The melon plants went out yesterday. These are the same plants Søren is growing in his garden this year and what he grew last year as well. You can see my plants are much smaller than Søren’s. I also didn’t prepare my bed with horse manure like he did, I just gave mine a generous amount of compost.
The basic idea with these plants is this. Melons don’t normally grow outdoors in northern latitudes (this is in respect to the northern hemisphere). Some varieties do better than others, but none do very well. So what do you do if you want to try to breed a melon for northern climates? If they don’t grow at all, you have a chicken and egg situation, because you can’t get them to grow in the first place so how can you even consider crossing different varieties in order to create something more suitable for your climate?
The solution to this chicken and egg problem is for someone in a more southern location to do the preliminary work for you and create a genepool mix or grex, by combining the genetics of a number of different melon varieties which have been shown to be suitable for northern climates. The idea is I will grow a number of these plants, and be able to select which melons do well in my garden.
A special thanks goes out to both the Seed Ambassadors who brought these seeds with them when they travelled in Europe, as well as Tim Peters who created this Melon Mix.
