(gentle music playing) (plastic flapping) (birds chirping) (birds chirping) (water running) - It's now the middle of May. We have some warmth, and as well as that, these plants, the melon plants I sowed
on the 4th of April have been on this hotbed. So that's been keeping them warm. Even now the hotbed is... It's actually getting cooler, funnily, but it's really made a
difference to the melons. And this is one of the plants and you can see the difference, well actually not much difference. It was only three days ago. It was mainly 'cause of
delays in being able to film. I potted them on. This is something you can do if you've got your ground not-quite-ready, for whatever reason, and you've got a plant that's ready, 'cause this plant, a plant like this, you can see by the root ball, it's very fully rooted inside there. That's a sign, that's one sign that it'll benefit from being
given a bit more compost. Also, these lower leaves just starting to yellow a little bit. That's the first sign
of running out of food. And so what I did was just pop them into a bigger pot, so you see the size
difference, it's not huge. This is seven centimetre, that's nine centimetre. And just when you pop them in there, all I do is I put them near the bottom that that's new roots there. That's three days ago I did that and pushed new compost around the smaller root
ball inside this pot. And that's kept it going
until we need to put it in, which is today, as it happens. So we're going to plant
the slightly larger one. We're going to do melon, two types of watermelon and loofah. This is the watermelon, it's home saved seed, Early Moonbeam. I'm going to put it in here. I'm not going to put a
string under this one, because partly the fruit are so heavy that it might be hard
to support that weight, but in fact they do very well just sprawling on the ground. You could grow the other
melons on the ground. They do take up more space though. One advantage in the greenhouse
is I've got this brick, the stems can trail along the brick where I can't be growing anything else. I really want to cram things in here. Like you'll see, this garlic
that we planted last October. These are tomatoes behind me. Self-sown zinnia. There's carrots I sold in
February to get early harvest. They'll be out the way soon. And then the tomatoes, we had winter salad here that's now gone. Tomatoes. Then we've got more garlic in the middle. I've got a lettuce going to seed. There's some celery over there. So there's a bit of everything. And the watermelon I'll
just fit in nicely. I'm not worrying too much
about rotation though, there's a nice earthworm. Wow, actually that is nice to see all these worms. I'm not enjoying disturbing the worms, but there's some good life in this soil. It's nice and moist. We've put compost on top, so I'm not planning to
feed these plants at all. They're just going to go
into soil which, every year, once a year in May, has an application on top, in this case of old horse manure, and a bit of either homemade compost or green waste purchased. I'm going to put it in a little bit deeper than the pot is deep, so it slightly disappears into a hole. I always want that to be the case, you'll see that with everything I plant. Just pushing in gently around the edge, not filling in the hole too much, then it's easier to water. They're not going to
need much water actually because the sores are already very moist. The pot-was pre watered. Just a tickle, just to help it settle. So that's watermelon. We'll come back to this one. (birds chirping) So here's the string. I'm going to plant the
melon there, melon there. I'm going to show you how
I attached the string. It's actually one we used last year. You can keep them, polypropylene. The reason for using polypropylene is so that it doesn't rot in the soil, 'cause you're putting
it under the root ball and if you used natural string that would decompose before
the end of the season and then your plant's
got nothing, no support, and your melons will fall down. So the string is there. I'll just quickly mention that. That one is on the poly tunnel frame. Most of them we've put wires
in the poly tunnel here, and here's some cucumber we've planted just a few days ago and I didn't tie them up at the time. You could do this with melons too. You could use fleece to
give them extra warmth, say for a few days, even a week or two after planting, if it was particularly cold at night, but more than anything here actually, it's the wind. The prevailing wind
blows in that end door, and it really buffets these plants around and cucumber and melons,
they don't like that. I mean they'll survive but they'll be a lot better off for a bit of protection, particularly when they're very small. So here I'm doing a
different kind of knot. It's a very quick, simple
slip knot, like that. It's not to make the
string tight but just firm and it's giving support
to the plant as it grows. And it's only kept in the ground by the knotted end under the root ball. So for the planting it's
as we saw in the greenhouse for the watermelon, you make a hole. I like to be precise with my hole. I use the trowel to cut down
the sides of the compost. I don't want to take up more soil or compost than I need to. To your eyes, this probably
