📌 Quick Summary: Forcing Melons to Set Fruit
- 🥒 The Problem: Your melon vines look incredibly healthy, but they are only producing male flowers. You might be tempted to rip them out. Don’t do it yet!
- ✂️ Pinching Mistake: Many growers pinch the vines too early. You should generally wait to pinch the main vine until after a fruit has set above the 5th leaf.
- 🧪 The Fertilizer Fix: If vines are stalling on fruit production, a quick liquid feed of balanced 20-20-20 fertilizer with trace elements can often shock the plant into producing female flowers and setting fruit.
- 🐝 The Pollination Hack: If you grow in a greenhouse and lack pollinators, try spraying the vines with weak honey water, or let some companion plants (like green onions) go to flower to attract bumblebees.
gala7496 wrote:
Katya, your melons look great! Did you graft them? I planted melons for the first time… they grew beautifully, I pinched the side shoots after the 5th leaf, but I only have male flowers, no female ones. I kept them as an experiment, but now I’m thinking about pulling them out.
Gala, thank you! I didn’t graft them, mostly because I don’t know how, and they grow fine on their own. I planted them in my middle bed since it’s the warmest. The soil was covered with black plastic mulch, I didn’t remove it, just cut holes to plant. I watered them with chicken manure tea in the beginning.
Please don’t pull them out yet! I looked at my garden diary from last year, and my first melon didn’t set until early August, and they all still managed to ripen. Also, aren’t you supposed to pinch the vine after the fruit sets above the fifth leaf? Maybe you shouldn’t have pinched them so early?
I also have tons of bumblebees in my greenhouse right now. I planted green onions early in the season and never pulled them out, so they are flowering now and the bees are all over them.
Da4nitsa wrote:
I also have tons of bumblebees in my greenhouse right now…
I actually have an unusual amount of bumblebees on my property right now too. I have two pumpkin patches nearby and lots of flowers, it smells amazing outside. I have big pots of petunias everywhere. I just don’t know if the bumblebees are flying inside the greenhouse.
I’ll leave the melons in for now and see what happens, the weather is still warm.
By the way, just wanted to show off my pumpkins. I picked the biggest ones to photograph.
gala7496 wrote:
I kept them as an experiment, but now I’m thinking about pulling them out.
I planted them for the first time this year too. And I also had zero fruit set. Then I read a tip on Natasha’s thread on HOW TO FORCE THEM TO SET. The trick is a liquid feed of 20-20-20 fertilizer with trace elements. I fed them, and boom – two melons and two watermelons immediately set.
It happened a bit late in the season, but I definitely learned my lesson for next year. Good day everyone!
I actually sprayed my melon vines with honey water. It attracted a ton of bees and I got lots of fruit set!
We’ve already devoured five of them. They weren’t huge (about 1.5 lbs / 700g each), but they reached the “slip stage” and fell off the vine by themselves, turning totally yellow overnight.
