Cantaloupe X Honeydew. Possible? How?

atillathepun

18 years ago

Thanks for any responses! Just curious about the viability of this cross and the mechanism for doing so.

Comments (4)

Pierre_R
18 years ago
Quite easy: just plant aside one each and let the bees do it. Many/most seeds will be hybrid. Melons are preferential outbreeders. Some melon vars are dioceous others monoceous that is the female flowers of the former do not have stamens. Both have male flower with stamens and no fonctional pistil.
Hybrids are intermediate in fruit characters and do not breed true.
There are some fixed vars with these intermediate characters.
carolync1
18 years ago
It seems to me that all the melon varieties I have been interested in cross-breeding have monoclinous (perfect) flowers plus male flowers. Sounds fun to try if one can still get a good percentage of hybrid seeds when the female parent has perfect flowers, without doing whatever they need to do to get 100% (or close to it) hybrid seed commercially. I have no experience with this.

I expect that the percentage of hybrid seeds would go up where the female parent had no stamens in the female flowers. Am I right?
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carolync1
12 years ago
I grew one Bidwell Casaba with three Small Persian melons last year. Of the four plants I grew out this year from the Bidwell Casaba seeds, 3 are Bidwell Casaba and one is the hybrid. The hybrid is half the size of the largest Bidwell Casaba I grew (7 pounds vs. 14 pounds), has netting similar to that of the male parent and some ridging like the female parent, but less pronounced. Both melons show a color change at maturity but do not slip.

I'm not sure why the Bidwell Casaba is called a Casaba. It is very different from the wrinkly yellow-skinned, pale-fleshed melons we normally think of as Casabas. But I think it would still be part of the inodorus group.

Both the parent varieties are long-season melons well-adapted to our hot-suumer climate. I got ripe Bidwell Casabas before the hybrid ripened, but one Bidwell was ripe on the same day as the hybrid.
farmfreedom
12 years ago
CRENSHAW MELONS are across between cantaloupes and casabas or honey dews Santa Clause and other melons can cross breed.
on rare occasions melons can crossbreed with cucumbers (but that is rare). These crosses do not include watermelons however.