Watermelon question, sure I'll have others later....

[ChaoSS]

So I'm growing a garden this year for the first time in my life, and I'm having some success, some failures. My watermelon plant (the only one that sprouted and survived) has started growing all over the place. It has recently set a number of fruit.

Is this something where I should eliminate a few of the fruits and just leave 2 or so of the biggest so that the plant can devote it's energy to those fruits? Or should I just let them all grow?

 

[Ridgerunner]

Unless you are growing them in a contest where the biggest watermelon wins or have some other reason to want a really big watermelon, I’d let them all grow. I don’t know what variety you are growing, how big they are supposed to get, how much your variety runs, or how many it is supposed to set on, but I find the smaller ones just as delicious as the big ones.

I grew up on a small farm. I can remember during a break in harvesting other things of grabbing a small one-person-sized ripe melon and eating that whole thing during my break. Talk about refreshing even when it was not chilled.

I’ll thin apples, peaches, things like that when they set on the tree pretty thick, but not melons. But I’m not trying to win at the county fair.

 

[ChaoSS]

No contest, just looking for decent fruits and vegetables, and we have crappy soil that I'm trying to work to improve, but it's not easy growing much around here.