no male flowers yet. I guess female flowers stay viable only some days, so I have to wait for my first set of fruits.
The variety is janosik. All 3 plants did start with female flowers only.
1 Like
Thatâs the opposite of what normally happens. Male flowers always
come first, then followed by females. Are you sure you arenât confusing
the two?
1 Like
If youâre growing season is short and you prefer ice box melons,
Blacktail Mountain is much better that Sugar Baby, but it also has
a good many seeds.
2 Likes
I know, its a little strange.
Donât think so. I will post a photo later. They look like tiny watermelons with a flower on top, right? Thats how the flowers look at my plants. Iâm not 100% sure but believe I can see male flowers forming now too. If the developing flowers actually are male flowers they for some reason are behindâŚ
1 Like
Thanks!
1 Like
As usual, I agree with Ray! My melons ALWAYS produce male flowers first (and more abundantly) so that is unusual. However, your description certainly does sound like you are correctly identifying the flowers, so Iâm not sure whatâs happening. But surely the âboy flowersâ will appear very soon. Iâm curious why you are seeing what at least Ray and I donât usually see. Oh wellâŚnature is always strange and making exceptions to its own rules!
2 Likes
Today in the morning I took some pictures.
It are 3 plants in a greenhouse, Nr. 1 in the front, Nr. 2 in the middle and Nr. 3 in the background.
Nr. 1 was the earliest flowering. This flower opened roughly 10 days ago. I think it is no longer viable. This plant is producing 1 or 2 more female flowers and is also starting to produce male flowers now. Interestingly the first male flower is developing a node before the node with the shown female flower (hard to see, but it is in the second picture to the right half hidden by a leaf).
Nr. 2 is developing the first female flower. No opened flowers yet.
Nr. 3 has opened a female flower yesterday, no opened male flowers yet. Male flowers are already developing.
3 Likes
Donât know what is causing my WM behavior putting out female flowers before male flowers. Its happening with all 3 plants. Maybe it is variety dependent? The variety is Janosik developed in Poland.
Since they are planted in a greenhouse and we still have cool nights there are wild temperature swings from night to sunny days (50°F to 115°F and more). The âgreenhouse-effectâ when sunny is amazing (the greenhouse is new to me too). Maybe thats a factor.
But since they are putting out male flowers now everything is fine. Its an interesting behavier though.
1 Like
Melon flowers, male or female, are functional for 1 day maybe two at the most. So you need a male and female that first open on the same morning to have any real shot at successful pollination.
1 Like
Oh, wow thats a little more difficult than I expected. Thank you very much for the advice.
Yes very difficult esp with just a few flowers. Once the bees show up and there are dozens opening each morning it becomes easy. Not until.
1 Like
You know what is really strange to me? Last year I had my watermelon patch with hundreds, maybe thousands of blooms (250 plants x ?15 blooms per?). My bee hive was less than 50 feet from my patch, and I saw MAYBE 10 honeybees total working watermelon blooms all year long. Aparently they just donât get what they need from watermelon blooms. That being said, I think bumble bees did about 80% of the pollinating and they were ALWAYS in the patch working. Actually I wish I knew more about bumble bees because they werenât the usual bumble bees, but rather a smaller version that otherwise looked identical. I guess it could have been baby bumbles but they never got bigger all year long. Just an interesting side not. But Fruitnut is right- bees are what will show up and pollinate outside melons (just not honey bees). Not sure if they can get into your greenhouse?
The question I have, @carot, is whether you have enough room for vines in your space. Its hard to tell from your photo, but it looks like there may not be a lot of space. If you havenât grown watermelons before, you may be shocked by how extensive the vines can be. THey can grow more than 12 feet in more than one direction! That being said, you can pinch some tips and control it somewhat. Good luck!
You are right, the space is not exactly huge. I will allow them to take over the back half of the greenhouse. It is not shown in the pictures but itâs aprox 9 feet space across. So the space is something around 6x9 feet, plus I can start to trellis part of the vines up (without fruit). If thats not enough I need to pinch them back.
My growing season only allows the WM to ripen that set this month. After that the summer will be too short. Thats why I plan to remove all later sets of fruit. That way I can trellis part of the vines up when needed or pinch back, cause the later growing parts will not be allowed to fruit. I hope for lets say 3 or 4 WM per plant.
Thats my plan, lets see what reality has to say about itâŚ
If this summer becomes a hot one I also can remove the sides of the greenhouse allowing the vines to grow out of the greenhouse. Its major task was to get the plants establish early. I guess the protection of the plants by the greenhouse is less important in summer. The greenhouse consists out of glass panels I can remove separately.
1 Like
Sounds like you have a good plan. I also enjoyed what you said about plans when it comes to growing fruitâŚsometimes nature has different plans! ha. I just went to your intro to remind myself where you liveâŚI had forgotten you are in GERMANY! Wow. I love the internetâŚI always just assume everyone is from the US (I hope that doesnât sound too egotistical, just that I get used to the fact that most people on here are in the US). Iâm glad you are here and you have an interesting variety of fruit growing over there.
Good luck with your watermelons- I hope natures plans and your plans are the same this time.
3 Likes
Thank you for your kind words. I am very happy being part of this really great board.
In general assuming everyone here is from the US is right most of the time. So we can safely say statistically its a very smart move 
4 Likes
I should be careful joking in a foreign language. I hope it was recognizable as that (of course not the first part).
3 Likes