How to Grow The World’s Smallest Watermelon!

[Music] well hello everyone and welcome to another very exciting complete growing guide here on the M Gardner channel in today's complete growing guide I'm going to be showing you how to grow the world's smallest watermelon no I kid they're not actually watermelon although they look identical to a watermelon they're actually called Mexican sour gerkens or as I like to call them and a lot of other people like to call them cucam melons and you know ironically enough they taste a lot like a cucumber and a melon mix um and they look a lot like a cucumber and a watermelon so they're a very sweet very kind of tart and uh cucumber flavor going on it's just it's so unique I really can't express it uh in words because it's it's sweet it's tart it's um it's not bitter at all and yeah this just a crunch you know the crunch is just unbelievable on these things um so I definitely recommend growing them but I want to talk about how to grow them now because there's a few things that make these things amazing they are super nutrient-dense very high in vitamin K E and C as well as fiber so you get a lot of your benefits of your cucumbers only in this super small little package that's so fun to eat it's really fun for kids and uh they're no bigger than and grapes another thing that makes cucum melons very fun to grow is the fact that if you are plagued with powdery mildew like we are here or if you live down south and I know it gets very humid and a lot of people say I can't grow a lot of my my zucchinis and my my cucumbers and pumpkins and stuff because I just get powdery mildew this is not the case with cucum melons they're extremely resilient to powdery mildew these here are these have been growing and are still growing and flowering and fruiting about 4 weeks after our whole entire cucumber trellis has been completely decimated by powdery mildew finally they lasted a long time I was actually surprised how long my cucumbers lasted but these are still going strong so no powdery mildew I think that's a great I think that's a great thing about it also another thing is pest pest's got a couple of our cucumbers it's not normal around here but I know cucumbers definitely are uh the you know the target for mice and and other rodents and stuff like that but these they never bother them and so you're not going to have the pest problems that you have normally now the first first thing to talk about when growing cucum melons is sunlight as you can see the sun is nice and bright and that's why uh I am just absolutely loving it today so the the sunlight in this Garden is between the sun uh exposure in this Garden is about 7 to 11 hours um in this spot of the Garden in other places a little more like 11 um cuz we have a tree line that kind of comes in the uh in the early morning of really tall maple trees and so this part of the garden gets about 7 to 11 hours of Sun depending depending on the time of year um this time of year it gets about 7 hours in Midsummer it gets more close to 11 hours cuz the Sun comes in a spot where there's absolutely no maple trees at all which is great um so it gets about the same as the other Gardens so I would say between 7 11 hours of Sun is what is what these get but they're going to do just fine with between 5 and seven so if you don't have that much sun at least give them 5 hours and they're going to do fine now the next thing that I wanted to talk about was nutrients these need a lot of nitrogen they are a very fast grower extremely vigorous Viner and so you're going to need a lot of nitrogen to support that growth what I do is I just fertilize them like I do normally but I give them Trifecta Plus in the spring they've only been fertilized once and they've been fine but I make sure to put a lot of fertilizer in so that it lasts throughout the season with those fast acting and slow relase nutrients to give it that long prolonged uh growth that that is obviously required because they fruit early and they fruit late and they go all the way through the season and fruit late so you're going to need a lot of nutrients for that now the next thing is watering here in the garden we hardly ever watered these and that is because we used core gardening which we talk about a lot in this channel but also the fact these are extremely drought tolerant these are so resistant to Drought the the flavor changes a little bit when they get dry out when they get dried out for a long period of time they get a little more bitter and the skin gets a little hard but they by no means stop growing and they don't show very many signs of drought whereas a lot of other stuff in the garden would be suffering now the next thing that I wanted to talk about is spacing and trellising these kind of go together together and you can definitely space them closer together because they actually grow on top of each other very well they don't um they don't show very much signs of stress when you crowd them out however what I will say is that Vining you need a lot of trellis space you need a very tall trellis these were not tall enough these trellises so they ended up kind of collapsing in on themselves which is fine again they still don't show very much