Just thought I'd post a quick follow-up. I actually got some ripe melons this year. Most of them were tiny though. Maybe i planted too many close together. Oh, well. It was still fun. It's been hard to identify which ones did the best, since i planted them all landrace style (And hoping for some to cross). Anyway, the best red variety goes to Blacktail Mountian by far. I had a few other reds, but i don't know what varieties. Some of the reds seemed like they were struggling to ripen though too. Whats surprising is that i got quite a few yellow ones. And i'm not sure if it was my imagination or not, but the yellow ones seem to be able to ripen much easier than the reds. Plus they tasted better. I had three different yellow varieties (because they all had different sized and colored seeds). Yellow-Doll is a strong possibility. Hopi Yellow is another. Tohono O'odham Yellow Meated? Desert King? (i dont think i saw any Desert King based on pictures of the rind, but who knows) Maybe even Orangelo, but i only saw yellow, not orange. The worst melon was "Malali" (or possibly "Osh Kirgizia", but i think it was "Malali". It was a splitter! Not only that, but they kept splitting way before they were ripe! It had very distinctive pattern on rind. Very round. Will not grow this type again. Still if i had to recommend two varieties for Northern or Colorado gardens, they would be Blacktail Mountain and Yellow Doll. (i still suspect the yellows ripen better).

I used to grow Early Canada (the regular one, not the "improved" one... it was about 30 years ago) when I lived near Ottawa, ON (zone 5). It was an iffy crop there -- if it was a long hot summer I would get quite a few to ripen but if it was a cold summer I would get few, maybe none to ripen. And if they weren't ripe by early September, they were never going to ripen (as fruitnut points out about ripening temperature). They never got to 10-15 lbs. Five or 6 lbs was probably average. I don't know if the improved ones are bigger, earlier, or both. Try to make it as warm as possible for them, and good luck.

Dale, I am truly sorry to hear that man's best friend sort of went nuts and failed to mind his manners. I hope you get some more melons and tomatoes from those plants. There must be something about canines and melons, because here in the boondocks, coyotes devour melons like mad and don't even wait for the melons to get close to being ripe. Fred has lost practically all his melons at the old home place to coyotes the last few years, and he used to plant dozens and dozens of plants. I think he's given up on raising melons out there any more, and it is a shame because the old home place has great sandy soil along the Red River. Most of my dogs don't eat tomatoes, but they're fenced out of the garden anyway. Since we have hard clay soil, they can't dig under the fence although they certainly have run amok in the garden when I have forgotten and left the gate open. (A mistake you only make a couple of times before you learn that your garden pays the price for a gate left open.) Do you think your dog was playing or was thirsty? Maybe he or she had knocked over the water dish and sought out the fruit for the water content? Maybe the dog wanted to play ball? My dogs grow their own gourds and pumpkins on the dogyard fence and randomly pull them and play with them whenever the mood strikes, so they don't necessarily get a lot of gourds or pumpkins to full maturity, but they have fun. The stink bugs are atrocious this year. Between them and the grasshoppers, it is a wonder I have a garden left. I haven't had SVBs this year, but have squash bugs, the aforementioned stink bugs (they arrived in May again which is abnormally early), and leaf-footed bugs. You know, pelting the dog with tomatoes might not be a bad idea. Here in our area, when a country dog kills a family chicken, some people tie the dead chicken carcass to the dog's collar and leave it there a couple of days so the dog has to smell that decaying corpse. They claim it teaches the dog a lesson, but uggh, I don't think I could do it. Luckily, our dogs aren't bird killers. Every year we have different gardening challenges, and some years are more challenging than others. You still have plenty of time to get lots more tomatoes and other veggies since the average frost date for your area is....what....about early November? Every winter, I start out the year with such high hopes for the garden, and then it is always a struggle all spring and summer to try to make the dream a reality. If it isn't the weather, it is the pests, or the deer or the rabbits or.....whatever disease is most active that year. What keeps us all going? Probably that old saying "there's always next year". Since we've lived here, every animal known to mankind has attempted to destroy my garden, though thankfully not all in the same year. As soon as I figure out how to exclude one type of wildlife, another one figures out how to get into the garden. I've seen animals in/around my garden that I never knew existed....until we moved here, I didn't know that there was such a thing as a ring-tailed cat. (That particular wild critter likes to eat our young poultry.) I'd never expected to have a beaver killing our trees, or a cougar hanging out at the edge of the garden, or skunks digging up sunflowers or turtles eating tomatoes. It is always something......and I didn't know that deer ignore those lists of "plants that deer won't eat" and eat them anyway. Recently, I noticed 1 lone pigweed plant in the corner of the potato bed. I kept meaning to dig it up or cut it down---seems like it zoomed from 6" tall to 5' tall in about a week.....but before I got around to it, a deer ate it. Ha! At least the deer are good for something. I think I grew okra here for 5 years before I ever got a pod because the deer would jump the then-three-foot-tall garden fence and eat every plant down to the ground at some point during the season. All that's ever worked for me is the 7' tall fence we have now, and it only works if I remember to always close both gates. One reason I haven't expanded the garden more and more every year is because it means moving the 7' tall fence or errecting another one. I have friends who garden in towns, both large cities and small towns, and they often find fruit missing from their plants, or sometimes entire plants gone, and believe it is two-legged critters stealing their fruit and veggies, flowers and herbs. So, I guess a garden is never truly 'safe'. Hopefully the second half of this gardening year will turn out better than the first. Or, as I always say, there's always next year..... Dawn

