This is an old question. However, I want to clarify a bit for folks who are new to growing with plastic mulch in large sheets. Dennis explianed it well. I'lI just add my four cents. Which is way too much. So here's the short version 1- Dennis is right and use big sheets 2- make round holes, they tear less. 3- pick up and store plastic away from winter UV 4- don't worry about the weeds and grass. do not till, add compost only at the holes, before putting down the plastic. Water only until the plants are established. A week or 2. No irrigation needed. Ever. Well, maybe in the SW. 5- soil is 5° cooler under black plastic in the summer (Rodale c.1985). 6- Relax, until Mid August then protect from fifty-five° I'm not kidding! The long version. I have been raising melons, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers and more, using six mil or thicker black plastic since the nineteen seventies. My parents started with ten mil (I think), which I inherited and it lasted eight years of leaving it out year round. The winter UV finally killed iit. My first suggestion is that you roll it up and store it in a dark place. I get six years or more out of six mil black. Pre-drilling with inch holes is a great idea and I'll try it at about one foot intervals. I just poke holes in puddles when they appear. His nail on a broomstick in a better idea than my method of using whatever is at hand. Why? Because plastic tears in a line. If you make a longitudinal cut, instead of a round hole or puncture, in later years it will tear more easily. So, do not make your planting holes with an "x". Make them round with scissors, or as I do. I cut both ends of a can, around four to five in diam, hold it with vise grips and heat the other end with a propane torch. Take a deep breath and psst, cut a nice round, sealed hole and put the circle in a trash bsg . For melons I use six foot diagonal spacing. Less for tomatoes, even less for peppers, eggplant, basil, etc. Plan well, because that's the configuration for years to come. I often use twenty by twenty sheets so I could just turn it each year for crop rotation. You might just slide it down the length of the garden, if north south orientation augers against turning the layout Now, its about time to plant. Clear plastic will heat up your ground before you plant. Black plastic will not. Clear plastic solarization is thought by some to disturb/ destroy the beneficial biota of you topsoil. So heat with caution and read more to find your way. That aside: in spite of the wind, lay the black plastic on the ground...no need to weed or cultivate. Drive a short stake into the center of each hole. Pick up the plastic and prepare the area at each stake as you wish. I try to remove a half bushel or more of soil to my compost and fill each hole with a compost soil mix. Replace the plastic. Batten down the edges with soil, stones boards, etc. Plant and water individually, as needed for a week or two. Then forget about it. You may need to weed three inches on all sides of each plant. You will not need irrigation. You have stopped evaporation. The ground in most regions is wet when you plant. It will stay perfectly moist all summer. I have had a few six week periods of eighty to a hundred degrees and no rain w/o water stress. Rodale tested mulches sometime in the eighties and determined that six mil black plastic kept the soil five degrees cooler than bare soil. For me the major problem with melon production is that i crowd them. So stepping on the vines as I pick and some mildew. I do not lift the melons off the plastic, but puncture a puddle occupied by a melon. Bigger still is that after over thirty years, I cannot tell if a watermelon is ripe. Beware the heartbreak of late collapse in canteloupes! Fifty-five degrees will make you cry in the August dawn. Get some cover material and get out there on that cool evening, when the clouds go away. A few nights later,you can relax until fall. That's for Western Oregon, Wash, Penna, and the garden state. In NH prepare to keep the patch above fifty- five. Sorry about the length... I just love eating melons!

My PPM has been running between 13,000 and 15,000. PH staying right at 5.8. Some of my plants took a beating in the last few days of wind. I still think the cucumbers are still growing very slowly. Tomato plants are doing great. Corn seem to be slowing down even though there are there are about 3 ears on each stalk. Small i think too. Green Onions, Basil, Camomile, Strawberries seem to be getting sweeter, Spinach is starting to bud, but is still delicious. Caught a Caterpillar eating the Dill and brought him inside. However he only seems to eat Dill. Tried Broccoli leaves and he turned his nose up at it. However i went out this evening to pick a crown and something had eaten the top off. The White and Red Onions roots are growing and i have taken out all the clay pebbles so that it has room to grow. I should have done his earlier for the garlic as some of them stayed a little wet under the clay pebbles. All the peppers have bloomed and are producing as well. Not sure if i missed anything but will post a few pics. Here is a link that might be useful: Garden Video

Hi Bruce, Welcome to the forum. We have a great time here and all of us learn a great deal from one another. It's quite simple really. In a hill, you start with 4 to 6 sprouts, let's say, and they all are competing with one another for water and nutrients. As you thin the plants and keep only the 3 plants...and then thin to 2, they still are competing for whatever their roots can pull up out of the soil. Since you leave 2 plants in a hill, the competition for nutrients and water never really stops so the two plants will tend to be ever so slightly less productive than a single plant on one hill would be. When you plant single plants in single rows, they do not have to compete with any other plant from Day 1, and really they do not have to compete for a long time.....not until their massive roots are competing with the massive roots from the next closest plants. However, because Squash Vine Borers are so good at taking out plants, it is smart to plant 2 plants together using your in-row spacing so that you'll end up with at least 1. When I do in-row spacing (which I did this year), I don't remove the second plant until I have blooms forming. As far as whether to plant on hills or not, in our climate it is mostly a matter of soil drainage that should drive your decision. --If you have well-drained soil, you should get equal production from plants on hills or in rows. --If you have heavy, slow-draining clay soil, you'll likely get better growth and production from plants on hills, assuming you loosened up the hilled-up soil and amended it with compost or other organic material. Even if the soil is not improved, though, you'll still get better drainage from a hill. In colder climates than ours where the soil stays very cold much later in the spring, the gardeners "need" to hill up the soil because it will warm up faster and that helps get their plants off to a good start. They also usually cover the garden beds with black plastic several weeks before their plant-out date in order to warm up soil, and also start seeds inside and transplant out, so they can start with 2 to 3 week transplants and get "ahead" that way too. In general, gardeners in colder parts of the country have temperature issues in the spring and fall that make it difficult to ripen squash and melons that have long days-to-maturity. For example, if you're in a zone where the last spring freeze falls around Memorial Day, and the first autumn freeze occurs in September, you have to push your melons and squash hard to get edible melons and squash from them. So, planting on a raised mound (hill) gives you slightly warmer soil and that gets you earlier sprouts. I've grown melons and squash both ways. I tended to use hills when my current garden was "young" and the soil (which started out as thick, dense Red River clay) was not as well-amended and, therefore, drained more slowly. Now that we're in our 11th year here, the top 8-10" of our formerly red clay soil is a brown loamy soil that does drain well, so I tend to go with in-row planting. And, I haven't even addressed what I'd do if I had very, very, very fast-draining sandy soil or sandy loam soil in a hot climate. If that were the case, I'd probably do waffle beds to help retain water and reduce wind and slow down moisture loss. I hope that answered your question. With any veggie I grow, I tend to experiment with growing it several different ways, and then "permanently" use whichever method worked best for me. What works best for one person is not always what works best for other people----so much depends on your soil type and climate. Some people on this forum routinely get 50-60" of rain per year, and others are lucky to get 15-20", so we all have to adapt and do what works in our specific locations. Dawn

Hi Kenny, Were the seeds inside the melon dry? They should of been surrounded by gucky stuff just like other melon seeds. If they were dry perhaps the melon was quite old and the seeds were ready to sprout? Normally, you remove the seeds and the guck together, put in a small container to ferment only adding only a touch of water of you meed to to make sure they are covered. If there's no guck and pretty much only water, the mechanism in the seeds to sprout may take over as is what happened to you. Remy