Growing Watermelons From START TO FINISH - Tips and Tricks and Some Unusual Varieties

Hey guys it's Calum, welcome back. I'm here with little Sky today and today I'm gonna be growing watermelons from seed. So the whole video is basically about growing quite a few different varieties of watermelon from seed right through to harvest. I wanted to put it all in one video so that you guys can see all the stages I go through to grow them. Anyway let's go get these seeds started. It's a beautiful sunny day here in spring so I can't wait to get this going. There's a little bit of a chance that we may get a late frost like we do some years so I'm gonna be planting these in pots and growing them indoors until there's no chance that we're going to get a frost. Anyway let's get into it. Okay so I've gone ahead and just filled these pots up with some organic seed raising mix and basically I've just got one pot per plant and I'm going to be planting two of every variety that I have here. So there's ten pots we've got five varieties. They're really easy to plant you just put a little hole in the soil and drop your seed in. These ones are quite big seeds this is the moon and stars variety. Drop it down and then just cover it up. Now one thing that they do sometimes recommend is that you plant two seeds in each pot and that way you can pick out the weak one and just grow the strong one but I don't actually have a lot of seeds so I'm just going to put one seed in each pot and hopefully it grows well for me. The reason I'm not growing them in a tray or I'm not growing multiple plants in each pot is because they generally don't like their roots being disturbed so once they've grown I'll just carefully remove them out of the pot and then drop them into the hole where I'm going to grow them so that I don't disturb the soil and they can keep this original mix around them. Alright guys so it's been three months since I planted these from seed. They took about two to three weeks to sprout most of them although the golden midgets took a bit longer they took just over a month to sprout. So as you can see here there are eight plants left and I originally had ten so unfortunately I did lose one of the banana melons and one of the golden midget melons but as you can see there's still a good amount of melons to grow here which I'm really excited about. However it is about midsummer at the moment we just moved house I haven't until now had a place to actually plant them in the ground. Let's get into that now and go and plant them in the ground. So as you can see I'm going to be planting these in tires today and what I'm doing here is just putting some newspaper down to stop the grass growing up into the soil I put in here and the soil I'm using is a mixture of normal compost and mushroom compost that I bought in bulk and I've just mixed it together. Watermelons are pretty heavy feeders so you could also add animal manure at this point things like sheep manure which you can buy in a pelleted form. I don't have any right now so I'm just going with the compost. Now because these plants have been in their pots for so long I am going to tease the roots out a little bit because they are a bit root bound but I don't want to disturb the root system too much. They're all looking really good they're nice and green and healthy unfortunately though I did lose the golden midget which was the one that looked really bad when I planted it anyway but that's okay the other ones are doing well. Today I'm going to give them some liquid seaweed fertilizer and I'm going to get it on the foliage as well because they'll absorb it that way too and this should help give them a nice boost. Okay time for another update and you can already see how much the plants have grown just in the last two weeks but come and check this out we have some melons setting. So this plant down here is the Georgia rattlesnake and as you can see it's got two little fruits that have set on it and they're actually growing at a fairly rapid pace they're sort of growing bigger each day and they're looking really really cool they've got quite an unusual long shape to them. The moon and stars plant it's actually quite interesting it has little yellow spots on the leaves which originally I thought maybe there was something wrong with the plant but I did look it up and know that is actually normal for moon and stars to have the little yellow spots on them. This one has two fruit on it and they're both the same size not that long ago but the bigger one here has massively overtaken the smaller one and the small one seems to have stopped growing. This one over here is the banana melon and as you can see the leaves are very different to the watermelons but the leaves actually remind me a lot of the African horn melon or kiwano that I've grown before and I've done a previous video on that but yeah they do look very similar I'm not too sure if they are related or not but yeah very cool and unusual looking leaves. This one has an awesome little fruit starting on it so I'm really interested to see how that turns out but just one so far lots of flowers though and aside from all these ones there's also the other Georgia rattlesnake which just has a very small fruit on it but nothing yet is growing on the golden watermelons so hopefully soon we'll see something going on there. Alright so this is one of the Georgia rattlesnake watermelons and this one here pretty much I don't think it's grown since the last update but the one over here which was the same size has gone pretty big you can almost see it growing you know every day. I don't know if I should take this one off because the plants already deciding to put all its energy into that but I think I will just leave it on and see what happens because you know I'm just learning and this will be interesting just to see. This is the gold on gold it's finally set a fruit I did notice a few that were like tiny little melons but they've dropped off but this one has set and look at that amazing golden color really really beautiful fruit. This one over here is another Georgia rattlesnake watermelon it's just suddenly blown up massive and it's pretty much catching up to this one over here. Now this plant over here is another gold one well it says that it is but that's kind of an interesting looking fruit it's