Hi, vgkg. I wouldn't think that disease would be limited to the north. I believe that fusarium wilt was first identified in South Carolina or somewhere like that in the 1880s. Anyway, What I have observed is that watermelons and cantaloupes do splendidly well the first two years in a new location if well cared for. Then the next year they just don't thrive as well and cannot seem to finish up the fruits with full flavor and vigor. The next year some of the plants die suddenly of classic fusarium wilt about the time the fruits set on. Then what I have had happen is the next year the watermelons do splendidly until the fruits are 2/3 grown and whammy, the whole patch wilts in unison on a hot day. They recover at night , but every hot day they grow worse until most of them die. A few regrow from the center, but are too late to finish good sized fruits. Purdue calls this Mature Vine Decline [Sudden Wilt]. I didn't have that problem in the old melon patches last year, but a new problem that looked nothing like any pictures of melon diseases. The melons again grew splendidly until the fruits were well along. Then one plant on the end got yellow leaves in the center. Further out on the vines the leaves were mottled yellow and green. This developed until the leaves fell off. Then a neighbor plant got it and then the next one got it until one by one the whole row had it. This happened in all three locations. I belatedly used a fungicide Anyway, most of the plants recovered and started a whole new growth from the center and set on more fruits and were extra healthy. In my new location the melons were exceptional in size and number...see not diseased. Some commercial growers fumigate to get them through the season. I cannot do that. Even the big growers have all the fungals they want and more and they watch and spray like a hawk.

okay, sorry for my obvious lck of knowledge here but I have a few more questions. My beds are 4' wide by 16' long. The plants are now about 10 (or more) wide by 18' long. They are growing among the grass in the field now because they outgrew the beds so quickly. I planted 2 "hills" of "million bucks" watermelon and 1 hill of "orange sunshine". In another bed I planted 4 hills- 1 each of "honey bun", "ambrosia" muskmelons and 1 charentais and 1 honey dew. I thought the honey bun muskmelon would be great since they are "personal size" but every one of them has rotted on the vine. Next to them is the honeydew which is having the problems I mentioned earlier. The charentais and the ambrosia are doing fine. The million bucks watermelon is also doing fine but the orange sunshine watermelon is NOT orange and it is NOT seedless. Could this be because it has cross pollinated with the million bucks instead of the pollinator seed that was included in the pack? This begs another question. The pack mentioned that there were 2 types of seeds in the orange sunshine pack but I could not tell the difference between them at all. How will I know for next time and, will the pollinator melons have seeds? (maybe this is the one I picked??) How can you tell them apart or will the varieties be different enough that you will know? I took a bunch to my husbands work (that is where we are selling everything) and a lot of people were asking if I had seedless so I really think that I will have to focus on that next year. I probably could have sold 2 seedless for every 1 that I sold on Friday. I have to go now but I have more questions to ask later...

Pam, Ever since the year I was visited at/near the fenced garden by 2 different cougars (the second one was smaller than the first, so obviously wasn't the same one) about six weeks apart, I have tried to remember every morning to take a gun out to the garden with me. I haven't seen a cougar on our near our property since then, but neighbors have spotted them on their property and on ours, so even thoug it is an uncommon occurrence, the fact that it occurred at all has made me much more cautious. Those two occurrences were not my first encounters with cougars, but they were the first ones that were so close, and certainly the first time they were in our yard while a human was out there. The majority of our wildlife issues come from venomous snakes, coons (which prey upon chickens like mad), skunks, bobcats and coyotes. We see lots of other wildlife, but they generally steer clear of us. The foxes, for example, seem shy and not especially happy to be seen so they'll run away when they see us. We hear feral pigs more than we see them, though we have had them on our property occasionally. We live in a bend of the Red River near the TX border with Texas to our west, south and east. There is a lot of wild, river bottom land, on those three sides of us and some of the bottom land is Wildlife Management Area, so there is a huge amount of wildlife here. I expected wildlife before we moved here. What we got is wildlife, wildlife, wildlife, wildlife, wildlife. For example, I knew ringtail cats existed but never had seen them in the wild until we moved here. I don't see them often, and when I do, I'm not happy to see them because they're generally trying to get into the chicken run or chicken coop, but I'm still always just amazed to see them. Last year, we got almost 79" of rain and had repeatedly flooding over and over again. The Red River even swept away a few homes that had been near it for over 50 years and never had been flooded before. The river bottom lands were flooded for months. Consequently, the wildlife was driven to higher ground.....and guess where we live? On the higher ground they were seeking. We had so many snakes, and so many huge ones much larger than what we normally see, especially broad-banded copperheads (so I am guessing they really stay in the bottom lands most of the time). I am hoping for a more normal year this year, but doubt we will get it. We had snakes out in January and February, which is incredibly rare, because we just weren't cold enough. I've already had enough snake encounters this year to make me a nervous wreck. Living here would be just about perfect if we didn't have all the venomous snakes. Being visited by a skunk, a possum and a stray dog in broad daylight all within a few hours, was disconcerting to say the least. Days like that are why I am exceptionally careful to close and latch the garden gate behind me. I don't want to be trapped in a garden with an 8' tall fence and with wildlife that might be dangerous. It also is the reason our two separate fenced gardens have two gates each---a main gate that gets used daily and a back gate on the opposite side of the garden in case something comes in the main gate and a person needs to escape quickly from the garden to avoid it. Normally, we assume all skunks out in broad daylight are rabid and shoot them, but if I had shot that one, the garden and I would have smelled strongly of skunk for days. I don't like shooting one so close to the house if we can just follow it 50 or 100 yards and shoot it. I hate to shoot possums, so was relieved when this one ran off. Possums are predators of venomous snakes, so I try to just leave them alone when they are out. It had been a rainy night for two consecutive nights, so I felt like maybe they were hunting for food because of those two rainy nights/days. Stray dogs are, sadly, a dime a dozen here as people commonly dump them in the country all the time. Most stray dogs form packs and begin preying upon foals, calves, kids, etc. and then the ranchers shoot them. Everyone who lives around us has taken in more dogs than they need or want, but we all could have 100 times the number we do have because so many sorry excuses for human beings dump them all the time. The same is true of feral cats, but feral cats prey more upon wildlife than farm and ranch animals, so people have more toleration for them and generally either ignore them or trap them and try to tame them at least enough to turn them into semi-feral barn cats. One surprising benefit of bird netting, by the way, is that apparently snakes cannot see it well or they think they can squeeze through it. We've caught quite a few copperheads that way, though not on purpose. I'd rather the copperhead get hung up in the bird netting before it can bite a person. Last year, as our adult son was bending over to open one of the barn's roll-up doors, a copperhead struck at him, but it got entangled in a piece of bird netting I had left drying on the pavement there, so the snake couldn't reach him, thank goodness. So, while I've never put up bird netting on purpose to catch snakes or to keep them out of certain places, it is a sort of beneficial side effect of using the netting. We wanted to live surrounded by nature. It is one of the reasons we moved to the country. It still is one of the things we love most about living here, but all wildlife is not created equal. I can sit and watch cottontails hop around in the yard or pastures endlessly. Coyotes? Not so much. Dawn

