Melon and Garden Update

It is the first full week in July and our rear utility room is flowery fragrant with the aroma of ripe cantaloupe. There is a box of Burpee Ambrosias, a laundry basket of early honey dews and three large yellowing Crenshaws. Of course there are still quite a few in my garden patch which have not turned completely ripe yet. The Burpee Ambrosia have pretty well lived up to expectations and reputation as a standard of taste, although a bit on the medium size. A single chilled melon serves two. All my fruits, bell peppers and tomatoes as well, seem a bit small. I think I may possibly be lacking phosphorus so I am going to try to find some bone meal to buy and spread before ripping out my summer garden next week and beginning my fall garden.

We let the Ambrosias set a couple days in the back room to finish ripening after picking them from the patch when they turned beige and their vines “slipped”. They have been ripe to the rind and excellent flavor. We grew the other two melon types as an experiment just to get a feel for how “winter melons” work. The Crenshaws get as large as an icebox-size watermelon, turn yellow and the vine also “slips” when ripe. If we let a Crenshaw store in the back room until it is all the way ripe the flavor cannot be beat. My wife is reaching the point where she doesn’t want anything else but Crenshaws.

We are doing some learning with the honey dews. Either they were unripe and tasted like cucumber or they had ripened to the point of rotting; no in-between sweet melon stage. Their vine does not slip like the other two melons and must be cut with a knife. As near as I can figure, they should be cut when the skin is white turning to butter yellow color. As I was pondering this problem of determining honey dew ripeness, my wife commented, “Maybe they are like apples” meaning they needed significant post-picking storage time to sweeten up. I think she may be on to something because they are called a “winter melon” which probably indicates they may be a storage-keeper crop. So that is where I am on the learning curve at present. I hope I can figure them out because I have a bunch more out in the field which will come in after the watermelon crop in the fall.

The purpose of our garden melon patch is to get family and friends through to when the field of watermelons ripen, which I expect will be toward the end of July. I am confident that the watermelons will do fine. We are seven inches short on rainfall so far this year and I have been irrigating them on a daily basis. Some are the size of basketballs already. Almost half our crop is seedless watermelons this year so that should improve marketability. Still I am not sure that I am looking forward to sitting on my truck tailgate at the local farmer’s market Saturday mornings in August.

Obviously I am big fan of melons and it is not just because our sandy soil is best suited to growing watermelons. We have several little patches of berries, a couple peach trees, an apple tree, and a couple cherry trees that were rife with cherries this spring. Now I have enjoyed cherry pie as much as anyone this summer but except for the apples, I really don’t care much whether the other fruits make or not; if they make, fine and if they don’t, fine. I must specialize a little and prioritize my time a little. I cannot do everything well in the limited time frame of a growing season, so I pretty well stick to my small vegetable garden which is supposed to help feed us and to the watermelons. Cherries are a good comparison. If I pick a cherry I have something the size of a marble and after I take the time to pit it, I basically have a little piece of red peel. If I bend over and pick up a watermelon, I can have twenty pounds of real food despite the rind.

Melons are also one of the few dessert foods that you can gorge yourself on and still claim to be dieting to lose weight. Melons are satisfying; on a hot day, I can eat one and skip the rest of a noon meal. As I write this, I am within striking distance of losing back the 25 pounds I gained over last winter’s holiday season. Hoeing half a day in a hot melon patch is good exercise and also conducive to weight loss.

It is now mid season, and as I get ready to rip out my early garden to plant my fall garden, I give myself a midterm grade of C as a learning gardener. Heck, given the drought we have been through, make it a C+. My goal has been to grow as much food as possible on as little a garden as possible. I have put a lot of food on the table this year and kudos to my wife; she is some cook. She has done her Dad proud. (He was their family chef.) I grew my little 25’X 40’ garden with only hand tools and organic methods and materials. This does not mean that I am a purist fanatic who will never ever use commercial chemical fertilizer; some day I may give my vegetables a squirt of Miracle Gro ®but before I do that I want to learn the organic method first. The best world may be a blend of the two methods.

I can’t give myself a higher mid-term grade than a C+, because as I look at my now drought browned garden I see how I missed opportunities to get a lot more produce from that small patch. I grew about a third of my garden in cantaloupe and similar melons and about another fourth of the total garden in sweet corn. The melon patch often wilted in the mid-day heat and this may have contributed to my not getting large melons. In hindsight, I should have grown half the garden in sweet corn and grown the cantaloupe between the north-south running corn rows. This might have doubled my corn production while still increasing the size of my melon patch by one sixth. Both the melons and the corn would be harvested by now if I had used transplants instead of direct seeding the cantaloupe. Once the melons were harvested, I could have planted late pole beans on the stripped corn stalks and the shade would have benefited late cabbages and winter squash planted as a succession crop between the corn rows for the fall garden.

I grew an early potato patch which we dug at the end of May, a late potato patch which I am just now ready to harvest, and a sweet potato patch which we put in as slips in late May. All three potato patches were about equal in size…a little larger than a king-size mattress. In hindsight, I should have skipped the late potatoes and planted all three beds in early potatoes; when the early potatoes were harvested in late May, I could have planted all three beds in sweet potatoes thus tripling my sweet potatoes while increasing the white potato by a third. There would need to be some extra potash added to grow the two root crops successively but I think it could have been done.

If I can pull these changes off next year I am going to raise my horticulture grade to B and my rank to gardener second class. I dream on. Got any windmills you need jousted?