I'm growing Moon & Stars for the first time this year too. I'm a loooong way off from harvesting (mine doesn't have flowers yet.) I hope the article below helps. Also if you tap on the melon and it sounds hollow, its a sign of the melon being ripe. Scroll down the article until your reach "Harvest." Here is a link that might be useful: Growing melons

planatus does bring up a good point about the round vs oblong varieties. It seems this melon has already been crossed to plenty of other stuff. Either of you know how that works genetically? cc definitely looks like the definition of oblong to me, which makes me think oblong is the way to go, but I also love variation and making new things. IF I were to put round m&s to cc, are the results going to remotely predictable? I was mostly planning to look for the heaviest weight I could sense thats the first thing I'll be going for. Maybe down the road I'll worry about mixing taste/resistance into it, but for the first step, I just want to make big cool melons. I cant find it, but I saw some seed someone developed that made the m&s look slightly pear shaped, and I thought that might have been from crossing round to oblong, but I thought round was typically an absolute trait as opposed to something line bred. maybe there are both. I wish I had bookmarked that page. I really love the idea of making new things. Growing the same stuff as everybody else would never be good enough for my personality type. An example would be roaches. I breed them as feeders for my pet lizards. Was that good enough? NO. lol. I had to select the most colorful, and the biggest, and start side roach colonies to try and improve things. Its really ingrained in me for some reason, so as I get more and more into gardening, I'll definitely be spending my life trying to make new things and improvements every year :) I love the idea of open pollinated plants because of their variation, and am not fond of patented seeds. I'd rather be the guy making cool new things in a natural way and sharing them with others, as opposed to letting some scientist do it for me then telling me I cant play with it in future generations. Its really a big part of the fun to me, even if I have some crops fail once in awhile because of that unpredictability. for whatever reason, I feel like this line should stay red fleshed. orange/yellow look nice, but not as yummy as red. I'll worry about colors down the road if I change my mind. I'm only 32, so i have plenty of time. If I grow a 200 lb melon with bright yellow moon and stars on it in the next decade, this will be a success. I have patients ;) Although realistically, it'll probably be done by someone in the south with my seeds which would still give me much satisfaction (I'm in MI so 200lb might be out of reach until I get south). anyway, sorry about rambling on so much. I like talking plants :)

My Little Gem watermelon seeded Mem Day never germinated so in mid-June I seeded more knowing it was a long shot. They finally started growing and just recently started flowering but no fruit at all - not even pea-sized. I think it was just too cool this summer. (Edit - I did find a marble-sized watermelon today) My cantaloupe seeded Mem Day now has 2 melons on it, 1 almost ripe and the other seeded mid-June has a small green melon on it that I hope will have time to ripen before frost. It's been a bad summer for everything - I had some decent zucchini but (edit) NOT nearly as many as I should have, didn't keep up with SVB and now it's getting PM so time to pull them. I started a 2nd planting a month ago and hope to harvest off those into Oct since they're in a tunnel (and I just ordered plastic today). Cukes have to be pulled too, though the melons to the west of them look good, no PM or wilt. This post was edited by ajsmama on Tue, Aug 26, 14 at 20:45

I grew Moon and Starts for the first time last summer. It does crawl all over the place and makes mowing difficult. My vine got stunted and made one smaller size watermelon. I was worried it was ruined, but when I cut it open it was perfectly ripe and sweet. Yum. This year I am trellising my melons, but some are still growing on the ground. You can trellis some of the vine and let some on the ground if you want. I have my doubts that my melons can ever get really large in my yard.