Take a look at the Stone Mountain and Sugar Baby varieties. Both are advertised as having "short" or "small" vines. Look at the bottom of the page to see the description. I don't believe either one is seedless though. Here's the description of Stone Mountain: Open-pollinated watermelon. Short vines bear 'icebox-sized', 17- by 14-inch, 35- to 40-pound, red-fleshed fruit with few seeds. Yellow Doll watermelon has "semi-compact" vines though I've never eaten one so don't know how they taste. Here's a discussion of four short-vined varieties. I hope you can find one that won't bury you in vines! Though you'll probably have to listen to the kids complain about the seeds... Show them how to cut the melon into thin slices and neatly remove the seeds with a plastic knife. Eating watermelon isn't as messy that way, and you can get nice mouthfuls of no-seed sweetness!

Probably more personal preference than anything else. Crimson Sweet has a more tender flesh for me than AU producer but is not quite as uniform in size. Willhite used to vend all of the Alabama melons AU Sweet Scarlet, AU Producer, AU Golden Producer ( virtually identical to the Yellow fleshed Crimson Sweet)and AU- Jubilant ( A Jubilee type). Have not tried the Jubilant as they dropped it before I got around to it, but the others were good melons) I have grown Tendersweet for about 50 years, try lots of others, but so far nothing has blown it away in its class. Tendergold is more uniform in size, but has no other advantages over Tendersweet that I can notice.

I am over here in Southeast Montana and have sandy soil that melons love. When I started raising melons in the 1970's, my Burpee Hybrid muskmelons were simply delicious, now I cannot get hardly anything good out of a muskmelon. The exception was the Sunder which was superb, but Willhite quit selling. I can get good-tasting Savors in the early part of the season, but the later ones rot before they taste good. As for watermelons, some do not do well for me (Desert King). I have had only two watermelons that had a "perfume" when eaten. The one I remember the most was a White Seeded Simpson. I used to grow lots of watermelons, did not rotate and eventually my field got too diseased. Now, years later, I start on new ground, till in lots of leaves and I have vines all over the place. I really like the Sweet Favorite. They ripen early (around a month after setting on), and I can turn around and get two crops off the same vine. Some Sweet Favorites do not get the sweetness of the others, I wonder if one should withhold the water for a few weeks before ripening. To tell when a melon is ripe: I used to scratch the melon with the date it set on. For example, if a melon set on July 19, I would take a knife or nail and scratch "J19 on the skin and the resulting scar would remain. Then, since it takes six weeks for most watermelons to ripen, I would harvest the melon six weeks later (September 1st for the above J19 melon. Now, I think I will take an ear tag (that they use in a calf's ear), and if a watermelon sets on July 19 th, write that on the ear tag and set it beside the melon. I actually would go out July 23 d, see a watermelon the size of a chicken egg, and subtract a few days and write J19 on the tag. But I do agree that the Orange Glo is a very delicious watermelon. And it has a taste that is more than sweet. This year my Orange Glos tailed off in sweetness at the end of the season. I tried the Moon and Stars a few years ago and was impressed with their earliness. But I ran into problems this past year as I picked the first ones too early. I think that in excellent soil, they ripen later than if they are on just average soil. And they do taste very good. This year, I will plant around 50% Sweet Favorite and 50% Moon and Stars. With a few new ones. I finally found a source for the Tiger Baby (Anderson Seed and Garden Logan Utah.) The Tiger Baby is a small melon, short vines and ripens in 30 days from setting on for me. The flesh is only pink, but I am going to try plastic tunnels, underground heating to try and get very early melons. I like to take a heat lamp (put in a 100 watt bulb), and set it next to the watermelon plants in the plastic hot kap for overnight heating of the soil (heat lamp is face down on the dirt). Sometimes the bulb breaks due to moisture on the bulb. But the plants really thrive and grow fast if it is 100 degrees in the hot kap at night. I like the Tiger Baby's short vines because I have to cover all my watermelons with wire with small holes due to the hail we seem to get every year. Is that called hardware cloth?

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.