looks like pure compost. It's actually, the recent compost is is about three centimetres on top. And this is the accumulation of 10 years of previous composting. And it's got kind of... It's merging now into the soil below, through the activity of soil organisms. So there's a beautiful humus-rich surface and plants love it. And I'm not doing a lot of rotation here. So we'll sometimes grow
tomatoes after tomatoes. I think no dig helps with that. Now, the knotted end of the string, I'm putting in the hole
downwards like that, and it loops around a bit at the bottom so that the root ball of the plant sits on top of the string. And then the string can't
really pull out now, especially once the roots get growing because, for one thing, that knot would have to
travel under the root ball and the melons, cucumber, whatever you're planting with a string, very quickly makes new
roots around a string and it would've a job to get out. In my experience it'll occasionally happen if we'd made a mistake, a silly mistake of some kind or the knot wasn't very big. But that's already pretty firmly in there. And one last thing you can do is just make it a little firmer, maybe the string a little. Again like I say, not too tight but just so that it's ready
to have a stem round it. And that's the only support that we're going to give to these melons. Just a gentle wind round like that, quite frequently actually, 'cause melons grow fast. If it stays warm, within a month this
plant could be up here. Straight after planting is a
good time to give some water. It may or may not need to be quite a bit. You notice when you transplant how moist the ground is around, this was pretty moist. You also notice how much
moisture is in your pot, which may not be fully moist, which is fine actually, melons and cucumbers, don't over-water the plant. So they might be quite
dry at planting time. This is now the moment to give more and I've got a fine rose on the can, but I could actually for this, take that off, it would be fine to do this as well, where you're just... 'Cause the point is you're just watering around the root ball. There's no need at this
point to water everything and just giving a bit of water too, not too fast but even
at that rate is okay, can go on the leaves as well. It's just helping the root ball to make contact with the soil and compost around the roots. Here we are now in the
middle of June nearly. It's only 16 days since these
two plants went in the ground. When it's warm, and it hasn't been hot, it's been warm. Daytime temperatures
outside low 70s Fahrenheit, low 20 centigrade at best, often cooler actually. Today it's a little bit warmer. It's around 26, 27 in here at the moment. 80 Fahrenheit. That's nice for melons. But they grow, with no dig soil in particular, I think they grow more rapidly and this is the warm
side of my poly tunnel. So I've been twisting around the top, that's the main thing. Every second day pretty much, 'cause they're growing probably
about that much every day. And then I made a mistake here, I can show you what
happens when it goes wrong. I was twisting this one and I just finished watering actually and it was wet and I think that's was part of the factor. It made it heavier. It snapped, sort of very tender as well. So I've lost the top of my
plant, what do I do now? I'm seeing if I can
persuade this side shoot to become a main leader. On the side shoots is
where you get the melon. And so that's a melon
there on this side shoot. And I'm thinking if I take this melon off, then as this side shoot grows more, I'm going to persuade it
to grow around the string. So all the side shoots have melons and I've only started leaving one already. You get quite a bit of growing
under their belt so to speak. And then let them start to grow melons and also to ripen them. This is male flowers here, that is totally fine. It's not like cucumbers, the male flowers do not
make the fruits bitter and they're good for pollination. And so this is Emir, the F1 hybrid, larger fruited melon. And this is the smaller fruited melon, which you can see the
leaves are quite different. And also the inter node length between the leaves is shorter, so this melon is not growing so tall. It is just a question of
keeping it twisted round. And we'll come back here, three, four weeks and probably be amazed. I hope we'll be amazed they'll be up here. Five weeks later, it's just past mid-July. It's 37 centigrade in here today. That's nearly a hundred Fahrenheit. And well I'm feeling it a bit, but these melons are loving it. They can be as hot as you like almost, in this climate anyway. What I'm doing at the moment, the main job is just
pinching out new growth. Very illustrated nicely here. So on a side shoot
we've got a lovely melon and beyond that, if you try and get more melons on the same branch, often they won't work and that's an aborting melon basically. It's small and starting to shrivel. All of that can come off. I've left a bit of this
just with a video actually, I would've been a bit more on it before. But it's helps to show this stage. All you're doing at this point, with vertical melons, is watching for these side
