@arribaelverde Yes, our climates are quite different as whole, but there are some times when there are similarities, atleast in terms of temperature. Especially if you are trying to sow them earlier. June/august here averages about the same as march/april there there, except that temperature swings are greater here during summer then there during spring. Drought tolerance is only question mark, but with mixed genetics it’s possible to find something. Just sow much more than you need and cull weaker plants. Like you can sow 100 seeds for 1 m2 and leave only few of the strongest.
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100 seeds in 1 square meter and cull like crazy makes sense to me! I absolutely love these types of experiments.
Happy to swap seeds. I have approximately 40 accessions, including bought, home saved, obtained from germplasm banks and any other sources I could find. Way closer to a grex than a landrace. PM me if you want me to send you some! Same goes for anyone in Europe.
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Couple of observations from this year’s wm landrace (note that my garden was originally an alfalfa field and still contains such remnants):
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tarping off an area in fall, removing it just before planting seems to work, but for: the weeds coming up are fast, overshadowing the young wm plants. These weeds, however, have strong stalks so they don’t move much with the wind. Giving the wm a tarp next to their “birthplace” allows them to crawl away from these weeds and thrive.
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On the other side of the tarp we have alfalfa, which does seem to lean and bend towards more sun. So if the tarped are is not wide enough, the lil wm plants crawling away from their birthplace will be overshadowed by bendy alfalfa.
This is how it looks like (note that in the weedy patch, not a lot of vines are thriving, but the edge of the tarp sees a lot of wm and muskmelon vines crawling away to light (west), the area between the tarp and the photographer was all tarped off)
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Watermelons in my experience adapts really well to being dry farmed, I never water mine and here it can go almost a month without rain sometimes and we have sandy soil which doesn’t hold much moisture.
The small melon was one of three similar in size I first grew in 2018 and after selecting the best this was only part of my harvest last season
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Fantastic! I love those pretty yellow spots, too. Is there some Moon and Stars watermelon in the landrace? 
Yeah the only variety I remember is moon and stars actually lol. But I used around 10 different kinds when I first started.
Looks like it’s heavily represented in your landrace, so it was probably well suited to your soil. 
It’s a beautiful variety – the first watermelon variety I chose to grow, myself, because it was so pretty!
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