long so strange there's nothing else on here so I guess we'll just see if that turns gold. This is the moon and stars watermelon this one is just growing bigger and bigger by the day and then the last one of course is the banana melon and looks like it does have a little bit of powdery mildew or something on the leaves is that sort of dusty layer there but the plant does still seem to be going well and the little fruit that I showed you last time has grown. There he is there very interesting looking melon so really excited to see what comes of that. Okay so we're a month into autumn and today I'm going to be harvesting a few of the melons but before we get into that let's just go take a quick look at the melons because there's been some big changes since the last update. This one over here is the one that I said was labeled as the golden watermelon last time and it had that really tiny fruit on it and this was the one that I showed so it's gotten a lot bigger than the tiny little thing it was last time and yeah it looks more like the Georgia rattlesnake variety that I've got but it's got a lot more yellow in it so I don't know if it's a cross variety or some other variety. If you guys know let me know in the comments but yeah it's a beautiful looking melon. There's another one of them growing over here and one more down here as well. The moon and stars melon is looking absolutely amazing very very cool and it's pretty big as well it's quite a decent sized melon and it has obviously these beautiful dots on it so I think he's getting nearer and nearer to the point of harvesting and the banana melon the plant has pretty much succumbed to either the powdery mildew that it was showing or something else but it's pretty much dying off and this is the melon here. They're supposed to be really yellow on the outside when they're ripe and then like a salmon pink on the inside so not too sure what's going on there because this one is pretty green. This Georgia rattlesnake is looking awesome it's got some interesting patterns I'm not too sure if that's from slugs or something and then the other one is over here and we've got one down here as well but this is the small one that I said was kind of not growing any bigger and it's feeling a bit soft so I'll definitely be picking that one today. Over here we've got this beautiful golden watermelon and next to him this one's growing over the top this is another moon and stars from another plant. It's grown since the last video this wasn't even in the last update so that shows you how fast they can grow once they do set fruit. So I've heard that one of the best ways to tell if watermelons are ripe or not is to look at the tendril that's directly above the fruit you'll always find that there's a tendril here and as you can see this one is fully dry right back to the base if it's only sort of half dry it's not quite ripe but this one looks to be dry right to the top and if you look at these ones over here that one's not dry at all and the golden one, carefully move them out and I just snapped him so I guess we're harvesting him today as well. Okay so this is where it was attached and this is the tendril here and it is not dry the tip looks like it's broken off and this bit is actually it doesn't look it but it's very hard it's not dry right to the base but I think it was starting to dry perhaps. Apparently if they break off easily then they are ripe so I'm hoping that's true we're gonna find out but it's a beautiful fruit nonetheless as you can see it's got a lovely pattern on it. Now this one the dog ran past a few weeks ago and latched on to thinking it was a tennis ball I think and that's why it's so damaged and I just flipped it over before and it's actually split just today so not sure what to expect for that one. Okay moment of truth guys. Awesome. Wicked man this is so cool such a cool moment to finally harvest a mallet. Let's go see if it's ripe. Let's check out this Georgia rattlesnake. Moment of truth guys. It looks pretty ripe it could have maybe had a little tiny bit longer it's got a bit of white to it but it looks beautiful either way. It's got some quite big seeds too. You want to try some Caroline? Yeah. Oh yum. Mmm that's a beautiful watermelon it's really sweet really juicy yeah that's good. Yeah that's yum. I'm actually quite curious to see what's inside this one now I know it's really soft and I'm not really expecting much at all so be interesting. Oh look at that it still looks okay. Should we try it? Yeah. Might as well. Here you go. Oh it's squishy. The flavors kind of a bit strange it's not yeah it's a lot different to this one this one's nice. That's what Caroline thinks of it. I don't think it's too bad it's still juicy. Definitely this one's a lot better. I think it was just more of the texture this one was a bit soggy whereas this one was really nice and crisp. This is the one I've been most excited about. That is weird. Okay I'm not too sure what's happened with this one. I don't know if that means that it hasn't had enough water or enough time or what. If you guys know and have seen this before I'd be keen to know why you think this has happened let me know down below in the comments. Okay so this one tastes actually really nice I was quite surprised it's still really sweet and really crunchy and watery quite like this one actually. Really nice even though it does look dry in the middle it's not dry at all when you eat it. If you look at it in here you can see just how juicy it is. What do you think Caroline? Yeah real good juicy not too sweet but like tasty. Yeah it was yum. Anyway guys I'm gonna leave it there for today's video but thank you so much for joining me along on this journey it's been such a fun and good learning experience for me and hopefully for you guys as well. So if you did enjoy the video make sure you give it a thumbs up. I will be doing an update so you can see how the banana melon, the moon and stars melon as well as that green and yellow variety turn out. I'm really keen to finally try those so stay tuned for that and if you want to see that make sure you subscribe and click the notification bell as well so you don't miss out on that. Anyway thank you so much for watching I really look forward to seeing you all in the next one and until then keep well and stay safe. Bye guys!