Growing Watermelon in a Container

well hello there and welcome back to another episode of backyard to table where i'm today i am going to plant some watermelon seeds i went to dollar tree and i bought these watermelon seeds they are sugar baby watermelon and i'm gonna try them out they're four four dollars so for 25 cents how can you go wrong right so right here i've got the tub that i used last year for sweet potatoes as i first started my hand at sweet potatoes and now sweet potatoes are on the other side of the yard growing in a much bigger area with fines and all of that kind of stuff but we'll get to that a little later so come with me i'm going to take and i'm going to remove the weeds that are visible here and then i'm going to add some compost now i use timberline compost it's a cow manure and compost mix and i've had very good success with it until i finally get my own compost growing and and ready to go this is what i'm going to go ahead and use so let's get started put on gloves it is already 81 degrees out here the beginning of march now i know a lot of you are still experiencing frost and low temperatures and everything like that but lately now we are moving into what i call the beginning of summer and uh so the temperatures have been like 70s at night and then back up to mid 80s during the daytime so i'm gonna get started now so that we don't fry trying to get this done today now i try to pull it out as close to the root as possible and then once we start turning it all over with the compost and everything hopefully that'll keep a lot of it from seeing the light of day and it won't grow back but we'll see one never knows everything is trial and error i'm still learning hopefully you're still learning and enjoying and that's what keeps me coming back so so all right so we got the majority of the weeds out and now i'm going to go ahead and add in the compost to reinvigorate the soil soil here in florida is very sandy and it makes it really really crumbly i mean that's the sand okay however this didn't start out as sand this started out as top soil with compost mixed in and peat moss and this is what it's become a year later so now from everything i've read yeah a little remnant of what would have been a sweet potato from everything i've read sweet potato um not sweet potato got sweet potato on the mud now colic greens would grow nicely with this here that's from the resource that i looked up however the fact that the vines on a watermelon plant can grow up to 20 feet in length that doesn't give me a whole lot of space and in addition it needs full sun like eight hours or more a day and lots of water so that's why i'm going to stick it here in this tub because in this part of the yard i can just let the vines overflow this tub and grow out over here to the right i've got a little bit of sugar cane behind me here i've got some banana trees over here is the okra bed but i can kind of move things around as the vines grow out so it'll be all right and nobody cuts the yard except me so there won't be anybody coming through with a wheat whacker and getting rid of all the vines that are growing so that's mixed up really well go ahead and put in the compost where's that knife i went out and i bought this handy little bag that people use for tools at home depot and it's coming very very handy it allows me to keep all of everything that i typically use here as i go through the garden on a day-to-day basis and kind of figure out what needs to be done what needs to be pruned what needs to be picked all of that type of stuff and it keeps me from having to go back and forth and back and forth to go and get tools and things like velcro tape and string for vines and hooks for laying back down the weave carpet so all of that helps me out saves me some time all right so let's go ahead and get this open and i'm gonna go ahead and put in the whole entire thing this is only one cubic feet and for those of you who hate math that's just one foot by one foot by one foot so that's how much is there and this should do me up pretty good see this is why people tend to grow stuff on their own this is why i finally decided to go ahead and do my own compost because right in the middle of this bag that's just supposed to be compost is a wire why there's a wire i don't know maybe we'll write the manufacturer so at any rate you got to just look out for these kinds of things sometimes i find bits of plastic and all of that type of stuff that's frankly not going to help your garden at all all right so let me go ahead do this up now i'm not one for reading i prefer an audio book and i go from there however i am visual love me some tv movies that type of stuff so i went i looked at some videos from some trusted sources of mine and found out their successes and now i'm gonna try it okay so watermelon seeds the watermelons are actually supposed to be put into a mound and then planted and it grows down and etc etc amen but i'm hard headed like i've said before so i'm just going to go ahead and i'm going to put about eight seeds inside here because what i've gathered from numerous uh sources and that they do better by not transplanting them so that's what i'm gonna try and again these are sugar baby i'm gonna plant eight and then when they all start coming up i'm going to whittle it down to just two i think that should be sufficient for this little tub right here and look watermelon seeds that look like watermelon seeds figure the odds okay so i'm going to take the seeds and these according to the packaging and others some have said half an inch some have said three quarter inch some have said a whole inch this package says half an inch so i'm gonna split the baby and i'm gonna go with three quarter inch which is just past that split on my finger so i'm just going to put in the hole five six seven eight one two three four five six seven oops did they go in there nope they didn't even make it all right and eight okay so the rest of these i'm gonna put back inside here and maybe i'll decide to plant another little section with watermelon we'll see yeah it is south florida zone 10b and the majority of the year our soil is above 70 degrees so i got a lot of time to to grow these things that take 80 days to grow okay so i'm just going to go ahead cover them back over and then we're going to water so so now i'm going to test and see just how far down we've got in the water i know for a fact i didn't get all the way to the bottom but yep i at least got down to the point where the seeds are now i'm gonna take put my little steaks where the seeds were now why am i doing this it's basically because there were weeds in here once before there'll be weeds probably once again before these even begin to germinate or at the same time so what i'm doing is putting a marker to let me know where the seeds were placed so i have a good idea of what i can and cannot pull never grown watermelon before it's the first time don't even know what it's supposed to look like so let me give myself a helping hand all right and that's it there you go so i'll keep you updated as things come along we'll do other little clips and so forth and hopefully in the next 80 to 90 days we'll have some nice sized watermelons that we can go ahead and begin to eat and i'll show you how i do the watermelon salad and then i do pickled watermelon and then i do pickled watermelon rind which is absolutely fantastic it's almost like a ginger ginger candy so throw nothing away and then this year i've decided that hey if they can dry seeds and use them then i can dry seeds and use them so some of the seeds we get this year i'm going to take and let them dry and then use them for my own planting again so thank you for joining us and we'll see you next time on backyard to table bye

Channel: Southern Boy Farm

Views: 35,503

Rating: 4.9447675 out of 5

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Id: 5LSKz3k2kHA

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 07 2021