08 January 2009

Watermelon progress

The watermelon seems to be doubling in size every couple of days. Pity there's only one watermelon on the vine doing anything! Several of the flowers have a baby watermelon at their base but they don't seem to be developing at all.

Five days ago:


Today:


The vine seems to attract the mosquitoes for some reason - there's always a cloud of midges that fly up if you disturb it, and there's always several sitting on the melon itself.

2 comments:

hessian86 said...

Hi, I have a watermelon plant as well. Found the mosquitos were pretty severe, everytime i go out to water the garden i'm bitten.

As for the lack of watermelons, what i did with my watermelons, cucumbers, rockemelons and pumpkins was that i took one male flower and rubbed into the centre of the female flower (the one carrying the fruit). Thus fertiliing them, altternatively if you have a lack of male flowers use a cotton earbud. :)

Alex Coles said...

Thanks! I will give that a go once the current buds flower. I don't seem to have any trouble with tomatoes or courgettes so I just assumed the bees were getting the business done, but perhaps they don't fancy the watermelon as much.