Cantaloupe X Honeydew. Possible? How?

atillathepun

18 years ago

Thanks for any responses! Just curious about the viability of this cross and the mechanism for doing so.

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Comments (4)

Pierre_R
18 years ago
Quite easy: just plant aside one each and let the bees do it. Many/most seeds will be hybrid. Melons are preferential outbreeders. Some melon vars are dioceous others monoceous that is the female flowers of the former do not have stamens. Both have male flower with stamens and no fonctional pistil.
Hybrids are intermediate in fruit characters and do not breed true.
There are some fixed vars with these intermediate characters.
carolync1
18 years ago
It seems to me that all the melon varieties I have been interested in cross-breeding have monoclinous (perfect) flowers plus male flowers. Sounds fun to try if one can still get a good percentage of hybrid seeds when the female parent has perfect flowers, without doing whatever they need to do to get 100% (or close to it) hybrid seed commercially. I have no experience with this.

I expect that the percentage of hybrid seeds would go up where the female parent had no stamens in the female flowers. Am I right?
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And, well, frankly IMHO, any canteloupe or muskmelon that doesn't thrive, really thrive, and make full sized, quality fruit with appropriate netting, ribbing, etc. for its variety generally isn't going to have a good flavor. The smaller, scrubbier, and worse the plant and fruit, the more likely it will have poor flavor, sometimes cucumber-like, and often not sweet.
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Jay, We have grown cucumbers, canteloupe, and watermelons on trellises for the last 5 years. We grow pickling cucumbers, they perform better on the trellis than on the ground IMHO. Get more than we can use every year, they get large too and are quite prolific. Sometimes they grow thru the fence and make entertaining shapes. They definitely don't need netting. The canteloupe did splendidly the first year. We had the same experience as Hagen. We grew a 12 foot row with trellising 4 feet high and yielded about 20 or so decent sized melons, some quite large. Not sure of the variety. But since then, the vine collapses before the fruit can size up, same with the watermelons. Makes me sick every year. I can't wait to make some of that canteloupe sorbet from a fresh melon. I've been told we are having a problem with some sort of pest that feeds off the sap in the vines causing the collapse. I think we will need to resort to some sort of "unorganic" rescue powder. Blah. Good luck with your trellising. We won't grow these space hogs on the ground ever again. Congrats on the excellent netting resource and thanks for the ideas. Happy holidays.
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Comments (2)
Thanks for the reply. I did, after posting, do a little more reading on the summer squash and realized those were bush plants. I'm trying those in 7gal containers outside the bed, leaving the bed only for vining plants that I can train up a trellis. I settled on a smaller number of plants, but it does still include two large pumpkins and another winter squash. From what I've read, I can prune the growing tip off of the vines if they get too long and the result might be smaller pumpkins, but that's fine with me -- I'm not trying to win any competitions. I've also got a watermelon and two muskmelons in there. Just because I had extra seedlings, I added a tomato plant, a bell pepper, and some herbs, all of which I'm willing to sacrifice if things get too crowded. I may even put in some bush beans, since this should grow quickly while everything else is still getting going, and I can probably harvest them before it's too crowded. I guess I'll see how it goes. I'm considering this bed an experiment, and if the entire bed fails, I'll have learned something.
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carolync1
12 years ago
I grew one Bidwell Casaba with three Small Persian melons last year. Of the four plants I grew out this year from the Bidwell Casaba seeds, 3 are Bidwell Casaba and one is the hybrid. The hybrid is half the size of the largest Bidwell Casaba I grew (7 pounds vs. 14 pounds), has netting similar to that of the male parent and some ridging like the female parent, but less pronounced. Both melons show a color change at maturity but do not slip.

I'm not sure why the Bidwell Casaba is called a Casaba. It is very different from the wrinkly yellow-skinned, pale-fleshed melons we normally think of as Casabas. But I think it would still be part of the inodorus group.

Both the parent varieties are long-season melons well-adapted to our hot-suumer climate. I got ripe Bidwell Casabas before the hybrid ripened, but one Bidwell was ripe on the same day as the hybrid.
farmfreedom
12 years ago
CRENSHAW MELONS are across between cantaloupes and casabas or honey dews Santa Clause and other melons can cross breed.
on rare occasions melons can crossbreed with cucumbers (but that is rare). These crosses do not include watermelons however.

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Cantaloupe X Honeydew. Possible? How?

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Pierre_R

carolync1

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carolync1

farmfreedom

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