shoots, again like that. See the lovely melon behind it there? And take them off. So it's just prune, prune, prune, every couple of days. Regular watering. When I say regular, even in this heat, we're not watering every
day, every two days. I watered in here yesterday evening. Next watering will be
Tuesday, that's tomorrow. Here also illustrates the aborting fruit, that's never going to make a melon. Unlike this one, which has. And this is the plant
where I broke the top when I was twisting it around, by mistake. And so these are growing on a side shoot. I'm actually pretty impressed myself. And we got three. Three decent size melons on this plant. I'm happy with that because these can grow quite big. As you can see actually
on the one behind me here, that's more of a full sized
melon of this variety. It's all the same variety called Emir. And same story. Pinching out the side shoots. I just found, look at this, that's a side shoot. And I'm not seeing on that any melons. I even need my knife. I'm going to take that all off. And the one more question
we're left with is, okay we keep pruning. The next stage is ripening. How do you know when
these melons are ripe? I'm often asked this and it's a fair question 'cause they don't change
much in appearance. It'll be the aroma and I can't convey that on film. But we'll aim to be back
here in about a month and we'll look to catch a ripe melon. It does change a bit visually and it'll give you an
idea what to look for. And one last thing is, we'll put a little
demonstrate as well here. You could grow these on the ground. If you do, it's a lot less work but you probably won't
get quite as many melons. So let's see what happens
in about a month's time. It's the middle of August, a wonderful time of year here and we've had an unusually hot summer, warm temperatures often
over 25 centigrade, high 70s in the evening,
into the 80s, Fahrenheit, lots of sunshine. Perfect melon weather and you're going to
see some great results. And in fact the aroma
in here is remarkable. So let's go and have a look at the two melons that I was showing you back in early summer, even from planting here in May. So they've only been
here for three months. And you can see there's quite a lot of fruit here, but these are not the best ones actually. We'll see some better ones in a minute. It's interesting how they vary. And that's the Minnesota
Midget, doing well. But this one, do you remember the top snap, when I was twisting around string? So I grew a side shoot up the plant and it hasn't worked so well. And it's actually really interesting, 'cause we've got... These melons have just ripened but they've ripened
without much green leaf. There's a little bit there. And when that happens, you can see they look ripe and you get this cracking around the neck. That's all good sign of ripeness. But ate on yesterday, It smells all right actually, it smells nice. But it wasn't as delicious. We'll see, we're going to have
a little tasting at the end. Now here's another interesting thing that happened just now. This one fell down,
just since this morning. I found it on the ground. So it's fallen from the plant above and I hadn't noticed that it was ripe. But you can see that same thing. The change of colour, if we compare it with that one, this is a (indistinct) and, yeah, it was ripe and I missed it. Actually, do you know
what I'm even wondering? I'm wondering if it came off this plant? But it was there. I'm just intrigued, 'cause the difference
in colour is so strong. Melons. It's amazing. But we'll see when we open it up. So these ones, you can see that many still not ripe but I think they won't be long. You can see a bit of mildew on the leaves and we're going to do a
fascinating comparison in a second with different varieties and how much mildew they produce. But when you start to
see this much mildew, it's a little bit worrying because eventually the mildew
will take away the green and stop them photosynthesizing so the fruit won't be too sweet. But I think these are
just going to make it, there's actually one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight and I've had one already. So that's been nine
melons on this one plant. Really good value. And there's not much you can
do about mildew in my book. I know people talk about spraying milk and things like that, but other people say no
it didn't work for them. It's more about, well I think it's more about, the variety and just the conditions
that happen to be there. You should only be getting
mildew on the older leaves and when that happens it's okay because most of the growth
has already happened. And I do cut some mildew off. But look at this plant here. Furthest North variety. So much mildew that even leaves
are going yellow with it. Well that's partly old
age actually as well, but that's partly mildew not good. There's not much green leaf on this plant. There's still quite a few
melons needing to ripen. There is one here which has ripened. So I'm going to harvest that. You could harvest these melons just by snapping off 'cause they come off quite easily, like the one that fell down. But if you cut it like that, that keeps it intact and that's not damaged the actual melon. It'll store for longer if you want to, if you're not going to eat it immediately. So that's Furthest North. And look at this one right next to it. Same growing conditions,
