Sunday, August 15, 2010

I'm Finally Getting Melons!!

Anyone who knows me, knows how funny that title is, but the reality is, I've never successfully grown melons.  HA!  That's funny, too.  Seriously, folks, (because you know I'm always serious), this year the melon patch is doing really well. (From here on I will refer to the melon patch, not melons).
"What did you plant," you ask.  I have no idea.  Well, let me clarify.  I know I planted a type of cantaloupe (orange fleshed) and a type of watermelon.  I just don't know the variety.  I'm guessing Muskmelon or Crenshaw cantaloupes and Sugar Bush or Sugar Baby seedless watermelon.  The fun thing is that they will be coming in toward the end of August, maybe middle of September, way after all the others are done.  Maybe any cool nights will make them extra sweet, who knows?  

The only other time I did have mild success with a melon patch was also the year I had a very successful groundhog.  He was extremely good at assessing the ripeness of a cantaloupe which proved to be his favorite thing in my garden.  I was growing a French variety.  (Oui, oui, hunh, hunh)  I would look at the cantaloupe and smell it and say, "One more day and you should be just right" or "Two more days", etc.  Well, Mr. Groundhog was obviously trying to be helpful and just wanted to teach me how to judge a melon's ripeness.  Sure enough, the next day, I would find the carnage in my melon patch.  Usually there would be a half eaten or mostly eaten cantaloupe either still in the patch or right by the gate.  He was crawling under the gate to enter and exit, so I imagined him dropping the melon in a mad dash to escape.  Either that, or he was full, considering he was also eating beans that year.  And by eating beans, I mean he started out with groundhog ADD and ate the bottom half of each bean and then he just mowed the plants down.

I'll take a whole herd of deer over one groundhog. The one time a buck jumped the fence, he only ate a cucumber.  Thankfully, I have a nice fence apron buried down in the ground about two feet and it goes out another four feet or so, so they're discouraged and I have a board buried in front of my gate, so they can't dig under it.  I have my fingers crossed that they won't climb the fence because they can climb.

In the meantime, it's cucumber heaven out there and would be squash heaven if it weren't for the squash bugs (an evil variant of the stink bug) and the worm vine borers.  If you have any leaves just wilt and fall or break off, you've got worm borers.  No real solution.  I used my last organic resort last night.  After finding a dead bumblebee in my cucumbers I worried that it was from the spinosid I sprayed the night before.  I tried to keep it off the blooms and fruits, but it's really hard to do that when the bugs you're trying to eradicate are in that spot.  Also, squash and cucumber blooms close up at night, so I thought they were safe.  I always wait until I don't see any bees buzzing around.  So last night I just did some direct spraying of the bugs with some Espoma Earth Tone.  It contains pyrethrums, an extract of chrysanthemums, but also has canola oil which smothers eggs. I use this only as a last resort because it effects the nervous systems of bugs and I worry about the beneficials getting hit.

If anyone has some suggestions for how to use all these cucumbers, let me know!

Thanks! Happy Gardening!

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