First plant with early female flower is flowering. Unfortunately it or some +10 with the same trait don’t have more than 1 early female flower coming. At the same time “normal” plants aren’t progressing as fast as I hoped after it warmed up. Still no sign of female flowers. Maybe they aren’t that far away, but it seems like early female flower trait might be imperative to breeding short season melons. Which is why I started to think about using cucumber melons and opened thread about it here Creating short season melon with cross with bushy cucumber melon
Another observation is that it seems like the treshold for maximum growth is higher than I thought. At some point the growth most hit the maximum speed, but it seems highs around 25C for about week is not it. The growth has still been fast, but it could be faster based on what I have observed before. Right now it looks like there are 3 days of highs around 25c and after that little cooler rainier period so it looks like anything with “normal” female flowering trait will have hard time making ripe fruits. If they do make, at least they have gone through hard selection, but this doesn’t seem like the best approach. This summer still hasn’t been cool, but rather slightly above 30 year average. Maybe it’s cool compared to next 30 years average, but certainly there will be years like this and even cooler. So having early female flowering trait seems like way to go. With that they would already have enough cold tolerance for most years and be able to produce ripe fruits.
This could be good approach for those that struggle with heatwaves futher south. This kinda plant would have fruits ripe maybe week (futher trials needed) earlier and could also work as late summer sown crop. If it’s warm autumn you get melons and if not you can get at least some that you can use as cucumbers.
Same melon as on previous update 5 days later. Still quite good growth, from 10cm vines to over 30cm vines. Could be faster. There was one overcast cooler day which must have taken some of the growth.
