About Sweet Melons

By urban farmer -

Background

#onceuponatime

Note: This post is purely based on growers' observations, your results may vary. No part of this can be reused without written permission from the blog writer.

We started our journey of sweet melons/cantaloupes growing back in 2012, about 10 years ago. Then the green house conditions are non ideal for sweet melon growing. Low roof, hot and humid. We also cannot do constant drip system for that site. 

Most cultivars of sweet melons did not flourish in the previous setup except one,  Taiwan cantaloupe (洋香瓜). We are able to plant pretty well consequentially almost every year.  

Our main focus at that time is really asia leafy vegetables hence very little space are allocated for cucurbits growing. However, they flourished with that little space allocated and are our pride in our mini plot.

New Plot and New Journey

#restart #cantaloupes #sweetmelons

We are all excited to restart the journey. It is really a fresh start. New plot/new environment, new set of seeds ( old one long expired following closure of the old plot), new planting beds, new soil and new irrigation system. Other than the knowledge we have in our heads, everything else is new.

For new site, it will be easier to plant the hardy cucurbits like gourds and cucumbers first. But it was year end and very near chinese new year when we completed the plot building, weather is cool and we thought why not try it out. 

We went on to acquire 5 different cultivars of sweet melons. We couldn't get our star performer, the Taiwan cantaloupe hence decided to try our luck using generation 2 old seeds ( from previous fruit we grow but this is typically not advisable as F1 seeds will have unpredictable outcome when propagated using seeds from generation one fruit). 

We grew one cultivar from Japan, one from France, one from Taiwan and three from Thailand. We did managed to grow them but with varying outcome for different cultivar. The known theoretical pruning methodology somehow only works for the Japanese cultivar. The rest behave very differently. Alot more work to be done.




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"Meloning" Around

#melons #cantaloupes 
We will update the following in the coming months. Do look out for our monthly post or follow our FB or IG to be notified.






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