My Cantaloupe Breeding Patch

[DarJones]

Joseph, from what I can see, it looks like a lot of male blossoms. As Jonny noted above, it is the first female flower that determines earliness because the fruit matures in 5 to 7 weeks after the female blossom appears. A lot of work has been done in cucumbers to select for early production of female flowers. Cantaloupe should be similar.

DarJones

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

Joseph i too have about three or four (suspected) cantaloupes or melons flowing just like yours. I did not plant cantaloupes this year, so they must have been seed that i planted last year (and they stayed dormant in my dry soil). I also have about two watermelons doing the same early flowering this year. I suspect it's the heat. I too think mine are only male flowers so far.

But my first female flower on a winter squash plant appeared the other day. I believe it probably has already been polinated by the several male squash flowers nearby.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Confirming that among the dozen plants that are blooming precociously that there was only one female blossom this morning.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

First muskmelons of the season.

[steev]

Looking good.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Today's harvest. I'm sure loving growing landrace melons. They are definitely very content growing in my fields these days. Sure a big difference from the first time I tried to grow melons in my cold high-altitude desert garden.

[Drahkk]

Very nice!

[templeton]

You're an inspiration, Joseph. Great haul.
T

[jondear]

After reading through this thread, I have a few thoughts based on my limited melon growing ventures here in Maine.

In recent years I've grown Delicious 51 with decent results. I've saved seed from the best plants for a few years.

Then on a whim, I did some research and decided to do a little back year breeding. In the first year I thought I should help them out by seeding in trays and planting out through landscape fabric. Remember I'm in Maine, not really the muskmelon capital of the world. I chose 5 varieties each for different attributes they had the potential of bringing to the party. Some were early, some not so early. The varieties were : passport, orange honey, petite gris de Rennes, oka and my own saved delicious 51. Both passport and orange honey raced off to a good start but in the end, I was really disappointed in their flavor. Petite gris lagged behind the rest, didn't have very big leaves and was the last melon to give me ripe fruit. But, when it did.... Heavenly didn't begin to describe it. Both the delicious 51 and oka did OK but lacked something... Mostly sunshine, it was not the best of melon years, way too cool and too much rain upon ripening.

Fast forward to 2014.

I decided to not plant the saved honeydew seed until I found out how many of the crosses contained honeydew traits. I added a few new melons from different sources. I like the idea Joseph mentioned about getting fruits from the farmers market due to the year head start of being locally adapted. So in went : everything from last year (sans honeydew) plus sweet n early, Iroquois, and f2 butterscotch and canary melon from the farmers market and an almost perfectly round muskmelon from the grocery store. I seeded in trays because this year was especially late warming up. Grew them for 2 weeks and only transplanted the most vigorously growing figuring it was hybrid vigor. I did put them in bare ground this year however. Call me cheap, but I have issue buying landscape fabric that just doesn't last.

This is going to be my best melon growing year to date. It's only the first of August and I have many many melons set on nearing a good size. I see some plants that aren't keeping up but if they have exceptional flavor they may get to live on in next years melon patch. I noticed a few plants from last year have a great crown set. They will continue on if they taste like anything. Others have one or two good sized fruits but are continually setting more. I can see how both traits could have their benefits. Next year should be a lot of fun. I guess I should plant out in fruit to row next year to help with further selection... Thoughts anyone on where to go from here?

[Joseph Lofthouse]

jondear:

I have come to love starting plants in the greenhouse. Makes it much easier to select for early vigor and quick germination. If I plant directly into the field it's easy to not pay attention and have slow germinating plants emerge later and not get chopped out, or to allow plants with low vigor to contribute pollen to the patch. I tend to plant into bulk pots, but then need to bare-root the plants during transplant to not drag not-yet-germinated seeds with them.

It's easy for me to plant fruit-to-row. It's hard for me to keep track of the pedigrees. I can see which sibling groups do well, or produce early, but with my record keeping skills pedigrees end up getting lost. I partially deal with that by ranking fruits as they are harvested or tested. Then I start planting the patch with the highest ranked plants, and trend towards worse plants throughout the patch.

This year I pulled out the watermelons that had yellow flesh and planted their offspring together on the same side of the patch. I want to increase the concentration of yellow fleshed melons. I also planted a yellow skinned melon in that patch... Yellow flesh and yellow skin might be really clever. "How do I tell if my watermelon is ripe?" "Harvest it when it turns yellow".

When I started breeding cantaloupes, I never expected that eventually I would end up selecting for netted skin. My culture has a hard time accepting melons with smooth skin.

[jondear]

I saw a picture of melon seedling in a single pot and thought "wow what a hassle it must be to separate them", but I see now why. I seeded several seeds per cell in six packs and thinned to the strongest one with scissors as to not disturb their roots.

As far as smooth melons verses netted, it's pretty much the same here. It's obvious as you look at the melon section at the local supermarket. Netted muskmelons outnumber canary, honeydew and piel de sapo types about 50 to one here. The farmers markets here are moving a fair number of smoother skin types though. I would think that a charantais type landrace would move very well once people tasted them.

[kazedwards]

Around here netted skin melons are considered cantaloupe and smooth skin considered a melon, so much so that they are thought to be as different as an apple and a pear. I never realized that they were the same until I started gardening.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

The first melons of the season were harvested on Monday. Sorry about the boring picture (repeat of last year's). They were 2-3 days earlier this year... And there were 3 first melons. The other was gifted to the land owner.

[raymondo]

They look delectable.

[cortona]

they looks good! how it smell?