Melons That Failed
#OurFailures #CantaloupesThatFails
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.
Note: No part of this document, be it pictures or content can be reproduced/reused without written permission from this blog owner.
#洋香瓜 #LongGreenMuskMelon #RoundOrangeMuskMelon
As mentioned in our About Sweet Melons post, we started our journey of growing sweet melons/cantaloupes back in 2012, about 10 years ago. Then, our green house conditions are non ideal for sweet melon growing, low roof, hot and humid.
Hence, we only managed to grow one cultivar consistently well, Taiwan cantaloupe (洋香瓜), "Known You" seeds. Almost all Japanese melon cultivars perished in our hands.
This round, however, we failed terribly with our previous champion cultivar, Taiwan cantaloupe. Even the seedlings sprouted unhealthily. The seeds are kind of old ( 4 years) and worst still they were saved from previous fruit ( not advisable for original F1 hybrid seeds). So I guess it all adds up.
We have planted generation 2 F1 hybrid seeds previously, without doubt the fruits will be unpredictable but still the plants were fine. So we highly suspect it is due to age of the seeds. We cannot stress enough on the importance of good quality seeds. Really not worth to waste time on bad seeds and eventually gets undesired planting outcomes.
The other two melons that are less ideal in our opinion, are long green musk melon and round orange musk melon. Both are new chai tai seeds from Thailand. We rejected them based on taste more than anything else. They sprouted and grew well. Just not so palatable to our likely. But again taste is subjective.
Our Selection Criteria
#GoodForUsMayNotBeGoodForYou #TasteMatters #Sweet #Crunchy #EaseOfGrow #EasyToManageVines
These are the few selection criteria we adopted before deciding if we want to grow a particular melon repeatedly.
#Taste&Smell
- Sweet
- Either crunchy or film but melt in the mouth texture
- Juicy
- Sweet fragrant either on vine or light refreshing sweetness when cut
#Appearance
- Thick orange or pale green fresh and thin skin like picture above
- Either even netted skin or smooth lustre skin like picture below.
- Evenly round or slight elongated symmetrical shape
#AboutTheVines
- Predictable vines patterns across all seedlings. Manageable growth and tame vines, not too messy/bushy.
- Consistent flowering/fruiting across nodes
- Ease of pollination.
Why These Are No Go for Us
#NoGo
We will likely to try Taiwan cantaloupe (洋香瓜) again after acquiring new seeds. We really doubt is a cultivar issue. For this round, the vines kind of did well for the start but they either developed leaves curl issues or just wilted suddenly or the pollinated fruits just abort prematurely across all seedlings.
The fact that we have been very successful on this for last 10 years, we want to give it a second try just to be sure it is not just environmental issue of this plot. Something we highly doubt since the more demanding Japanese melons actually did very well.
We however will not go for these two anymore. Mainly due to taste.
The matured fruits are blend in taste. We tried harvesting it once ripen as well as left the fruit on vine for very very long till it almost started to rot. Both cases, fruits are tasteless. We are however not sure if they are meant to be cooked or eaten raw like fruit. The fresh is soft but tasteless.
We assume it is meant to be eaten fresh as these are both musk melon. We could be wrong. Hope we can finally find an English speaking Chai Thai seeds seller who are grower to enquire. If you experience otherwise, do drop us a note and will be really happy to learn from you.
A Little More on These Melons
#LongGreenMuskMelon
The Long green musk melons actually look very pretty on vine. It is however a bit unpredictable, not all plants have the same flowering pattern. Most mass flowering occurred after node 18 but some can be 24 or even further.
It is also extremely difficult to pollinate successfully. We use 4 males to 1 female flowers and were very careful with our manual pollination. Still uneven pollination happened 2 out of 4 fruits. The fruits eventually appeared distorted
A successfully pollinated fruit at week 4 after pollination looked pretty in picture below. By week 5, it turned to a lighter tone with a very fragrant smell and was ready for harvest. If you do not harvest it by then, the fruit will crack on the vine.
The average weight of this melon cultivar is 2kg. Chill your melon immediately. We left ours on the table top for a day after harvest and it just cracked opened lengthwise.
The vines of this cultivar is massive, more like gourd vines than melon vines. You really need good climbing space for the plant to do well.
#RoundOrangeMuskMelon
In all aspect, the Orange round musk melon is very similar to the long green musk melon, except the fruits are round in shape. They look kind of cute but are equally tasteless. Picture below.
We did not manage to get the very bright orange outer skin shown on the seed pack. Either we have cross pollinated them by mistake or could it be weather? Anyway, we are not motivated to try again, put off by the taste. Maybe we may come back to it after we are done with the other better tasting melons.
This concludes our round one melon growing journey at this new site. We have shortlisted the better melons to go on round 2.
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