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?
Watermelons are a desert plant, traditionally dry farmed in the sandy wadis. They probably need less water than you would think.
I never water mine, although my situation is quite different from yours. At my old home, I grew watermelons dry in sand (under deep woodchip mulch) or with once a month watering. At the least, pull water off when they start to ripen.
Hi! Just a quick update—sorry I haven’t been very diligent about posting updates. I’m still watering a little because it’s been raining very little here for the past two months, but I’m trying to keep it to a minimum. Some areas and varieties are doing better than others. I haven’t marked the varieties, but I note that the Royal Golden is quite weak in my garden (easy to spot because it’s yellow!) and otherwise there is still variety in the appearance of the fruits, so I deduce that at least 6 varieties are doing well in the garden, and there are a few that don’t have fruit yet, so I’ll soon see if there are more. The vines are still producing a lot of flowers, so I’m hopeful that there will be even more cross-pollination!
