Hey, how are you guys doing? My journey brought me in Acre, Brazil, where I’m staying 15 more days, then move back to Cusco, Peru, for a week, and then back to Europe.
We could already have a discussion on sowing / planting and its timings if some are interested :
SOWING / PLANTING
I’ve personnally experienced 3 types of sowing/planting:
- Direct seeding
- Sowing in trays in 8x8cm plastic buckets and replanting a month later
- Sowing in 4x4cm trays and planting at the 2 cotyledon stage - i.e. just when the first real leave shows up
I prefer direct seeding - though it might be interesting to experiment with other methods, especially for those having short growing seasons, or if you have few seeds and don’t want risk losing them in direct sowing (rotening, slugs, etc…)
Rerooting was great when planted at 2 cotyledon stage : I didn’t notice the same usual pause in growth as with the plants in 8x8 plastic buckets planted at 3-4 real leaves stage, due to what most call “transplantation shock”.
If I was to use trays again I would add some of my soil to my potting mix to make sure there is a possible microbial connection with native soil from start.
This is more far fetched but I’ve also “sown” whole watermelons : I used those regrowing late in season last year - so that survived summer + made 1 or 2 new fruits later, i.e. strong plants! -, so in late September, just to see in 2026 when seeds naturally sprouts, and if the plants emerging from that overwintering are fundamentally different.
Photos of the “sowing” in late September:
Why would they be different, or somehow “different”? Because last year I was surprised to see volunteer watermelons showing up, sprouting in my field about 15 days BEFORE my sowing date (16th of May). That in itself is interesting - as it seems that we’ve inherited dates of sowing inherently wrong with the warming trend - BUT the main take out from this was that this earlier sprouting watermelon transcribed to a twice bigger, longer vine than my average watermelons around (4 meters in total against an average 2). Interesting as a longer vine means more photosynthesis capacity, with all its correlated qualities : plants being somehow “solar panels” it means more energy available, right? This may be not only due to earlier sprouting, but also to microbiome maturation while overwintering, with seeds always kept humid… like it does in nature, except when human dry seeds… or in arid regions when growth is solely in the rainny season… Anyway : the follow up on that this year could be… funky 
I’m super curious and excited to see how this pans out 
Back to basics : TIMINGS
As this earliness advantage of the volunteers was consistent in all cucurbits species (from squash to melons and watermelons), with some showing up up to 3 weeks to a month and a half before any gardening book or market gardener would ever consider direct sowing, I decided to totally change my timings :
- in 2023 I direct sowed on the 4-5-6th of June, which was considered late but as no one really does direct sowing anymore it felt like a secure way of doing things to me,
- last year I decided to sow much earlier : 16th of May for watermelon,
- and because I saw those volunteers showing up earlier this year I’ll dare to sow around 15th-20th of… April!
Note that this could be SOIL SPECIFIC : I’m sowing in a draining sandy soil and if I was gardening in a damp clay soil and/or in another climate it could be very very different : in my place biology - i.e. soil “life” - goes more or less dormant in the summer season, everything turns yellow, from end of June until the first real rains of September, so I bet on sowing earlier as a way to settle better rooted and bigger plants, with better rhizophagy, microbial partnership before that. John Kempf notes that nutrition through microbial partnership (“rhizophagy”, in particular with Mychorrhizae) continues even when the soil runs dry, while nutrition stops with water soluble nutrients (as “no water = no availability of water soluble nutrients” , like NPK) - Mychorrhizae being the far-reaching pipelines of bacterias and other small microorganisms mineralizing rock and soil nutrients for the plants, in exchange of carbohydrates that solely a photosynthesizing plant can produce - so I bet on the formation of strong holobionts as early as possible, using mostly endogenous nutrient supply via microorganisms as shown in this J.White’s graph:
Side note : bringing in manure or any “organic” input in big quantities would be 100% antagonistic to that as well (see Walter Goldstein breeding journey with corn in low fertility and zero input environment for good examplification).
Behind those considerations of trying to settle plants when the soil life is at its maximum intensity, and so much earlier than any typical recommandation, my vision is that if my plants could flower around Solstice, in other words go from “vegetative” to “reproductive” stage ,they would profit a lot from solar energy at this crucial stage : before it is too hot, so before it runs too dry, before there is less daily light… so yes : it’s sowing and selecting for “cold emergence” capacities some would say… but, as we could infer from previous paragraphs, there could a lot more qualities or “capacities” added than the sole “cold emergence capacities” - at least in my context.
Not to forget mentioning that harvest will be earlier too … we enjoy watermelon when it’s hot right? Not in november 
… on that point in 2025 my average harvest date was 10-15th of August… if I could get them a couple weeks before it would be nice.
DIRECT SOWING MORE SEEDS THAN FINAL PLANTS !!!
Last but not least : without even talking of “selecting” let’s remember the rule of thumb of direct sowing more than one seed for one final plant when you direct seed : it’s what have done farmers and gardeners for millenia. Like 3 or 4 seeds close by, up to a lot more : you can thin out later, cull the…“unwanted” 
I’ve personnally thinned out at about 20 days post sowing to this day.