keen101, > Make sure all chance of frost has passed and that the soil has warmed to around 65 degrees. If the soil is cooler than that, it will affect the germination rate of the seeds. I noticed that if it's too cool when they're planted, fewer (if any) seeds sprout, even when it warms up afterward (although somehow seeds can overwinter and still sprout), when it comes to direct-seeding anyhow. Germination in my unheated greenhouse is great for most varieties, as long as it's not too low below freezing outside for the nightly lows. Watermelon generally germinates better than just about anything in the greenhouse (same for okra). I don't start my seeds indoors anymore. I start them in a 6'x5'x3' Strong Camel greenhouse and then transplant them in the spring. My area isn't as cold as most parts of Idaho in the growing season. We get about four months of hot weather (the last part of May, all of June, July, and August, and maybe half of September are generally quite hot and very dry, especially from late June to mid August, sans when we have thunderstorms in early August or so; early May and late September or onward are generally cooler, and sometimes rainy, though; the frost-free growing season is generally from about May 10th to October 10th, but it varies, of course). Things like Armenian cucumbers, and muskmelons, which love the heat do very well here. I don't have problems germinating watermelons, as long as it's warm enough when I direct-seed them. Direct-seeding can work, here, but I seem to get much better results (as in larger fruit) if the plants are a certain maturity before I transplant them (even if I have to transplant them late). The plants get plenty of light in the greenhouse. We get a lot of sun in my region, if there's no shade. Cold and other outdoor conditions can indeed damage young watermelons. I do believe they should probably be transplanted later than tomatoes (although I need to test that in more contexts). I think it's more due to the fact that they're young than that it's cold, though, but cold seems like it's probably a factor, if not a big factor. Watermelon leaves seem to prefer the kind of light they grew with. If you change that light, it seems to stunt the plant to a degree. This probably isn't going to be a noticeable issue with young plants, since I think young leaves are adaptable, but once they get to a certain size, it seems to be a major issue. I have a hypothesis that removing old leaves (not on young seedlings, but on older plants) can help them quite a bit (and can get around the issues people have with starting watermelons too early, wherein they think it's a taproot issue instead). I plan to test that, this year. I probably won't transplant any watermelons until the end of May or so, this year (in previous years, I tried to do it as soon as possible under milk jugs—I think it's probably a better idea just to wait until milk jugs aren't necessary, even though it seems like you're losing time. Fortunately, we have lots of pollinators here. Our neighbors have beehives. I don't see many at all on the tomatoes, but they seem to like the Russian Sage, cantaloupes, sunflowers, squash, and stuff. They're often on the watermelon, too. I don't know that we have issues with few fruits getting pollinated (although we could probably get more), but some watermelons seem to have incomplete pollination, especially if they're first-year watermelons. I mean, the seeds on the blossom end are often not developed. This can result in smaller, less tasty, fruits. Acclimatization seems to help avoid this, whether or not fruits get larger in following years. I'm not sure that it's the fault of the pollinators; it might be something about the climate. With the exception of Red-seeded Citron and maybe Sugar Baby, I've actually had *much* better results if I water watermelons with an oscillating sprinkler or a shower nozzle than if I just water at the base of the plant. It's interesting how results differ. My main challenges with watermelon have been these: * Fruit size tends to be smaller more often * Spider mites (they're everywhere, I've pretty much resigned myself to adapting the plants to deal with them) * Foliar anthracnose and/or alternaria (theseseem to go hand in hand with the spider mites) * Weeds (particularly tall, weedy grasses) I didn't know you were in more similar circumstances, living in the city limits. I guess I assumed there! Sorry. That's cool. I planted the tomatoes about a foot apart when I did about 105 varieties in 2017. I didn't cage any of them. I made sure to separate the smaller plants I knew about from those that would smother them (due to lots of smothering experience in 2015 and 2016). I had them in a long strip of land instead of something closer to a square-shaped piece of land as I had done with about a hundred varieties in 2016 spaced somewhat further apart (and the long strip made for a better and easier harvest, I think, since more plants were on the border, without tomatoes on all sides). I had watermelons, muskmelons, okra, and a few other things in the square-shaped piece of land in 2017. I'll probably put at least tomatoes and other stuff there, this year, and watermelons in a new spot that hasn't been gardened on much, if at all, before. I'm pretty good at making things fit (not just with plants), if I'm allowed to do it. If it were up to me, I'd want to line the western fence in the backyard with 18-gallon moving totes for plant containers, since mostly just weeds grow there anyway. Stuff I've tried growing in the ground directly next to the fence tends to be smaller than usual. I could probably fit 50-60 of them there, all in a line, and lay a drip irrigation hose over them or something. I could grow a lot of peppers. But, that's me dreaming. I'm not the only one who lives here, and I'm not allowed to do whatever I want, even though I've managed to do some pretty interesting (IMO) things. If I had a big field, and could manage to water it, I'd probably grow tens of thousands of watermelon/muskmelon plants and literally every tomato variety I could find, at least three times (including F2+ hybrids). I'd probably let all the tomatoes reseed, too, as well as plant more, both saved and otherwise, the next year. I really wonder what would have happened had I encouraged all the volunteers these last two years instead of trying to pull them up. They were growing like weeds. I was pulling them up most of the season, last year. They were pretty easy to pull up, but there were lots of them, and they kept coming. I eventually stopped, and some of them set fruit. Letting loads of varieties reseed sounds like it could make for some interesting breeding over time. If I were just breeding, rather than trying to get a harvest, I'd probably direct-seed a lot of them, too, for some reasons.