hardly any mildew. This is the Minnesota Midget, which I like so much. It's actually from home saved seed. Really pleased with it. And I have been trimming a bit, cutting off odd stalks, but more than that any... Yeah, I should have left one of two. Often it's this leaf that goes mildew. But look at that, it's really green, the little leaf you get growing on the melon branch and when you see that happening a lot, that means you're in trouble. Or the melon... You see now look, that one's looking quite ripe. It's just starting to yellow around there, but it's not giving an aroma. Those are your two tests. This one's also going a little
bit yellow and this one. But down here I think we've got one. Oh, I don't know, let's have a sniff. This is the most ripe of all of them. No, it's just coming, but it's definitely not there yet. Two, three days maybe. So this is what the fun bit, watching for when they come ready and then gathering your bounty. There's one here that I think... I've been looking at for quite a few days. Well these two actually. These I think are Ogen. I'm afraid I had a mix up with labels. But I was given some seed just called Ogen and this looks like it. Actually, I don't think
that one's there either. And this one too. Nope, not quite. Nevermind 'cause we've
got so many ripe ones. But you can see the difference between, say that one and that one. You're just looking for
these kinds of changes. Change of colour. But cracking around the neck on this one is not happening at all. It's looking very good still, very firm. That could be four or five days. And then the difference between
growing them up a string. So same variety here as on the ground here and we can't actually see too well how many melons are on the ground here, but I don't think it's nearly as many as we have on the plant up the string and they're nothing like is ripe and they're smaller. So, for me on the whole, much that I like the ease
of growing on the ground, I think it's suitable where you've got really hot dry climate and a cracking hot summer, hotter than we have even this year, you're more likely to get a result partly 'cause of controlling this mildew. And the mildew tends to happen, exactly like you can see here, on the many of the branches coming out. There's a side shoot basically that would've been a side
chute on the tall plant, it's come out as the
main stem which is there. That might even be a side shoot itself. No, hang on, sorry, it's going underneath. This is quite confusing. So if we follow that back, it's going to, wow, it's going way back. This is where it difficult to plot the evolution of a plant on the ground unless you're really on it. I think I'm not even going to try and find that origin of that one. But that's an example of
how side sheets can grow. And most of the mildew leaves here are on little side shoots
coming out of the stem. So let's now, by way of comparison, oh there's one falling down, ah. And this does have a bit of aroma. That's falling off this plant. So there's another tasting, a slightly different one. We're going to, just by
way of complete contrast, have a look in the greenhouse at a watermelon plant. The one plant I put in back in May, three months. And meanwhile outside a lot has
happened also in the garden. These are all grown in three months. That's runner or pole beans for dry seed. We haven't picked them. These are French beans that we're picking for seed, for pods. There's more fresh beans there that, because it's been so dry, we've had very little rain and I've only got limited water, so I've decided to leave
them to grow dry pods. So these are dry pods of beans that you can pick quite
soon for Haricot beans, to eat in the winter. So I switching from a summer harvest to a winter harvest on the same plant. And this greenhouse
gets a little bit hotter than the poly tunnel. I also do all my propagation in here, which is fine in the summer, even lettuce. Totally possible to do in
these high temperatures. And hat I'm wondering is, do we have a ripe watermelon? So this one plant has grown, there's a lot, there's four there and then if you look along, there's one down there, there were three there. I've picked one already up the end and we were looking at them
in just now actually and there was a little
frog hopping around. This is fantastic habitat
for frogs and toads. I think there's quite a
few under these leaves. You can see how dense the leaves are and from that one plant, how does it do that? Well I don't know. I mean all of these melons
I've been showing you and this watermelon, I'm growing without any
fertiliser, no feed, literally nothing except the compost that we put on in May before planting. And that does the whole year. We grow salads after that as well. So shall we have a look? How do you know when a watermelon's ripe? Well the big clue is, now I learned this from Katia in Slovenia, she's Delicioustale on Instagram. Their summers are hotter there. This needs to go brown. The little tendril that's coming out, there's the stem of the actual fruit and there's the little tendril. Ideally that's going to be brown. It's not. However, you see the change of colour between this one and the one right next to it. Again, it's rather bit like with melons. This is a yellow me watermelon by the way. Yellow flesh. We'll see, I'm going to pick it even though I know it's
