Look! It’s our first ripe watermelon

Our little watermelon was finally ripe. I quickly cut it off the vine and brought it in the house for fear it get nibbled on.

Just how can you tell when to harvest a watermelon?
Well after a bit of research along with trial and error from last season, I found the best 3 clues are:

• when you rub your hand over the watermelon you can feel the ridges and bumps
• the closest curly tendril on the vine to the watermelon turns brown
• when you thump the watermelon it sounds hollow – similar to thumping your chest (be sure to test this out multiple times with gusto – comparing the sound of thumping your chest to the sound of thumping the watermelon…especially if your watermelon patch is in the front of your house)
• ok, there’s one more…the light color patch on the watermelon where it sits on the ground will turn from cream to yellow color

Cut the watermelon off the vine – and you know you’ve got a ripe one when the cut stem starts to ooze out a pinkish red ’syrup’…welll unless you planted a yellow or orange watermelon variety.

On other fronts…

Alas, the cucumber plants are nearing their last legs so I expect a few more until I pull them out. Those vines have some sort of disease so we won’t put them into our compost bin. I don’t want to infect the compost with whatever disease is ailing the cucumbers – this would have the potential to spread the disease when I use the compost to ‘enrich’ the soil in the future.

Despite the vermin eating a lot of our kale and lettuce we should have some to harvest next week. The vermin proofing has had mixed results. The vermin seem to mostly go after the amaranth flowers and are leaving the green leafies alone…for the moment.

I did, I think, stumble upon a great natural aphid spray. The vermin vinaigrette I sprayed on all the kale seemed to get rid of all the aphids! The kale is looking as beautiful and green as ever since the spray Well, as well as now growing in totally rehabilitated enriched soil!

We have a big weekend ahead getting some of our mobile pots planted.

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Today, I got a chance to help out the many busy pollinators out there in the garden. We planted watermelon vines both in the front garden where we planted them with success last year and in the back since I had an extra seedling.

This morning I noticed an open female flower on the back vine but not a male flower in sight! What’s up with that? All dolled up for the Ball but no date!

You see, in order for the female flower to mature into a fruit it needs to be pollinated by a male flower. That’s where the birds and the bees and other pollinators come in – they fly around, gather pollen grains from male flowers and buzz into a female flower looking for more pollen and as a result fertilize the fruiting body of the female flower.

Interestingly, each seed that you find in say, a watermelon, is represented in the flower’s ovary (yes, flowers have them parts too.) Each ovule needs a pollen grain to mature into a seed. So that’s a good amount of pollen grains since there are many seeds in most veggies and fruit. If only a few seeds are fertilized then the fruit will likely shrivel up and die (sniffle) or if all the seeds aren’t fertilized you may end up with a misshapen veggie or fruit.

Most flowers then, need multiple visits from our pollinator friends. One gauge of how large and diverse your pollinator population could be your rate of unfertilized female flowers and oddly shaped veggies.

As hard as all those busy pollinators are buzzing from flower to flower doing their thing – I had doubts that they would make a special trip out front to find the appropriate pollen for our potential watermelon.

Matchmaker, matchmaker…

So I got the buzz on and beelined to the front in hopes of finding a nice date for our lonely female flower.

I found a nice specimen bursting with pollen and carefully plucked it off the vine.

After I made the trip to the back, I carefully peeled away the petals to expose the stamen.

Then I gently brushed the stamen to the center of the female flower where the ovules are located – making sure I got as much pollen in there as I could.

That’s it! Hopefully she got fertilized and we will be enjoying a nice Sugar Baby watermelon in a month or so.

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Back on July 2, Patti noted that our watermelon plant was quite small. We’ve had a few hot spells since then which resulted in our first watermelon. Here it is next to a tennis ball. There are a few other tiny ones on the vine but much depends on whether we will get the required hot weather – melons grow best in hot sunny weather.

Last year, we grew a seeded variety – from two vines we got about 8 watermelons with the largest weighing in at 37 pounds…we had a lot of watermelon!

Most folks agree that seeded melons have more flavor; nevertheless, the watermelon variety we chose this year is the seedless Sugar Baby. We wanted a smaller melon and the convenience of seedless. We’ll see which we like better.

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Perhaps you know the saying “Knee high by the 4th of July”. That’s what they say about corn.

This is a picture of our watermelon plant less than 48 hours before the 4th and it’s not looking very promising. It hasn’t been great weather for hot loving plants.

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