I wish it was the turtle
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Thanks! Now I have to research that. Arrgh!
But it sort of fits in with what Rayrose said about never spraying his plants. I think I may have been spraying to combat PM when the real culprit may have been cucumber beetles and bacterial wilt.
Bart, I grew 60 acres of vine crops for years, cuke beetle bacterial wilt causes the plant to wilt, die, and turn brown. The pictures remind me more of Fusarium Blight, a soil borne disease that starts near the main stem and kills the leaves but the vines and fruit donāt die. I have areas in my gardens now that FB wilt as soon as the plants initiate vines.
There are anthracnose diseases of cucurbits that can look like that also
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I just did some reading on ripeness/over ripeness from someone who claims to have worked in the watermelon fields for three years:
Since a ripe and overripe watermelon will both sound hollow (āpunk, punkā) you canāt use sound as an indicator of over ripeness. If you press hard on both ends of a watermelon at the same time and feel some give, then itās over ripe. A ripe melon will be very firm.
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Fusarium and verticillium wilts attack tomatoes so I would avoid susceptible tomato varieties if someone does want to do vegetable crop rotation. On tomatoes for example VFT on the tag means resistance to fusarium and verticillium wilts and tobacco mosaic . I did not realize watermelon were susceptible to fusarium since I donāt currently have problems with it.
I am well aware that many people- including many here- put a lot of faith in the sound made when thumping a melon, but I totally agree with whatever you read that said its a poor indicator. Now, I still thump melons when picking them, but Iāve definately had plenty that sounded hollow (āpunk punkā but were either under ripe or over ripe. But for me the thump test is just one of several indicators that help- but do not guarantee, a perfectly ripe melon. Now, at least for me, the thump test will cull out some extremely under ripe and some over-ripe one to the point they are spoiling. In those cases, you donāt hear much sound at all. Its just a dead thump with no echo of any kind at all. That sound will guarantee it is a bad melon, but a hollow sound will NOT guarantee it is a ripe, ready to pick melon.
My favorite indicator in the field (not really helpful in a grocery store) is one @rayrose kind of mentioned in passing- the sheen on the melon. But as Iāve said before, this is a VERY subtle difference and I couldnāt tell you what it looks like. But just as Ray said, when most watermelons ripen they loose a little bit of shine.
Ray has grown more than 50 varieties and Iāve only grown 41 varieties. I forget how many years heās grown but I remember thinking it was more than the 27 years Iāve grown them. I always agree with everything he has said here, but I donāt remember how much faith he puts into the āthump testā. I put some, but not much.
I donāt find a single one of the oft-cited ripeness tests to be true all the time. Iāve had melons that were so green they barely were turning red inside but had dry, brittle tendrils. Also had dead ripe ones with green tendrils, though thatās less common that the former. Iāve had yellow bellied melons be green, and Iāve had over-ripe melons have very little yellow. Iāve heard countless other tests that people swore by (including the one Clint just mentioned- pushing on both ends and seeing how much āgiveā it has. The problem is, all watermelons at all stages have at least a very slight give (except the ones that are so green they are still smaller than normal size.
Anyway, that is my typical, long-winded, run-on-sentence filled way of saying that while all the old-style techniques may have SOME merit, I donāt thin any of them are all that dependable, and even with my experience, I still get it wrong sometimes! \
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Thatās why itās an art and not a science. 
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I cut another Orangeglo tonight. Must not have the touch. It was better than the last one at 11.5 brix. But itās going in the dumpster in the morning. Soft and tasteless. I think it was over ripe but the seeds were still whitish.
Much better was this recent seedless SSX 7405. It was somewhat over ripe as well. 15 lbs and 14 brix. Somewhat soft due to over ripeness but very tasty. I ate all of it in two days.
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Iām sorry youāre having bad luck with Orangeglo in spite of Ray and I recommending it so strongly! But that melon in the photo looks great! It also looks to have a lot less seeds than many watermelons do, though it could just be you cut it at a spot that didnāt reflect the whole melon? Either way, glad you got some good melon. Mine are just ridiculously late this year thanks to me not being able to plant until June 2 (a month late) due to rain.
Kevin,
A triploid is a seedless melon. Mine are late this year too, because of
my late start, but Steve plants his in March and winter protects them.
Thatās why he has a much earlier harvest than we do.
Iāve had a lot of rain lately, which will affect the sweetness of my melons.
Iām harvesting cantaloupes now, and they arenāt nearly as sweet as they
should be. I also picked my first sacrificial melon today(Gold Strike), and
while it was under ripe, was still good.
HA! Iām feeling a little silly now about telling Steven it looked like there werenāt many seeds in his (as I now know) SEEDLESS watermelon! hahaha. I actually did know that triploid=seedless but I somehow completely missed that in the photo.
Glad Iām not the only one who is late this year, but if you are picking a melon already (even if it is a sacricifical, unripe one) then you are WAY ahead of me. Beleive it or not, most of vines are just now STARTING TO BLOOM! And many arenāt even THAT far along. Most of my plants are just about 2-3 feet long. There is late, and then there is LATE LATE. Iāve never in my life planted watermelons in June, but seriously, it either rained or the garden was still a mud-hole every single day the entire month of May. I have no doubt my melons will still produce, but Iām pretty bummed about how late they are going to be (basically my main harvest will be in SEPTEMBER! Watermelon is one of those fruits that are most definitely a SUMMERTIME treat. Who wants to be eating watermelon in the fall? You and I have both spoken about the joys of cutting and eating a watermelon out in the patch in the morning. It just wonāt be the same to do that when its starting to feel like fall. Oh well, its better than not having any at all, and I seriously considered just not planting any.