signs of stress because the plants themselves are very spindly the the vines on them um I can't even really get them but the vines are very very thin and so you know they don't really They Don't Really crimp or break like it would H if it happened with a cucumber the vine would crimp and it would pretty much be the end of that plant but these can fall over on themselves and and they're kind of meant to do that which is kind of nice but to keep it neat and orderly I would suggest having a minimum of a 7 to 8T tall trellis and if you don't I guess it'll be fine but it'll look something kind of like mine which just looks like a pile of vines and you kind of have to sort through all the leaves to find the the melons so um you know it's uh something that I would stress as as being important now I want to talk about soil type so as far as soil type goes again just like the rest of the garden they're really not very picky and I have not noticed a big difference in soil types when growing cucamelons we give them just a very loose humus-rich soil and uh basically just pure compost and that's what we give them and they do just fine as far as soil PH goes I probably would recommend something a little more acidic our soil here is around a 5 5.5 to a 6 so it's just very slightly acidic which is what a lot of plants like so we definitely give them the the same soil as all the others but it is slightly acidic and the very last thing that I want to talk about was the temperature obviously as we've already spoken these plants are extremely resilient we planted these out in the first of spring and they've grown perfectly fine through the cold weather of Spring they've grown through the hot weather of Summer and they've and they've grown uh all the way through all the cold nights we've had so far and they're doing just fine so and with the amount of flowers that are still on there I'm going to say that they're going to continue growing even up until the very the very last days of uh of fall where it starts to get super heavy Frost because they are extremely cold tolerant and so I would not worry about planting them at any specific time as soon as it is past the the last frost date I would recommend planting because I think you're going to be just fine cucumbers don't like cold weather but these are definitely not cucumbers they are completely a breed all of their own they're so awesome and um definitely just make sure that if you have plants like like I've got this kale here just make sure you're ready to uh to kind of have them duke it out because it can be very aggressive and like I said it's a very very aggressive Viner and so if you try to plant stuff close together like I do just be prepared for some stuff not to do as well because it will choke it out and I don't necessarily mind I love these cucamelons here and I got plenty of kale so I'm not too worried but in hindsight I probably would have not planted the kale right here because it's just they're all going crazy so there's some things to think about when you're planting your cucum melons next to some of your other crops but I would recommend growing them they are like I said so delicious super unique and you really can't find them in the store I've seen them in a couple different farmers markets and they're very expensive at the farmers market so uh it's definitely a specialty crop that I think gets a lot of people's attention and if you wanted to grow it for uh you know for friends and family um I think you would definitely get them hooked on on growing the super unique vegetable as well and also I do know personally a lot of very uh kind of upscale restaurants will search out people to grow these and if you call them you might even be able to get a little extra summer income so I uh I don't personally but I know for a fact that there are quite a few around us that uh that have posted about wanting to buy uh Mexican sour gerkens because not a lot of people grow them it's just such a unique uh kind of unique culinary thing to have on your menu but it's just something that not a lot of people grow so anyways give it a shot hopefully you all enjoyed this growing guide I recommend going and checking out all of our other growing guides we have so many over on Mig gardner.com click that media Tab and it's going to pull up videos and then that videos tab is going to drop down he going to have a bunch of different playlists and one of those playlists is growing guides click that there's like 25 27 something I've already lost count growing guides complete growing guides like this one to walk you through every step of growing every step of the way anyways there you go hope you all are having a great day hope you all are growing big or going home and as always this is Luke from the Ami Garner Channel I'll see you bye [Music]

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 175,326

Keywords: howto, walkthrough, how to grow cucuamelons, mini watermelon, how-to, how to, cucuamelon, migardener.com, complete growing guide, Premiere_Elements_14, how to grow, complete, migardener, how to grow watermelon, mexican sour gherkin

Id: B8mxRn-JN3U

Length: 9min 14sec (554 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 25 2016