i was to late to get Harts of gold this year from my local seed co. the best prices. so i am planting Jumbo Hales Best. last year i grew crenshaw and i had to harvest is before it was fully ripe. they turned out just find. i have a short season and so i will not grow it this year but next year i will have my own green house the JHB and the H of G are comparable. the H of G was once a standard commercial melon so it is a good producer and i really link the taste. Dean

I have grown Ambrosia cantaloupes for many years. There is not a better tasting one anywhere. One year, I decided to keep count of how many I picked off one plant. The average was 11. Since I have plenty of room, they grow no the ground, not on a trellis. I arrange the vines so I have a little footpath to walk on. When you think they are getting ripe a small push on the stem will usually let them come off, if not try again tomorrow. My neighbors love me, not unlike when I have zucchini in abundance.

Pollination is important. If you can attract bees, that will help. Or if you have a lot of patience, you can try hand pollination using a small paintbrush.

Mimi, Well, sanity prevailed and we didn't get that fourth freezer. All my freezers are full now, though, so I can't freeze much more beyond maybe a couple more gallon bags of jalapeno peppers. I don't know how this happened. It was only a good year and not a great one, and I thought only one freezer would be fully filled, but somehow, they all are. I will confess I am completely and totally exhausted and burnt out and at the point I don't want to step foot in the garden again this month nor am I really in a food preservation mood either. A great sweet potato harvest awaits though, and I am excited about that. Kassie, Ambrosia is a hybrid melon so seeds saved from it will not necessarily give you the same melons you had this year. While you can save seed from open-pollinated, stable varieties and they will (assuming they were not cross-pollinated) give you the same variety, hybrids by their nature don't work that way. Hybrids are created by crossing two (or more) parent plants to get fruit that produce hybrid seed for planting purposes. So, to get new seed for planting purposes, you have to cross those two (or more) parent plants each time to produce F-1 (first filia, or first generation) seed. Plants grown from that F-1 seed will produce seed, but it won't be F-1. It will be F-2 and may be similar to the F-1 or may not resemble it at all. So, if you save seeds from an F-1 plant, you might get great plants and fruit the next year and you might get crap and there is no way to tell in advance. I don't know if the melon you know as Sugar Melon Classic is a hybrid, but there is a melon called Classic and it is a bybrid as well so likely would not come true from seed. When you save any seed, you dry them down to very, very low moisture levels. You need to dry them long enough that you can break a seed in half between your fingers. If the seed only bends and doesn't break, it usually isn't quite dry enough. Oh, and if you had Ambrosia and it was not incredible, you either didn't have the true F-1 Ambrosia melon or had something go terribly wrong because it is one great melon and most people do not get the results from Ambrosia that you had. Dawn