How to Grow Watermelons - Complete Growing Guide

[Music] well hello everyone and welcome to another episode here on the my gardener channel i'm so excited to be filming this complete growing guide for you today because it is hands down the most commonly requested growing guide and that is on watermelons watermelons are just they're so fun to grow and they are i guess just the icon of a great summer thing to eat i mean watermelon in the summer is just an amazing thing so everyone wants to grow it but not many people know how to grow it or know how to grow it successfully watermelons are more difficult than you would imagine and so i would definitely say if you're a beginning gardener don't invest a whole lot of space in trying to grow watermelon grow some other stuff that we've talked about that is a little easier to grow watermelon can be extremely difficult to know when is ripe it is extremely difficult to give enough space to grow it adequately so that leads us to the first thing and that is the first requirement is a lot of space watermelon will take up a good and i say this is like the least amount of space that i'm going to be giving it and that is five feet by about 20 feet so we're talking 100 square feet and we're gonna plant four plants in that hundred square feet so you need about 25 square feet or five feet by five feet per watermelon plant and so i'm going to plant four plants in that amount of space that's uh pretty that's pretty space hogging if you're asking me that's what we like to call a garden hog so you definitely need the space first the next thing is warm weather watermelons absolutely positively will not do good in cool weather you need a summer night to be at least in the 70s if you can't get your nights in the 70s then you're not going to have a good time with watermelons because they require warm temperatures to ripen otherwise you're going to have those white melons that everyone talks about it's just bitter and flavorless so it's really important to have those nice warm nights the next rule is really good soil watermelon are not like pumpkins anywhere the on a pumpkin anywhere the the leaf node touches the ground it's going to send out roots that's not the case for watermelon watermelon and cantaloupe both require a very loose soil because the root base that they put out is the only root base supporting the plant with pumpkins and other forms of squash you have a little bit of forgiveness because all along the the leaf anytime there's a leaf joint to the stem to the main growing stem it's going to send down a little roots and those roots all along that stem kind of add up and they can really help out the plant to uptake more nutrients uptake more water so it's really crucial to have that nice loose fluffy soil that the roots can go in expand out so they can take up all the nutrients and water that's required we have them growing in just a basic garden soil but i highly suggest amending your bed making sure that there's lots of sand lots of compost really well draining so that the roots can get a lot of aeration to do what they need to do the next thing is when it comes to nutrients watermelons are extremely heavy nitrogen feeders a lot like we talked about in the uh in the zucchini growing guide they require a minimum and i say a minimum of two feedings of blood meal per season so what we like to do is we like to give them trifecta and blood meal just like we do with the zucchinis because we have a lot of fast-acting nitrogen that's going to give them that boost now and then that slow release nitrogen later on so it's going to get a whole season of nitrogen and we typically give them that because they require all that nitrogen to just set the fruit i mean you're talking a 15 20 pound watermelon it requires a lot of nutrients to put that out the next thing is a lot of water if you're not there to water your garden all the time watermelons might not be something that i recommend growing because of the fact that watermelons are a lot of water hence why the part of their name is water melon watermelons are about 90 water so when you have something that is that you know that rich in water you really need to um be able to give them a lot of water otherwise you're going to have very dry melons oftentimes that nice crisp melon that you bite into that just drips juice all down your face and you just have a big smile on your face those have been grown with water on a very regular basis those are not allowed to dry out at all because what you're going to find out is if they dry out if the soil dries out the the melon itself will turn kind of spongy and you know what i'm talking about that very nasty melon you bite in and it's just kind of like a biting into a dish sponge that's not pleasant in the least and it's also very flavorless so it's extremely crucial to have water here in this place that we're planting it's kind of a low ground we had a hard time growing stuff like beans that have dampening off issues but with watermelons they really like those wet that nice not really wet but damp i should say damp soil and it stays damp here a lot and the very last thing that you're going to need to know is be prepared to fight powdery mildew because they like that damp environment to grow those huge watermelon they are definitely prone to powdery mildew so we do have a video on that i'm going to post in the corner over there a basically a defense against powdery mildew and there's really nothing that you can do typically if you can have a underground watering system like a drip irrigation or something that's better but the thing is is that in our environment here when we're growing in ground and it's a traditional in-ground garden it's really difficult to get drip irrigation in here and so we just rely on rain and hand watering to do all of that so we typically just rely on that combative technique of killing off the powdery mildew using baking soda and we'll typically do that every week to just kind of keep it down and keep it at bay oh the last thing i was going to talk about is maturing dates i've had a lot of people ask for maturing dates if you do not have a growing season that is at least 150 days don't even bother growing watermelons watermelons are between 100 to 110 days till ripening which means if you get them in the ground at the beginning of the growing season you're going to be lucky here in michigan to get a watermelon by the end of the year just saying so it's something that it's a gamble but if you like gambling it's your kind of thing to grow so i uh i'm a gambling man i'm gonna put one in i'm gonna put four in actually and we're gonna see how we can do so hopefully you all enjoyed this i'm gonna plant these and that's really it all right hey guys good luck on your watermelon let me know in the comments box below what you think if you'd like to try a watermelon let me know what kind you're trying to grow also let me know in the comments box below any plants that you'd like to grow that i have not done a growing guide on yet and the last thing is if you're interested in these growing guides make sure you check them out we have a huge playlist of over 18 i think we're up like 19 growing guides now and that is over at www.mygardener.com you can check out the full list of growing guides and it's going to hopefully get you on your way to success to a successful garden so i'm going to plant these up i'll talk to you guys later so the first thing i'm gonna do is i'm just gonna loosen the soil as you can see got lots of that really loose soil it's so important to have like we talked about but the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to basically work a radius don't just plant the plant work a radius out and get the radius to be really loose as well and kind of mound the soil up you want to plant in a mound because it's going to allow the the plant to be a little bit off the ground while the roots can still stay in that damp soil it's going to help kind of combat some of that powdery mildew that we talked about so there you go there's a little mound and then we're going to plant right inside that little mound there now you can trellis your your watermelon if you have a smaller variety like a sugar baby watermelon those are pretty reliable to trellis up however if you have other things like these are crimson sweets i would not recommend trellising them just because of the fact that when you trellis a watermelon you really have to be able to sustain a big melon on that trellis and oftentimes the trellis either breaks or the melon will become so heavy that the supports will break and then it crimps the stem ending up in a unripe melon to be harvested because once the stem crimps there's really no saving it so i definitely recommend just growing them on the ground they're a whole lot easier the one exception to that is the sugar baby watermelons because they really only get to be like a personal one to you know one pound to a five pound melon at most i've seen so it's really uh it's really a very easy to trellis melon anything other than that though just stick to the ground all right so hopefully that helped hopefully you learned something new and this is luke from the mi gardener channel reminding you to grow big or go home and i'll talk to you guys later see ya bye [Music] you

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 3,068,315

Keywords: growing watermelon, garden, growing guide, complete growing guide, migardener.com, gardening, beginning a garden, how to grow, complete, how to grow watermelon, migardener, Premiere_Elements_10, watermelon trellis, harvesting watermelon, tutorial, how to grow a garden, watermelon, How-to (Website Category), Flowers

Id: X793Uy8qMcQ

Length: 9min 26sec (566 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 27 2015