A lot depends on what our weather does. Most years my watermelons last a bit more deeply into fall than muskmelons, true cantaloupes and other miscellaneous melons do. Once the temperatures drop substantially and the daylength is a littler shorter every day, the melons slow down in growth and can take a longer time to mature. However, they will eventually mature. I am about to take out my muskmelon plants and watermelon plants in the front garden so I can clean up that bed, but I'm going to let the watermelon plants out back go on for as long as they can. Last year we harvested a couple dozen watermelons in October and November, and the flavor was fine but the melons were, for the most part, smaller than fruit on the same vines had been back in the summer months. I just leave the plants alone and let them do their thing. I don't cover them up on cold nights, I don't pinch off blossoms and I don't tip-prune. Our average last frost date is in mid-November, but sometimes the first frost hits in latest September and sometimes not until mid-December, so I'd rather let the plants go on producing for as long as Mother Nature will allow. I missed a couple of melons last year when I harvested the last of them on the day before the first freeze was expected to occur that night, and I didn't find them until 3 or 4 weeks after the first freeze. By the time I found the melons buried under a lot of dead, brown foliage, they'd been exposed to overnight lows as low as 18 degrees and I was surprised they weren't rotting. One wasn't any good. It was smaller and likely was a long way from maturing when the freeze hit. The other one was large and probably was completely mature when we froze, and its very thick rind protected the flesh inside (which surprised me). It was very tasty, but not quite as tasty as summer melons from the same plant that matured in much hotter weather. So, even if your melon has time to reach its mature size and to ripen fully on the vine, the flavor might not be as good as you remember because it matured under cooler conditions. You could try to keep the melons warmer by putting a low tunnel (PVC or EMT hoops covered with clear plastic) over them, but be aware that if you do that, you have to watch them closely because the greenhouse effect can roast the plants to death, and a lack of air flow can encourage fungal diseases. If I was going to to that, I'd probably pull the plastic back off the hoops during the day and pull it back over the hoops in late afternoon to hold in the heat during the night. And, I'd make the hoops go a foot or two above the top of the trellis. If your clear plastic is too close to the plants even in cool autumn weather, they plants can get too hot and be damaged or even killed. My garden does pay for itself most years. I generally can about 600 pints of food and fill up 2 or 3 deep freezes, and then have onions, garlic, potatoes, carrots, sweet potatoes and winter squash in dry storage for the winter months. However, it also costs more money to process and store more food, so the longer the garden is producing heavily, the more money it costs us in terms of processing and storing the excess part of the harvest that we cannot eat fresh. It has taken me many years, though, to arrive at the point where I feel like the garden does pay for itself......and, even if it didn't, I'd have a big garden anyway. I don't garden just as a way to save money in the food budget. I do it because I enjoy it (and I have about 100 other reasons) and I like knowing how our food was grown (as naturally as possible) and I enjoy sharing the produce with our friends and family. Even though I put up a lot of the harvest to eat later on, my favorite thing to do is to eat fresh from the garden in season. You know, when asparagus is in season, I'd never go to the store and buy vast quantities of it so we could eat it once or twice a day for weeks on end, but when it is coming from our own garden, we do eat it once or twice a day for weeks on end. It is the same thing with everything else---something like melons could be on the menu once or twice a week if we didn't have a garden. With a garden? They can be on the menu daily at the height of the season, and often I have enough to share. I often feed the chickens a melon of their own in very hot weather, and sometimes slice one up for the deer as well. A large and highly productive garden lets you do things with food that you wouldn't do if you were paying grocery store prices for that food. Tim wouldn't be happy with me if I went to the grocery store and bought a melon for the chickens!