Melons are a challenging fruit to grow, requiring consistently warm, humid, and sheltered conditions with well-drained soil rich in organic matter. They need pollinators to set fruit and are ready for harvest in August and September. Melons are slow growers and need to be sown in early April, to plant in June. Melons need to be kept warm, ideally above 15°C, and are best grown in a greenhouse, polytunnel, cold frame, or cloche. Melons are heavy and need support if not grown on the ground. Limiting the number of melons per plant helps to ensure the fruits grow to a reasonable size and ripen well. Ripe fruits are best eaten as soon as possible after harvesting, but they taste fine a few days later.
I use a rating system to help me decide what to grow and it considers lots of factors, but the main ones are how tasty it is, how healthy it is to eat, how expensive it is to buy, how big its harvest is, when it's harvest period is and whether I can buy it organically and if not how much it's sprayed.
Melons doesn’t score very highly using this system, because they occupy a lot of ground, during the peak summer growing season, whilst only giving a small harvest, but we still going to try growing them! That’s because it’s one of those crops that tastes so much better harvested and eaten within hours. It also looks great and the kids and grandkids will delight in harvesting it.
Freshly picked melons have a special flavour and sweetness that you cannot buy. In fact I’ve never seen the kids so excited by the mention of any other fruit or veg that I grow and I grow a lot!
I have another reason for growing them though. I have a lot of low tunnels and cold frames on my allotment which are full to the brim over winter and then replanted in late winter/early spring with spring crops that are harvested throughout spring and finish throughout May.
I plant a lot of these with sweet peppers but there’s only so many we can eat, so I’m always on the lookout for crops that really benefit from the extra protection, but can be successfully planted out in late May/early June and harvested during September, when the beds need replanting with their winter crops.
Melons seem to fit this growing window perfectly, better than peppers do in fact.
In optimum conditions a single plant can yield 4-6 fruits, (water melons 1-2). Since they will all ripen over a few weeks sowing a few varieties might be a good idea and I will be mixing greenhouse, polytunnel, low tunnels (warmer) with cold frames, to try and stagger the harvest over about 4 weeks. Hence work out how many melons you can eat a week ( in our case 4 ) multiply by 6 weeks and divide by 4 (the average yield per plant) which means we should be growing 6 plants.
<aside> 💡 I’m actually planting 9 plants to give me an opportunity to test out multiple varieties in different growing conditions
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Melons are amongst the most difficult fruits to grow as they need it consistently warm, but not too hot, shelter from wind and very humid, but without the leaves and stems being too wet. They need well drained soil, that’s consistently moist but not soggy wet, and a a pH between 6.0 and 6.5. It is important to ensure that the soil is rich in organic matter and once fruit has set a liquid feed!
These conditions are similar to cucumbers, but not ideal for tomatoes, so growing in a mixed use polytunnel or greenhouse can be a challenge.
I’m growing most of mine in a mix of dedicated cold frames and low tunnels. These have the benefit that they can be tuned to the growing conditions that melons favour, particularly keeping them humid. For a slightly earlier crop though I’m also growing a small number in my greenhouse and polytunnel.
Melons are slow growers, so they are planted a little earlier than their cucumber cousins, but they share their need for heat, so they are usually planted out in early May in a heated greenhouse, late May in an unheated polytunnel and early June in a cold frame or cloche.
They need pollinators to set fruit and are ready for harvest in early Autumn.