Crimson Sweet has done well for me in my area. I used to grow sugar baby but found the larger ones did just as well and I preferred their flavor. What I usually do is save seeds when i get a really good watermelon, then plant them in the garden about a week before the last frost date so they don't come up and get frozen (never been successful transplanting a watermelon plant). The watermelon usually ripen in September. Getting a little past the warm season for eating watermelon, but I still eat a LOT of melon in late Sept. and October. Currently I have a grey stripe like a Charleston Gray (variety unknown, just saved seeds I've been growing for 15 years or so now). They get to 20-25 lbs typically, sometimes over 30. Also a nice big, round, green-white stripe saved from a melon grown in Hermiston, Oregon that ended up in the grocery store a few years ago. Last year a couple of them grew to 30-35 lbs. Watermelon do like it warm, so plant them on the south side of a building or a protected area where they get full sun. They also don't like being too wet and want to dry out a bit between waterings.

Lol, this so many wonderful selections I'm having a hard time picking! I found a 3 gallon America rose at a private nursery, I remembered the name from this thread and it was the only fragrant rose in the lot, so I went for it. It has a lovely salmon pink color that turned out to be a great compromise between the decking and white building. The clematis Perle d' Azur is trained up the wall and the rose went in front of it next to a Clematis Arabella intended to scramble trough the border. What surprised me was how much clay I found about 2 feet down while back digging the bed. I dunked two bags of mushroom compost and mixed it up with two bags of fine gravel and one bag of sand but I'm kind of worried about what will happen to the root a few years down the line? Any predictions? Is this enough amending ? I left the hose on to soak the bush, a small trickle for about 45 mins, and when the bed was over flowing I turned it off and it took about 25 mins for the standing water to drain away. This was after I had replaced about 8'x2'x2' of the old dirt. Anybody with more experience who can give me more insight on how this will play in to it's health? There's a few spots on the leaves that I suspect is the dreaded blackspot. I live inland, due west of Chicago, so not exactly coastal climate but still lots of humidity in the summer. I made sure to clear about a foot between plant and wall and also at some distance from where another rosebush been before, I cleared about 2 feet from the original site but I essentially replaced all the dirt as well. I made sure of sinking the bush level with the dirt in the pot per instructions. As far as I could discern, it's not a grafted plant, I felt up the trunk all the way down the to the ball of dirt and felt no bump. I'm very drawn to the Romantica and English roses and am interested to learn more about the two series, My new Colette is coming in this weekend with a Stormy weather who's supposedly a purple rose. These will be my trial experience before I commit to a full rose garden. I understand ramblers only bloom once, no? How do I know the difference between a rambler and a climber? What is the difference between a Grandiflora and a Wicheriiana? My roses must be of the resilient kind and besides generous amounts of mushroom compost and a good trellis will have to fend for themselves. No spray, no chemicals. I'm staying clear of any grafted stock and no Tea roses. What would be the best US purveyors of either the Romantica or the English series? Is it possible to buy rootstock older than a year trough mail order? Also, can anyone advice me on good online sources for reading up on the different categories ? I'd like to hear from someone who grows the Zepherine Drouhin, Queen of Sweden, or the Polka in zone 5. My priorities are as follows: Repeat bloom, disease resistance, fragrance, cut life, color... God bless and thank you! Kerstin

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.

Good to know. My prior experience with melons was at my home garden using various methods and locations, I'd get a little to no vine growth until 6 weeks later, followed by a golf ball sized melon mid July, and a softball sized melon by August. Then it would become cooler and I'd have a pink immature excuse for a melon in Sept. Growing at the community garden in sandy soil, in full sun, planted early has been a huge difference. I just need to figure out what my problem is at my home garden.