This is the first year I've been able to grow anything for real, and outside. I decided to try and grow melons (watermelon, canteloupe and honeydew) and they worked surprisingly well. I went with two types of watermelon, red and yellow.
A friend asked me if I were planning to grow a square watermelon... When I said just trying not to kill them was goal enough for the year, he made me a "watermelon box" and told me to try it. I have engineer friends :) I put one of the small yellow watermelons into the box....
On July 30th, after about two week in the box, the yellow watermelon looked like this:
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| View from the stem end, about two weeks after being put in the box |
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| And view from the back, where the melon is already growing against the plastic sides... |
But a few weeks later (Aug 20th), there was trouble!:
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| The melon is escaping! The box was glued and screwed together... |
I left it on the vine another week, and this is what it looked like when I brought it to the patio:
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| It only got worse over the next week... |
The box had deformed so badly, power tools were required to open it. When viewed side by side with a "non-boxed" watermelon from the same vine, it appears pretty obvious what happened:
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| Boxed (top) and non-boxed (bottom) melons from the same vine, plus a tape measure... |
Both melons were about 9 inches high, but the non boxed melon (bottom) was almost 16 inches long, while the box constricted the other one to about 9 inches long. It does look pretty cube-ish though:
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| It's kind of like a cube...? |
So maybe a bigger box (or stronger box?) would work? Maybe next year... but I'll either have to make a new box, or get someone to make me one, because this one is toast!
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| The remained of the box... the pins were so deformed they couldn't come out... |
But still a pretty cool experiment! Hopefully they both taste good... except I'm wondering what I'm supposed to do with two huge watermelons now...
I recommend inviting friends over to view and eat the results of your boxed v.s. free range watermelon experiment.
ReplyDeleteWe did exactly that, complete with observations of one vs. the other... A key observations was that the the boxed melon had a lot thicker rind that the un-boxed kind, but was much easier to cut up! A tradeoff, I guess, although I'd have to repeat the experiment to make sure it was the box that caused the thicker rind... (this is what happens when engineers garden :))
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I hope you don't mind, Renee, but I found this kind of hilarious. I've seen pictures online of those square watermelons. I guess you need either a stronger or a slightly bigger box to grow it in. I've heard you can do this with lots of other fruit too.
ReplyDeleteI don't mind at all, because I thought it was hilarious too! Especially since my friend who built the box didn't believe that "just" a melon could break it! If I grow melons again next year, I will definitely try a bigger box... or a smaller melon! Thanks for you comment!
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