How I Grow Watermelons From Seed to Harvest - ft. Two Awesome Varieties

What do you think of when you hear the word summer? Is it waves rolling onto a white sandy beach? Maybe jumping into the river for a swim to cool off? Or is it biting into a fresh crisp watermelon harvested straight off the vine? Well let's focus on the last one today and I can show you how I grow watermelons in my garden and the steps that I take to get a successful harvest. So the first thing to do is to decide on what variety of watermelon that you want to grow and this is one of the mistakes that I made early on when I started growing watermelons because the first few years I just got a little seedling from the nursery and I planted it and I just couldn't figure out why my watermelons wouldn't grow very big and turns out the variety was sugar baby which is a smaller watermelon variety and that was one of the mistakes that I made because I was imagining growing these nice large juicy watermelons and so just be careful with that and grow a variety that you are happy with and you like the sound of. So this one here is a moon and stars variety and one of the ones we're growing this year it's an heirloom variety so it's a great one to save the seeds from and it has just an incredible pattern on the outside as well and then this one here is a gold on gold variety a really beautiful variety too and we'll cut into these later on and see what they're like but first let's rewind back to when these were just little seeds and we'll get on with the growing. Okay so for getting the seeds started it's really easy I just drop them into some seed raising mix or some compost and just keep them watered and in a nice warm spot. I have read about these being sensitive to transplant shock although it's not something that I've had problems with before but if you are worried you can make these newspaper pots and then once your seedling's sprouted by that point the newspaper's already started to soften and break down and when you're ready to plant it you can just bury the whole pot into the ground without disturbing the roots. All right so we've got a few seedlings here that I've grown so let's prepare the soil. I've decided to plant the watermelons on some mounds because I think this will have quite a few benefits which we'll discuss shortly but watermelon's like a free draining soil and so what I'm doing is just opening the ground up slightly with a fork without disturbing the soil too much and I think this will just help the compost that we put on top of this merge with the existing garden bed a little better. I'm using some compost to make the mounds and I think this large sized wheelbarrow per mound should be about good so I'm making two separate mounds and I'll plant around four watermelon plants into each one. I've found that watermelons tend to respond well to fairly rich soil and so what I've got here is just some of these sheep manure pallets. I'd usually just use dried sheep manure from our own sheep but I've just run out and I've used it on something else so I had some of this lying around but basically we're just mixing it through the soil here just adding a bit of extra fertility and these are a good natural source of slow release nitrogen and it should encourage earthworm activity and as well as that having the extra organic matter in the soil should increase the moisture retention as well. So I reckon there's quite a few benefits to planting watermelons in mounds like this I think just having a good depth of good organic matter should support multiple plants that I plant all in the same area and by having them all in these mounds as well it means I only really have to water one specific spot or two in this case rather than having to water each individual plant and by shaping it with this sort of crater shape the water shouldn't run off the sides it should be able to soak in nice and easily. If you get like a big summer rainstorm when you've got your watermelons growing and they're to a good size then what can happen is if the ground gets too wet the plants suck up so much moisture and so do the melons and they can end up splitting and so I'm hoping by planting them on a mound it's going to just add a bit of extra drainage to the ground as well and hopefully avoid any potential splitting if we do get a lot of summer rain. So there we go we've got all our seedlings planted and they've got plenty of room to spread out in every direction which is pretty important because these can take up quite a lot of space. Okay so today I'm just mulching the mounds with some straw and I'm just doing this to keep the moisture in and stop them drying out so fast and the reason that I waited a bit to do this is because initially my seedlings were pretty small and fragile and I just didn't want to encourage slugs into the area. Okay so the plants are taken off and doing well and I'm just keeping the area free of weeds and I thought I may as well just give them a bit of an extra boost with an organic liquid fertilizer. And the main thing with fertilizing is just to avoid giving them a type that's too high in nitrogen once they get to their flowering and fruiting stage. Speaking of flowers though these plants produce separate male and female flowers so the male ones just have a thin stem below the base of the flower whereas the female ones have quite an obvious ovary at the base it just looks like a little fruit and that is what turns into the melon. I'm not going to bother doing any hand pollination of these because I've got plenty of sort of pollinating insects around the garden but if you don't have many in your garden then you can use like a small paintbrush or something and just move the pollen from the male flower onto the female flowers and of course you can also just plant some other flowering plants in your garden to attract more pollinating insects. We've got our first gold on gold watermelon forming and they seem to just pop out of nowhere and they grow really quickly. I've been watering these about every two to three days because it's been extremely hot here, at least for New Zealand and it's been really dry as well. The frequency of watering though will depend on your soil temperature and how heavily mulched your plants are but a good way to know is just to stick your finger down into the ground and if the top couple of inches is feeling quite dry it's probably a good time to water and that's assuming that your soil is fairly