juststartedmyown
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Please help me with my watermelon!

Hello everybody!

I bought a little watermelon plant about 2 months ago. The plant itself keeps growing and is getting longer and longer and longer...however, there is no fruit growing. All my other plants in my garden started to grow something. Even my peppers...but this watermelon simply won't grow anything. Does it take a couple of months before it grows anything? How long does the fruit itself take to grow? The plant gets plenty of sunlight...

Thanks!

imafan26
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Days to maturity for watermelon is 70-90 days from germination. If you aren't there yet, wait awhile longer.

juststartedmyown
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imafan26 wrote:Days to maturity for watermelon is 70-90 days from germination. If you aren't there yet, wait awhile longer.

wooooooow! ...well, I will just wait a bit longer.

How many watermelons can one plant grow?

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rainbowgardener
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But days to maturity is the time between when the seed sprouts to when you harvest a ripe fruit. So if you are 60 days out, you should definitely have fruit set already.

So is your plant blooming? Does it have both male and female flowers? Have you seen bees around the flowers? If you have both male and female flowers but no bees, you might have to hand pollinate.

I don't grow watermelons (or pumpkins, Waterbug! :) ) because one huge plant grows one or two fruits.

So juststarted, where are you located and what has the weather been like? What are you fertilizing with and are you giving it plenty of water. "It's getting longer and longer" means what, how many feet of vine do you have? Is it looking happy and healthy?

Image
https://www.blockstory.net/sites/default ... melons.jpg


Image
https://projectwelcometomygardendotcom.f ... -vines.jpg

juststartedmyown
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rainbowgardener wrote: So is your plant blooming? Does it have both male and female flowers? Have you seen bees around the flowers?
Thank you so much for your reply and your pictures! Mine do not look this at all. Is is not blooming and there are no bees. I would say it grew about 5-6feet long.

Seeing you watermelons makes me give up on them! hahaha yours are GREAT!

I will continue with my organic veggies, they are doing excellent. This watermelon is a heart breaker though and though...

imafan26
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Do you have ice box watermelons? Those vines are smaller. When I grow watermelons, I can get up to twenty fruit but, most of them will be aborted, the plant can usually sustain only 1-3 to maturity. Six feet is the average length for an icebox watermelon but a standard vine will grow a lot longer.

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rainbowgardener
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Those aren't mine, they are just pictures I found on-line to illustrate what I was saying. I put the picture credits for where I got them under the pictures.

So it can't possibly fruit before it blossoms and has both male and female flowers. (They are separate; the female flower is easily identifiable, since it comes with a little embryo melon already present behind it.)

If you have had it in the ground for two months and the vine is only 5 feet long, it isn't getting something it needs. It is too little to be blooming or fruiting yet, but it should be bigger by now. If it is not a dwarf variety, the vine may get 20' long or more.

So you said plenty of sunshine - if your peppers are producing fruit and the melon is getting the same amount of sunshine, I will trust that. Other variables would be soil fertility - melons are very heavy feeders and need to be fertilized regularly- and water. Watermelons while they are growing, blooming, and setting fruit need the equivalent of two inches of rain a week, which is a lot of water -- one inch of rainfall equals 4.7 gallons of water per square yard . Once it has fruit set, you can cut that down.

Also where are you and what has your weather been like? Watermelons need warm soil and three months of reliably warm (80 deg F) sunny weather.

It's why I don't grow them, they are very demanding-- tons of space, sunshine, regular watering and fertilizing to get one or two watermelons.

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rainbowgardener
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PS ... you aren't likely to see bees until you have flowers. If you do have bees around, visiting other kinds of flowers in your garden, they can't help pollinate the melons until there are male flowers to collect pollen from and female flowers to carry it to. Basic plant biology ("the birds and the bees").

juststartedmyown
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rainbowgardener wrote:PS ... you aren't likely to see bees until you have flowers. If you do have bees around, visiting other kinds of flowers in your garden, they can't help pollinate the melons until there are male flowers to collect pollen from and female flowers to carry it to. Basic plant biology ("the birds and the bees").
To be honest, after all what you wrote I am thinking of removing the watermelon from my garden. I have two of them and they are taking up a lot of place (5 feet each vine into various each direction). My tomatoes need more space, so it is a thought I am playing with...

This watermelon sounds like a huge pain in the butt. 2 inches of rain, 20 feet long, only one fruit.... :roll:

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rainbowgardener
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Well maybe two, and if you grow dwarf varieties like sugar baby the vines will be smaller and more productive, but yeah as a city gardener, I don't grow melons. After all that investment in them, they don't even have much food value, just sugar water.



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