Posted by Janet Harriett on Jun.07, 2010

©iStockphoto.com - ivanmateev

While many people enjoy vegetable gardening, fruit gardening is somewhat less common. Gardeners who already grow a vegetable garden can dip their toes into the world of growing fruit with annual vines crops. Watermelon, cantaloupe and honeydew melon will all grow in a vegetable garden if given enough space. Melons are members of the cucurbit family, along with cucumbers, and the growing techniques are similar. Like cucumbers, melons have sprawling vines that require some extra garden space or a separate bed where they have room to spread out.

Trellising melons to grow vertically in a smaller space is possible, but the melons have to be supported in slings to avoid having their weight pull them off the vine prematurely. Some gardening sites recommend growing melon directly in the lawn by building a mound of soil amendments straight on the grass and planting watermelon or melon seeds in that, letting the vines sprawl into the grass. I’ve tried that, and either I have very aggressive fescue or the ability of melon leaves to shade out and stunt the growth of the grass is wildly oversold. Either way, I ended up hunting through overgrown lawn for melons, and counting my lucky stars that the patch was in a place that only me and my gas meter reader ever saw.

I no longer grow melons in my home garden, either in the vegetable patch or the fruit gardens. After a few years of trying, I found the fruit quality of homegrown melons inferior to ones purchased at the supermarket or farmer’s market. My melons seemed to either split or wind up bland from a drenching rainstorm the week before harvest time. Melon growing guides recommend withholding water from melons in the week leading up to prime ripeness, so the natural sugars are more concentrated, but nature doesn’t often follow the instructions on the seed packet. My zone 5 climate is also not ideal for growing melons, with a shorter growing season that puts many varieties of melons ripening in the cool days of early autumn rather than the warmer late summer weather that produces good melons. Just because something will grow in a region, doesn’t mean it will grow well.

Another strike against my growing homegrown melons is that, while I like melon, I don’t like it that much. One thing to remember about growing your own fruit, either as an annual or in a permaculture fruit planting, is that the fruit gets ripe when it wants to, not necessarily when you feel like eating it. When I grew melons, they tended to be one of those types of fruits that got ripe all at once. I discovered the limit to the amount of melon a person can eat without feeling like I was eating it because I had to. I think, somewhere in my deep freeze, I still have a few quarts of puree from the watermelon harvest that gave me multiple jumbo watermelons within the same week. If you do try growing melons as an introduction to home fruit growing, I strongly recommend the icebox watermelon cultivars so you’re not inundated with watermelon at harvest time.

Gardeners who enjoy melon and have both the space and the climate can get a taste of growing fruits with these annuals that are as cheap as a seed packet and require no more commitment than a year and a wide row of garden space. Otherwise, consider looking to strawberries, which I will discuss next week

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Posted under Home Environment, Organic Garden.