free draining and it's not soggy underneath. It's actually been really good having these planted on the mounds because it's meant I can just focus my watering on the mounds themselves and not get the whole vines completely wet and that just helps with reducing disease by not wetting the whole plants every single time and you could of course set up like a dripper system or something rather than hand watering. I do hand watering because we're on tank water here so I'm kind of nervous about setting up something that I could potentially leave on and then drain my water tanks. I think that watering is actually one of the hardest things about growing watermelons because it's really hard to stay consistent if you're doing it by hand like what I'm doing. You know it's easy to get distracted or busy in the summer to the point where you end up kind of neglecting your plants a little bit and they just don't get the amount of water that they need. So be consistent with it and if you can't maybe look at setting up some drippers or a sprinkler system. And also the other thing is that it is really hot it's a really good summer actually right now for growing watermelons which is awesome but some years are just not as good as others so you know don't be discouraged if they're not doing as well as you hoped sometimes it is just the weather. Far out, once these melons get going they really put on the size pretty quickly and you even notice a difference in their size like every day or two it's almost as if they just grow right before your eyes. Alright guys so it's been about three months since we planted these in the ground and I'm really excited to harvest them so come on in close and we can see if they're ripe. Okay so looking at this melon here one thing that I often look at to tell if they're ripe is this little tendril which is closest to where the melon is attached on the vine and if the tendril has turned brown then that's usually an indication that they're ripe and that's just one of the things that you can use. The other thing that you can do is give it a tap like that and you can hear that it's a quite a deep hollow sort of sound so that sounds nice and deep and good and then also if you flip it over you can see this yuck slug this patch on the bottom here is starting to turn yellow and so this is usually white before the melon is ripe but now that it's turning a yellowy colour it's another indication of ripeness. So the other thing is sometimes when they're ripe they do snap off the vine easy but you kind of want to be careful because you don't want to damage the vine especially if there's other melons further down it so if I just pull away like that yeah it's not really gonna oh yeah see it came away that was the weak point the vine is still fully intact and so that's another way sometimes not necessarily these melons because they've got quite a thick stem but some varieties will pull away from the vine quite easy when they're ripe yeah sounds good to me check the bottom snap them off there we go beautiful man that's heavy I usually find with these gold ones that they snap off the vine really easily so just give it a slight tug and yeah there you go it's just come off really really easily one thing I haven't done with these plants is any pruning or thinning of the fruit and some people will do this so they can end up with some nice large melons and avoid having smaller ones like this but I really don't mind getting some of these smaller melons amongst the larger ones that came on earlier this is just an opportunity to have a nice snack-sized melon if you end up with some really small ones like this at the end of the season they can be a bit softer and not as crisp this one's actually surprisingly not too bad but I'm sure there's someone that will enjoy this more than me give that a tug that snaps right off and we're good to go oh that crunch check it out awesome oh it feels nice and crispy for a second I thought it was maybe a little bit over but I think it feels all good beautiful pink slice of fresh watermelon crispy as looks really juicy and it's got these big black seeds as well and this is an heirloom variety like I said before we can save these seeds and grow it again next year man that is so incredibly juicy water is just dripping down my arm that's actually a really good melon it's nice and juicy it's got a bit of sweetness it's not overly sweet but it's still a really great tasting melon good crispness as well and the seeds are quite big to eat but I actually don't mind it that much still totally all good you can either spit the seeds out or just eat them and grew this myself so it's awesome so so juicy there we go check it out man that's so beautiful such a cool color too it's quite a golden-y sort of yellow that looks really really awesome oh man these are honestly my favorite watermelons they are so so good I would definitely recommend growing this variety it's actually quite sweet it's a lot sweeter than typical red varieties of watermelon they're sweeter than this variety here and they're actually known for that and they're also known for how crispy they are too and that's something I really like from a watermelon you can see how kind of hard it is it doesn't really kind of collapse in and the cells are quite sort of rigid which gives it that crispiness these ones are super juicy as well and one thing I would say is that the other day we actually cut open a nice big one of these as well and what I found with that one is that it had even higher sweetness than this super insanely crispy and very juicy and just so sweet and so good and that's because since we picked that other one these ones have had a bit more rain so we had quite a lot of rain about two days ago and that causes the watermelons to suck up quite a lot of moisture which then can dilute the sugars a little bit but overall I'm super happy with this definitely give these a try I reckon they're so good you won't be disappointed I hope this video has given you some insight into how to grow your own watermelons or at least how I grow them so that you can adapt it to your situation and we're heading into winter over here now so for those of you heading into spring and summer all the best with the growing season good luck with the melons and if you want to see me grow some other watermelons check out these videos over here come back oh shoot ow you're standing on me all right stay there just oh king wasp stung me mother