HOW TO GROW CANTALOUPE OR MUSK MELON

hello friends, in today's episode we look at growing cantaloupe. Cantaloupe or honeydew melons are very easy to grow in your garden and we're choosing a variety here that's called the Sweet slice hybrid and to grow these cantaloupes we are using a grow bag with bagged potting soil which also contains a lot of compost and worm castings other than that the soil is fairly simple bagged potting soil that's a mix of a lot of good organic matter cantaloupe needs warm weather to grow so in June in southern california the plant is growing well and by mid July you can see that it has started producing fruits as well now when the cantaloupe plant starts flowering if you're using fertilizers do not use high nitrogen fertilizers you want the plan to devote its energy into producing flowers and fruit and not a lot of foliage so this is in line with tomatoes and peppers where you want to avoid a lot of foliage growth as opposed to flowers and fruits as you can see here this cantaloupe is not ready yet but if you look at the cantaloupe you feel around the cantaloupe and its is nice and firm and if the white netting around it is pretty pronounced and so that's a good time to harvest your cantaloupe or your honeydew melon and I don't have a lot of space to grow this plant, which is why I grew it in grow bags and kind of let it sprawl over the area on the top but if you have good trellises, do use them if you build high trellises about five to eight feet high those are good too. Here you can see a ripe melon and these are baby melons this is a variety that matures very early in about 60 to 90 days but it produces smaller melons and I'll shortly get to the point where how the melon size effects taste and quality so with one plant I was able to get about five to six melons from this plan which i think is a good harvest now let's cut open one of these melons and as you can see here very nice rich color and the melons were very sweet now if you're growing larger melons what I have found is that they have higher water content as opposed to smaller melons but they will give you a lot more fruit compared to the smaller melons that you see here however this is a great variety to grow if you don't have a long warm season this is a great variety the sweet slice hybrid this matures in about 60 to 90 days, eighty days on average and will give you a lot of melons throughout the growing season so there we have it that was a quick episode on growing melons do let me know if you've tried to grow cantaloupes or honeydew if you call it or if you call it any other name do let me know and whether you've tried growing this wonderful fruit, delicious food as well and I'll see you again soon Happy Gardening!