Cantaloupe

Wait until frost danger has passed and soil at seed depth is 65 to 70 F, then sow 4 to 6 seeds 1 to 2 inches deep in hills 4 feet apart and thin to the best 2 plants per hill. Black plastic laid ahead of planting warms the soil and lets you start earlier. Cantaloupe is a heat crop with no cold tolerance. Seed sown into cold ground germinates slowly or rots outright, and the seedlings that do emerge sit stunted while cucumber beetles find them.

Where the season is short, start seed indoors 3 to 4 weeks before your outdoor planting date, sowing into individual containers with one or two seeds each so the roots are never teased apart. Harden off gradually and set plants out while they are still young and growing fast, spacing them 18 to 24 inches apart in rows at least 5 feet apart. Muskmelons do not transplant well if the roots are disturbed, so they go out in the container they grew in. An overgrown transplant checks badly when moved and will often be outrun by a seed sown the same week.

From emergence through the 5-leaf stage, check plants a few times a week and count beetles. On cantaloupe the treatment threshold is just 1 beetle for every 2 plants - act within 24 hours of reaching it. The beetle carries Erwinia tracheiphila in its gut and leaves it in its frass, which washes into fresh feeding wounds with dew or rain. Plants at the cotyledon to 2-leaf stage are far more susceptible to bacterial wilt than older ones, and the bacteria plug the xylem so the vine wilts weeks later with nothing to be done.

If beetles reach 1 per 2 plants on seedlings, spray carbaryl within 24 hours. Kaolin clay is a lower-toxicity alternative that suppresses rather than kills. Get this done while the planting is still pre-bloom. Cantaloupe is very susceptible to bacterial wilt, and infection risk rises the longer beetles feed. Killing the beetles during the seedling window is the whole game - once the vine is infected there is no cure.

Float row covers over the planting from the day you sow or transplant to keep cucumber beetles off, then remove them at first bloom so pollinators can do their work. Watch for female flowers, which have a swollen young fruit beneath the yellow petals. A covered melon is a beetle-proof melon, but it is also an unpollinated one. Every fruit depends on bees moving pollen from male to female flowers, so the cover has to go the moment bloom starts or you get vines and no melons.

Once fruit starts setting, check older leaves weekly, looking at both the upper and lower surfaces. Begin spraying sulfur or chlorothalonil when fewer than 1 in 50 old leaves show symptoms on either surface — that is, at the first trace, not once it is obvious — and repeat on a 7-day interval. Cover both leaf surfaces. Powdery mildew takes down the old canopy first, and that is exactly the leaf area feeding the ripening fruit. Losing it early means sunscald, incomplete ripening and melons with visibly lower soluble solids, so the crop tastes flat even though it looks ripe. Starting at the first trace is what keeps the canopy through harvest.

When the vines begin sending out runners, side dress each plant with 3 to 4 tablespoons of a nitrogen fertilizer such as 21-0-0 sprinkled in a ring around the plant, then water it in. Do not overdo it. Runner growth is when the plant builds the leaf area that will later fill the fruit with sugar, so nitrogen pays off here. Past that point excess nitrogen just pushes vine at the expense of fruit and delays maturity.

Water deeply and infrequently, 1 to 2 inches per week, from germination until the fruit reaches full size. As the melons begin to ripen, cut the amount back. Drip irrigation in the early morning is ideal. Water taken up late goes straight into the fruit and dilutes the sugars the plant has spent all season loading. Slightly dry roots during ripening concentrate the flesh and are the difference between a sweet melon and a watery one.

Press a thumb against the stem where it joins the fruit. When the stem separates cleanly on its own with no cutting, that is full slip and the melon is ready. Look also for a crack circling the stem attachment and background color turning from green or olive-gray to yellowish tan between the netting. Check every other day early on and daily at peak. Sugar keeps moving into the melon right up to the moment the stem separates, so a melon cut early never gets sweeter - it has reached maximum sugar exactly at full slip. Quality then falls off fast, which is why the vine has to be walked daily rather than picked over once a week.