📌 Quick Diary Summary: Greenhouse Melons
- 🍈 The Center Bed Success: Planting melons on the wide center bed of a greenhouse is a fantastic strategy. It gives the massive root systems room to spread, and it’s the warmest spot in the greenhouse. Using black plastic mulch over the soil helps heat the roots even more.
- 🌼 Only Male Flowers? If a melon vine is producing tons of flowers but no fruit, you likely only have male blossoms. Female flowers (which have a tiny baby melon attached to the base) usually form on the secondary and tertiary side-shoots, which is why proper pruning is necessary.
- 🐝 The Pollinator Magnet: If you are struggling to get bees into your greenhouse to pollinate your melons, try letting some overwintered onions bolt and flower inside the greenhouse. Bumblebees absolutely flock to onion blossoms!
Here are my little melons! I planted exactly 4 of them in the center bed of the greenhouse. On the edges of that same bed, I planted a watermelon and a cucumber, plus eggplants on the sides.
I completely failed at pruning and training the melon vines because they grew so incredibly fast. They wove themselves completely through the trellis netting and absolutely smothered the watermelon plant.
I planted the varieties Aikido, Bravura, and two Manuela hybrids. The Manuela ones are definitely the earliest and the most productive. Thank you, Luda, for the idea to plant them on the center bed – the melons absolutely loved it, and it was so much more convenient for me to manage!
And here is one more from the same bed…
Da4nica wrote:
Here are my little melons! I planted exactly 4 of them in the center bed of the greenhouse… Thank you, Luda, for the idea…
Katya, they are absolute beauties!!! That yellow one is the prettiest of all, I love that type.
For next year, make sure you strictly select only the earliest-maturing hybrids to plant. We aren’t going to have an extreme summer heatwave like this every single year, and early varieties are the only real guarantee you will get a harvest!
Da4nica wrote:
Here are my little melons! I planted exactly 4 of them in the center bed…
Katya, your melons are wonderful! Did you graft them onto a rootstock or not? How did you grow them?
This was my first year planting melons. I wanted to graft them, but the melon seedlings were so frail and stunted that almost all of them died. Only two survived, and by then it was too late to graft because the rootstock plants had already grown too big.
So, I just planted the two surviving melon seedlings in the greenhouse next to the peppers in an open, sunny spot. They grew into huge, beautiful vines. I pinched off the side shoots after the 5th leaf, but I am only getting male flowers – not a single female flower! I’ve left them growing just as an experiment, but I’m thinking about ripping them out now.
gala7496 wrote:
Did you graft them onto a rootstock or not?… I am only getting male flowers…
Galya, thank you! No, I didn’t graft them because I have no idea how to do it, and they grow perfectly fine on their own roots anyway.
I planted them on the center bed because it is the warmest spot. The soil there was already covered with black plastic film (mulch) to warm up the dirt. I just left the plastic in place and cut holes in it to plant the seedlings. I watered them with chicken manure tea early on.
Don’t rip your vines out just yet! I checked my garden journal from last year, and my very first melon didn’t even set fruit until early August, and they still all had time to ripen.
Also, about your pruning: aren’t you supposed to wait until a fruit actually forms, and *then* pinch the vine off 5 leaves above the fruit? Maybe you shouldn’t have pinched them yet?
Also, my greenhouse is absolutely full of bumblebees! I planted some onions in there early in the spring for green shoots, and I never dug them up. They are flowering right now, and the bumblebees are happily grazing on the onion blossoms all day.
Da4nica wrote:
…my greenhouse is absolutely full of bumblebees! I planted some onions in there… and they are flowering right now.
I actually have more bumblebees on my property this year than ever before! Not far from the greenhouse, I have two large compost piles completely covered in blooming pumpkin vines; there are so many flowers that it smells like Phlox out there. I also have large pots of petunias set up everywhere. I just don’t know if the bumblebees are actually flying *inside* the greenhouse.
👨🔬 Editor’s Botanical Note: Pruning for Female Melon Flowers
Galina is frustrated because her giant, healthy melon vine is only producing male flowers (which means no fruit). Ekaterina questioned Galina’s pruning method (“pinching after the 5th leaf”). Who is right?
The First-Order Vine Problem:
Melons belong to the Cucurbit family. On a standard melon plant, the main central vine (the first-order vine) will almost exclusively produce male flowers. The female flowers (the ones with the tiny, round baby melon attached to the base of the flower) usually only form on the secondary or tertiary side-shoots (second and third-order vines).
Galina was actually following correct traditional pruning advice: by pinching off the tip of the main vine after the 5th true leaf, you force the plant to stop growing the “male” vine and push out secondary side-shoots from the leaf nodes. Those new side-shoots are the ones that will produce the female flowers. Galina shouldn’t rip her plants out—she just needs to be patient and wait for those secondary vines to mature and blossom!
