Our first watermelon

It was two months ago when I introduced you to these two watermelon. At that time it was all we had growing. We recently harvested our first melon. Both of these two were growing quite steadily all season. I knew farmers were having problems with pumpkins bursting this season due to all the rain, so we were keeping a close eye on all the watermelon.

Most especially we were watching the one by the Yucca, as that was our largest.




We had 8 watermelon which developed enough to be harvested this season, but the one by the Yucca, well, that location was obviously the best as those vines grew all over, up and around all in the area, the tomatoes, the yucca, the eggplant and they even grew up and into the tree peony and the hydrangea! That was the plant that I had mistakenly cut off the stem to a smaller melon last month, and had taken it in and kept it in water, trying unsuccessfully to keep it growing.

This was the first time we had tried growing watermelon. I will definitely do it again. I found the foliage just beautiful. The leaves are quite different from anything else in the gardens.




I was very surprised at the flowers. I thought we would be harvested and eating them all summer, since watermelon is so much bigger than squash. I was used to the larger squash and zucchini flowers, which we used to harvest and saute in flour and egg -- YUM!!! Will need to get back to growing those next year.
The flowers on the watermelon vines were quite small, only about 1 1/2 inch across.




They are a nice pleasant yellow, but not at all like the squash plants.




Actually they are flatter like the eggplant flowers, which are purple, and a little larger, although their shape and number of petals are different.




So to get back to the two watermelon, on one walk around the gardens I noticed that one of these two watermelon was developing a black spot on one end. I kept an eye on it, but it didn't get any larger, so I left it to keep growing.

Another day, just last week I noticed that both of these melons had a split on one end, so we harvested them immediately. This is our proud mama, holding her first harvested watermelon. It was quite an exciting day, as it was the end of the season, and we weren't sure when to pick them. We were grateful that these guys told us when they needed to be picked, as we could have waited forever for the to develop a brown stem, which is what my research had indicated. This fella was about ten inches, and turned out to be the sweetest melon! Alas, it had seeds. Mia and John do not like seeds!! We put up with them and enjoyed this melon, but it didn't last long, so the next day we picked the other one, which also had a split end. We will definitely grow watermelon again, but next time we will get seeds for the seedless variety and start our own. We had gotten plants this year.