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Post by templeton on Oct 26, 2015 17:01:08 GMT -5
I never really did melons, but in the nice wet La Nina years around '10, I surprisingly grew some tasty Charentais. Inspired, I got some Farthest North seed, and grew them out in a mixed melon plot mostly from donated seed giving it little thought. I had slippers and non-slippers, fragrant and odorless, tasty and spitters, splitters and non-splitters. Luckily I selected the earliest melons from the mixed plot, which i think were FN. I've been growing them for about 3 years now. I've got a bit more purpose the last few years. My objectives are to get a nice early melon, that produces good fruit on minimal water, sends me signals about when to pick it - slipping, fragrance - that produces single serve melons, sweet, tasty, perfumed,orange fleshed. Farthest North which I sourced from Adaptive, was luckily a good place to start. My planting have been very modest - half a dozen plants, selecting from the earliest and productive ones - in a couple of seasons only 1 or 2 plants survived to produce fruit. So this year , a good testing El Nino on the way, I've planted out another half dozen or so seeds from my Dry Mounds growout, and just sown into peat pots 4 of steev 's Dry Wit melons. I might let 'em cross, or might isolate them.
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Post by darrenabbey on Oct 26, 2015 22:01:37 GMT -5
I've been working on a similar project in Minnesota. Very early, single-serve melons, with all the wonder that melons can be.
Something that jumped out of my small patch a couple years ago was a very small melon with a rind so thin that I was able to eat the fruit like an apple. The specific plant was less than ideal in many other ways (fruit was -furry- and not very sweet, with a small number of fruits on the vine), but I saved seeds from it. The seed population it grew out from contains a great deal of diversity, so I'm hoping to find better combinations of traits that retain such entirely edible fruit.
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Post by raymondo on Oct 26, 2015 23:31:15 GMT -5
Worthwhile projects. Melons are among my favourite fruits.
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Post by templeton on Oct 27, 2015 6:14:00 GMT -5
Hey, darrenabbey, just reading your blog post on mistletoes - one of my interests as well. You muse on growing in artificial media - i always wanted to have a display garden of phytoparasites, now there's a challenge, not only do you have to get the host growing well, you then have to establish the parasite on it...imagine, a parasitarium, every mistletoe in Australia, growing in the one garden... i wonder if it is even possible... Perhaps I'll stick to vegetables this lifetime...☺
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Post by philagardener on Oct 27, 2015 16:19:32 GMT -5
Growing parasites can just suck all the energy out of a person
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Post by darrenabbey on Oct 27, 2015 20:15:40 GMT -5
Hey, darrenabbey, just reading your blog post on mistletoes - one of my interests as well. You muse on growing in artificial media - i always wanted to have a display garden of phytoparasites, now there's a challenge, not only do you have to get the host growing well, you then have to establish the parasite on it...imagine, a parasitarium, every mistletoe in Australia, growing in the one garden... i wonder if it is even possible... Perhaps I'll stick to vegetables this lifetime...☺ The idea has intrigued me for much of the last 20 years. I imagine such a garden would take a while to setup (as [some of] the plants grow soooo slooow), but might be something a botanical garden would invest in doing.
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Post by templeton on Oct 28, 2015 4:15:59 GMT -5
I was intrigued in the tea plantations of Sri Lanka half a decade ago, to see the introduced Eucalypts and Grevillea robusta infested with the local mistletoes - two sp. if i recall. T
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