Your question is complex. In general the seeds from seedless watermelons are not going to work well. Seedless watermelon seeds can be purchased. They are Triploid. Three sets of genes. Basically difficult to grow. But it can be done. When growing you need regular pollen from a normal watermelon to fertilize the seedless variety. They try to form seeds but they mix a triploid with a diploid. Because of this the seeds do not form. Well mostly they do not form. Also the melon around the seed stays firm. Which is good. So you saved some seeds of this triploid diploid mix. What will you get. Who knows. usually nothing because they will try to form seeds that will most likely not grow or form. But with luck who knows what you have and what you will get. It is a long shot. but you might get something. If you get some triploid pollen onto a triploid female you might wind up with seedless triploid watermelon seeds. But it is not suppose to work. Everything is suppose to die. The easy way is to buy known seeds. The experts purposely cross diploids with tetraploids to make triploids. Two triploids are not suppose to work. It is a mess with lots of sterility and death. Part of your problem is that the seeds you have were generated only HALF from Seedless watermelon. The other half of those seeds is regular diploid watermelon seeds. So you dont really have seedless watermelon seeds. You only have half of your seeds come from seedless watermelon genetics. the other half of the seed comes from unknown regular watermelon seeds used to pollenate the seedless plants. I would not bother growing the plants from seedless watermelons. Unless you have lots of acres of land to experiment with.

Tie them loosely to the trellis with twine, being sure not to tie them so tight that it cuts the stems. They'll eventually get the message and grab on by themselves. Plan to support the melons when they start forming. Rodney

Do like they said with the manure and compost, I would use cardboard I think the black plastic will get to hot in the summer the carboard acts as mulch as well keeping in moisture. What variety are you growing? Some varieties like sugar baby do not get as long as most others 8 to 12ft., however they are small melons, crimson sweet are a medium size and do really well for me but the vines can grow up to 20 ft. after fruit sets you can prune the vines, but I do not, to me more leaves mean more energy shade and sugars for the fruit, but I do thin the set fruit to two melons per vine, stay consistent with watering to much varation and the melons will crack, with four plants your side yard will soon be overtaken, try to train the vines so you have room to walk without stepping on them. When you decide if you want to thin your seedlings the best way I have found is to pinch off the one you are culling at the base, this will kill the plant without harming the roots of the other plant . I live in North Peoria and have grown some killer melons it is said that the heat here makes for sweeter melons I am not sure if that really has anything to do with it but they have been really good....Have fun!

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.