not perfectly ripe. Might seem a bit of waste. But we're getting close, 'cause another test you can do is the knocking. (hollow knocking) And if you compare that to this one (dull knocking) just a bit more dense and dull, this one's just that bit more hollow. (hollow knocking) So, we're going to see
a not ripe watermelon. A lot of people won't
have seen that before. The moment of truth. There you go. And that'll actually, cutting this a bit early, will help the plant find energy to develop these others. 'cause we're mid-August, we're going to run out of heat and, well mainly heat, quite soon in our climate. And to get a watermelon in September or get it ripe in September, that is not so easy. So Furthest North melon, the one that the leaves are starting to go a bit mildew and we're going to see
that it looks very ripe. You couldn't ask for a
riper-looking melon than that. And it's quite yellow flesh. I'm not clear whether
this is a true Charentais, which would be more orange. This is the same melon
when it's not quite so ripe and when it is very ripe. So when you pick melons, I picked this about four days ago and it's stored it since. You can see how they
change once you pick them. Still good. If you'd have cut too long, they're going to go quite soft, sweeter, maybe lose a bit of acidity. Actually that's nicer. It's nicer than I thought it would be. It's pretty good. But it doesn't have the
depth of flavour, I'd say. It's quite mild. Okay, watermelon, moment of truth. Oh, I'm a bit nervous here. That's got a lovely sound. It's sort of scrunching as I cut it. (watermelon scrunching) It's a yellow variety, by the way. Don't expect a red skin. Oh crikey, look at all
that juice coming out. This is promising. Ah, it's getting there. But these fruit, those pips, you see they would be black
if that was fully ripe. Having said that, well some people eat
these don't they, why not? Hmm. It's not bad. This is totally edible at this stage. Refreshing. Slightly sweet. Not, though, fully flavoured, but actually not far off. I'm beginning to wonder
if I remember that right. But I'm sure these were
black when I sowed them. It was home saved seed. Okay. What is this? I'm pretty sure this could
be the Ogen, I think. What colour will this be? I reckon it's going to be orange. I've not eaten one of these yet. This is the seed I was given. It's smelling nice. It's smelling aromatic. Yeah, look at that. That's pretty good. That's a sign of a reasonably ripe, just the lovely orange
colour of that flesh. And then the sweetness,
more than anything, is your guide. When they're less ripe. Ah, that's delicious actually. I would, normally, I'd cut that closer to the skin. I don't know if you ever noticed, but the closer you go to the skin when you cut them or eat them, the less sweet it is. Sweetest bit is in the
middle around the seeds. It's still good. We have two Minnesota
Midget, pretty recent and this one's, again,
I picked four days ago. It's in the store. I made a cut for the video actually and I realised we should
do this on screen. Yeah, look at this, look at that. That for me is a
beautifully ripe Charentais, which probably is going to be... Oh, it's really soft to cut as well. That's another sign. Very tender flesh. Oh, I wish I could share this with you. Really, that it is not only sweetness but so much flavour there. Hmm. That's one of the best I've
had this summer actually, Minnesota Midget. Okay, Emir. Emir, F1. Mostly when we've been eating
these, everyone's raving and, in fact, including
Alessandro who's filming, I gave him a plant back in May and he's had great results in
his small garden in London. That's Spicy Moustache, he's making this video. Check him out and it's
got a nice urban garden. Ah, gosh. That's not quite so impressive. I mustn't prejudge it. Taste will tell. Taste is the deciding factor really. Mm. No, it's not as good. But that's from a plant where the leaves have
started to go mildew, so that illustrates exactly that point. Whereas this one's from a plant where the leaves were still
nearly all green still and hardly any mildew at all. So the Minnesota Midget
in this little taste test has come out really well. So variety I'll warmly recommend and I'll leave you with that. I'm eating melons. I hope you've enjoyed watching the progress of these
plants through the summer and have a go, but if your climate is
cold, I wouldn't try. I mean this one, Furthest North, was bred in Canada to
grow outside in Denmark, to give you an idea. Summers are not hot in Denmark. They're colder than here. Outdoors. I don't even try to grow
melons outdoors here. If you're freakily
lucky, you could succeed, but it can be, four times out of five, you do a lot of work for nothing. So give them as much warmth as you can and hope for a good summer if you're in a temperate region and you can experience this joy and the fun and the excitement of watching them grow and ripen. (gentle music playing)
