Progress is encouraging in my garden this year. The past week or so has been quite warm and the plants responded accordingly. I finally got watermelons established in one of my backyard raised beds after some problems with starts damping off within a day or two of planting.
The lineup in the melon bed is now five Golden Midget and three Saskatchewan watermelons, and one charentais cantaloupe. I lost five Saskatchewan starts before my last three took hold. They are beginning to vine, so it should be clear sailing from here.
I planted my last melon start today at my plot in the community garden. It was a Tigger melon that is set in between four Korean Star melons. There was a volunteer sunflower growing in that spot, but it toppled over a few days ago. I staked the one side where it kept leaning, then it fell over on the other side. It is just as well. The sunflower established a massive root system that would have sucked out a lot of nutrients better consumed by melon vines.
I achieved 100 percent success with 19 mixed melon starts surviving transplanting to my garden plot. If you count the one Ambrosia melon vine growing with the cucumbers, I have 20 melons total in my garden plot. But I don't count it using the same criteria as the other 19 because I bought it at a variety store garden center. All of the other melons I started from seed. Plus, there were actually three Ambrosia melon starts in the 4-inch pot I bought. One damped off, the other I pulled to end its competition with No. 3. So if I count Ambrosia, I am no longer 100 percent, and I like to be perfect.
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