Connie, I know very little about growing watermelons, this is the 3rd time I have tried to grow them and the 3rd time I have gotten them too thick. One of the problem I have had was getting into the melons to harvest them. Mine are too thick now. I have about 10 seeds on square shaped ridge that is about 5 or 6 ft long in each direction. I have some melons that look good but no place to step for me to get into check them. My melon bed is about 25' wide now and I am going to have to move some of vines out of the way to make paths through the vines and I will have to keep these paths open. Because I am a little unstable on my feet I use bamboo as walking sticks to help me keep my balance and move vines to make place to put my foot down.

I plant pumpkins, cantaloupe and winter squash the same way and have to do them all the same way. If I had plenty room I would plant differently.

I have never had my plants too thick to grow well, but they are to thick to tend properly.

Larry

Connie,

How important? Well, that depends.

If your soil is very rich and full of nutrients (watermelons are heavy feeders), you likely could get away with leaving a couple of extra plants in each hill, assuming your hills are properly spaced. If you have a lot of rain and your soil moisture level stays really high, the same thing applies. However, if you have poor soil that is lacking in nutrients and if moisture is scarce, then having too many plants per hill likely wouldn't give you the results you seek. Too many plants too close together in a low fertility/low moisture situation will be fighting one another for the limited nutrients and moisture and might not produce well because of that.

The variety or varieties you'll planting also plays a role in making this decision. If you are growing varieties that produce very large melons, they won't be happy if there's too many plants competing for nutrients and water because those big plants that make big melons need all that stuff themselves. If you are growing varieties that produce small refrigerator sized melons, you could get away with leaving more per hill.

I mostly grow varieties that produce the smaller, refrigerator sized melons and plant them ridiculously close together in a raised bed heavily amended with lots of compost. It also has a permanent irrigation line installed in it so they are easy to water. I plant them 1' apart in the middle of a 4' wide raised bed, and grow them upward on a trellis that is 5' tall. Once the plants reach the top of the trellis they just cascade back down to the ground. The part of the bed that has watermelons trellised in it is probably 15-20' long, and then on either end there's another 6 or 8' long area with trellised muskmelons (Hale's Big Jumbo, Scrumptious, and Carole). These plants all replaced Sugar Snap Peas when they were through producing so they likely have been in the ground 5 or 6 weeks. The watermelon plants are ahead of the muskmelons and already have set about 25 melons, which range in size from hen egg sized to softball sized. The muskmelons just started blooming this week. When you trellis melons it can be really easy for the melons to get too much sunlight directly on them, which can cause them to sunburn and then the burned area rots before the melon can ripen. That's why I plant so closely---so we'll have tons of foliage on that trellis to shade all the developing melons. We love watermelon too and the refrigerator ones are perfect for a small family, and they just keep pumping out new melons all season long, so we have melons until the first freeze of fall arrives. Sometimes we have so many melons at one time that I slice them up and feed them to the chickens, the deer and the rabbits. I like sharing with the animals, both domestic and wild, when we have extra--especially in the heart of the summer when their native food supply is all dried up from heat and drought.

In a different raised bed of the same size, I have other melon plants. Some of them I planted myself and others sprouted from seeds from some previous year (I didn't grow melons in this bed in the past so something put those seeds there, but it wasn't me). One of the plants there produces fruit too big to trellis. It is called Harvest Moon and was an AAS winner a couple of years back. It already has produced two ripe melons and has several more in various sizes. The other plants in there are refrigerator melons and I planted one plant about every three feet. They are doing great and have lots of melons on them too, but the melons are a lot harder to find than the trellised ones. There's also a little watermelon patch in the back garden. I didn't plant it either, but did grow melons back there last year. We haven't harvested one from that area yet and the plants back there are smaller and don't look as happy as the ones in the front garden because the soil back there is not as good. Still, that garden produced lots of melons last year so it is adequate. These must have sprouted from a melon that a vole gobbled up last summer. I never picked up the remains, just left it lying there, and about a half-dozen seeds sprouted. I didn't thin those either, just left them where they came up.

I hate to thin anything, although with some things, it is important to thin---like with root crops like radishes and carrots. With melons, though? The worst thing that will happen is that you might not get as many fruit as you want, but that can happen even if thinned properly. I always like to try and push the limits to see how many plants I can cram into any given spot. It generally works out just fine. You won't know how it will work for you in your soil and your growing conditions until you give it a try.

Dawn

Larry and Dawn,

Thank you so much for responding. What, when and where would I add to the soil to help boost the production of the plants?

Also, I had read that you can pinch off the growing end of a watermelon plant at some point so the plant would put more into growing the fruit than in growing the foliage. Do you recommend that and at what point?

Thanks again!