I feel the same way about cucumis melons when I donāt get any until September
September is for apples!
This year, at least, the transplants took off and I see fruits sizing up on the vines - should have them in August, which is properly summer melon weather
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Thanks for the request for a photo. I have taken photos of my melon patch earlier but decided its useless because you just canāt fit it all into a photo, and when I get close, the result is that the plants are so far away- and therefore small- that you canāt tell much from photos. But since you asked, I tried again today.
First, this isnāt all my watermelons. There are more on the other side of my corn. Also, when you look at the photo you will see a bunch of little green āplant squaresā. Iāll explain. I line up all my watermelons in a grid that goes up and down and across. When I till them, I till the rows both across and up and down. So what is left is the watermelon plant AND the closely packed weeds which are too close to the plant to get with the tiller, thereby leaving little āsquaresā made up of the 1-2 square foot right around the base of the watermelon plant. Embarrassingly, in these photos that includes a big clump of weeds, but not for longā¦
I do something very risky which I DO NOT recommend to others. But I actually get rid of the clump of weeds that is bunched up right around the melon plant with roundup (well, its generic equiv). I use a small pump sprayer, I BARELY pump it so it has extremely low pressure. I set it to shoot a tiny, weak STREAM of liquid instead of a mist-like spray. I put the nozel just a few inches from the base of the melon, turn the nozel away from the plant, and go all the around it except the area where the vine/plant is running. Now, make no mistake about it, occasionally something goes wrong and I kill a plant. But I have about 200 hills of watermelons, and there is no way on earth I could hoe all of them. And if I do nothing, the weeds will suck up so much water and nutrition that my melon size and quality suffers greatly. In fact, the loss of a few plants doesnāt reduce my harvest nearly as much as leaving the weeds would.
If you look close at the photos, you will see that several of the āsquaresā have a lot of brown in them, especially those on the right. That is because I sprayed those areas several days ago and they are dead or dying. eventually that stuff will rot and be gone, making the patch look much better. Most of the big green squares you see have actually just been sprayed in the last 3 days and havenāt even started dying yet. WHen they do youāll see a much neater melon patch than this.
You can see where I have tilled going in one direction. Thats because the vines have started running so I can no longer till both across and up-and-down, leaving the patch to have in-tact rows but nice, clean, tilled dirt between rows. Anyway, I wish you could see my whole patch. I also wish you could see the individual plants better, and I wish it wasnāt as weedy as it is- it embarasses me to post these, but since @SMC_zone6 asked, I wanted to post them.
and
and
BTWāpeople often ask about all the sticks. I think I should get the nobel prize of agriculture for those! They look a little strange now, but you have to understand than a month from now, you will not be able to see a spot of dirt in that whole melon patch- really. It will be a solid carpet of green vines, all running into and over each other. You canāt tell where the rows are, and there is no sign of the grid layout you see now. As beautiful and wonderful as that is (and by the way, its why I fight weeds so hard now, because if I keep it clean now, the watermelon vines will actually shade out and prevent weeds once complete ground coverage is achieved). Anyway, once the whole patch is just a solid mass of vines, it is almost impossible to find where a melon plant comes out of the ground. I fertilize my watermelons several times over the course of the season (which I know some donāt agree with but its my way). I use pelletized fertilizer applied by hand, but you canāt apply it if you canāt find the base of the plant. Some years I also have to fertilize, and since I canāt afford to just sprinkle the entire patch, I just take a hose and hand water each one. But again, that wont work if I canāt find the base of the melon where the water needs to go. I use the sticks to help me keep up with some other things but its too complicated to explain here, so just know the sticks are important for me, no matter how strange they look!
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Weeds would swallow my melon plants if I didnāt grow on weed barrier. No way would I try growing them on bare soil. March to September is a long time to control weeds. Even growing 75 day corn the weeds get going by tasseling time.
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Iām experimenting with bare soil this year, but Iāve applied those pre-emergent granules to suppress the weeds - with results yet to be determined fully
Kevin,
You surely did get a late start. Do you sell your melons?
Thanks for rubbing it in, Ray! haha. Really though, it has bugged me all season long and I regret it every day. Next year Iām going to prepare my soil 1-2 months early so if we get another extra-wet spring I can at least just put on my rubber boots and plant my seeds in the rain and mud and then try to dress it all up when it dries outl
No, never sold a single melon. I give away an amazing number of watermelons and eat an even more shocking number. As weāve said before, I will often cut one open and just eat the seedless heart out of it. That is so wasteful that its borderline unethical . Like all our moms used to say when we wasted food- āthink of all the hungryā. I usually even put some watermelons out by the road for my neighbors to enjoy, but last year I had one person stop and load up about 20 watermelons. That really, really bugged me a lot!
How about a pic of your patch, Ray? But I know from experience its hard to get a decent photo of a melon patch, and whatever you can get seems to show the bad (weeds, etc) a lot more than the actual watermelon plant and fruit. But Iād love to see yours? You said somewhere that you donāt grow nearly as many now as you used to, but didnāt say how many you do grow? Just curious.
I donāt have a farm like you do, just a regular subdivision lot.
Iāll try to take some pics tomorrow.
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You have chickens right? Chickens are an open watermelonās worst nightmare. A flock of chickens will eat more watermelon than Ray. Seriously, I go to our closest grocer and get melon rinds, saves me 20-30% in feed costs.
Make sure you get the best part of the melon and leave the rest to your chickens.
Gross greed is indeed sickening, probably let them rot.
In Ia. they old saw is:
Plant in the dust, bins will bust.
Plant in mud, harvest is a dud.
Itās true!