Hello everyone! This year I am embarking on my very first landrace project. I’m in France in the Loire region where I have sandy but healthy soil and it gets quite hot in summer. My goal is to create a strong landrace of smaller delicious watermelons. For now, watermelons are taking over my garden!
Year 1 (2025):
April 7th:
- planted 6 seeds each of the following varieties in a greenhouse in pots: Cekirdegi oyali, lune étoile, early moon beam, strawberry, charleston grey, desert king, sugar baby, royal golden, melitopolski, small shining light
- I also planted 12 seeds from @ThomasPicard 's watermelon mix that he very generously shared with me.
May 11th: I planted 3 plants of each variety and 5 of Thomas’ plants in the garden. So far everything besides one more scrawny plant is doing quite well. I have a total of 35 plants in the garden. For the rest of them I’m going to wait to see if I have to replace plants before planting them elsewhere. I was thinking about underplanting some young trees with watermelons? Anyone have advice on that?
8 plants in 2.8m2:
My plan: water sparingly and see who does best!
If anyone wants to follow along or give any advice along the way, this is the place to be!