God Bless,
Connie

Hello CNC.
I usually grow watermelon as a second crop over my early season crop spots. I prefer the old time bigger melons and usually grow Kleckley's sweet or Jubilee which can get around the 40 pound range but are the most delicious I've tried. Sometimes I might grow Cobb's Gem for bigger or for smaller 25 pound range I like plain old Charleston greys.
I know most people today seem to like small melons so I might not be of any help.
They are easy to grow but you might as well plan on having 10 sq feet to plant space for each vine, they run vines everywhere. I usually plant 3 seeds per hill, at least 5-6 feet apart and 8-10 is better. I just leave one plant per hill and about the 4-5 leaf stage hit em with some 10-20-10. They are really easy to grow; almost by themselves, they are hardy. The best melons though, usually come from places like Hope Arkansas where the water table is shallow like less than 10 foot from surface. Watermelons have a massive root system and can grow roots down 10 foot deep and actually tap into the groundwater to grow some really huge melons. This is why I only leave one plant per hill, but I guess 2 would be ok.
If you want bigger melons try picking off all but about 2-3 melons per vine. The guys going for records only leave one.

About the only problems I have ever encountered growing them is they run out of the garden into the yard, so I have to lift the vines back to mow. Weeds will need to be pulled until the leaves get a good canopy going, then its usually just about getting rain, the more the better, they don't call em watermelon for nothing.
You sometimes have problems with proper pollination. You can do this by hand but sometime left up to the bees a fruit will set and only get partially pollinated causing you to have oblong bottleneck shaped fruit. Each flower needs to get pollinated several different times, at least 3 or more, for the watermelon to grow correctly. But, it will make a misshapen melon with just one pollination. They still eat just fine but look like a bird gourd or butternut squash shape when this happens.
The only other thing is trying to figure out when its ripe. I slap the palm of my hand on it an hear a low thud and can tell from experience. Another way is there is a tiny tendril, first one near the melon, when this falls off or dies she's ready.
Other than that they grow themselves with minor problems like leaf miners and mosaic virus. Keep the plants growing and healthly and usually these are minor problems only affecting a few leaves and can be ignored. Keeping the melon partially shaded with leaves helps prevent sunburn if the summer is a scorcher.
Hope this helps

This post was edited by cowdiddly on Fri, Jul 11, 14 at 10:27

Connie, I don't pinch off the tips because our season is so long. I just let the plants keep growing for as long as they are able and keep setting fruit for as long as they can. Our first freeze of autumn is so highly variable that I don't like to do anything that slows down the melon production. Occasionally we have a first freeze in September, but sometimes not until December. If I tip-pruned those plants expecting a freeze at the end of Sept, and then we didn't have one until December, look at all the growing time we could have had.

People in areas significantly farther north than us sometimes tip their melons, but it is more to focus the plants' energy on enlarging the melons it already has. Some folks do the same thing with their tomato plants. Once they are a certain number of weeks or days before their expected first frost or freeze, they top off the tomato (or melons or peppers or whatever) plants to divert energy into enlarging the existing fruit. There's no point in any plant, whether it is a watermelon or tomato or whatever, putting energy into making more vegetative growth and setting new fruit that doesn't have a chance of ripening because cold weather is soon to arrive. Here, though, I think it is worth the risk because cold weather arrives really late some years. So, it is your choice as to how to handle it, and you know better than we do when you'd see your weather at your house start getting cold enough to put a halt to the melon production.

Last year we got melons really, really late in the year and it was a wonderfully long harvest season. At some point in late fall or early winter, about a month after the last frost, I found a Harvest Moon melon under a bunch of dead foliage. Somehow I had missed it when I harvested the last of the melons and it had been through a month of really cold weather, with cold nights down into the teens. I found it while I was cleaning out all the dead plant foliage and putting it on the compost pile. I didn't expect the melon would be edible, although it looked perfect from the outside, but thought I'd cut it open and feed it to the chickens. However, Harvest Moon has a decently thick rind, and the melon was perfectly ripe and delicious, so we ate it and the chickens got the watermelon rind. That's the latest we've ever had a fresh melon from the garden. See. if I had tipped the vines, we wouldn't have had that last luscious melon much later than usual....and that's an example of why I don't tip my melon plants.

If you have more than one plant that still is doing well late in the season, you could try pruning the tips of some and leave others alone and see which results you get from each. With any and every thing that you grow, there's many different ways to do things, so you should try all the different methods you learn, see how each one does, and thus arrive at the method or methods that work best for you.

Dawn

You run into basic biology ... crowded plants produce less fruit because they are fighting for resources. So your reluctance to thin because you want lots of melons is self-defeating.

So go ahead and pinch off the smallest ones and leave 3 really sturdy ones.