Well, sadly, our 2024 outdoor melon trial has again ended in failure. We’re a bit disappointed, but the cold and incessant rain likely got to it this season.
For those that don’t know, one of our side missions has been to try and get outdoor melons to produce in the subarctic. Despite many believing this was impossible, we’ve been successful at producing melons outdoors in the past. After proving that it is technically possible, we’ve since been exploring various “cold climate” friendly melon genetics each season. The overwhelming majority of those trials have, unfortunately, ended in failure.
You see, practically all melon varieties will not survive temperatures below about 50F, which is not an unheard of thing mid-summer at 65 north. Melons are probably one of the most temperature sensitive plants that we know of. We exclusively look at melon genetics that are so-called “cool season” friendly, as the overwhelming majority of them are not. This year’s trial was with a honeydew muskmelon type called Divergent and we’re just going to have to disagree about it’s tolerance for cool nights!
We are slowly learning that many of these so-called “cool friendly” genetics are not quite as-advertised. Our general goal is to find varieties that can deal with high 40’s, as that’s usually about as bad as it gets here, in “most seasons” anyway. We sort of knew this was going to be an arduous process, but it doesn’t really help to lessen the blow when our testing results in failure.
Many times, we’ve thought about doing wider scale melon trials. Unfortunately, our setup doesn’t really allow for that. We need any cucurbits to be in our centrally irrigated systems as we just can’t keep up with the watering demand otherwise. (Cucurbits are ridiculously thirsty!) Plus, we’re a bit reluctant to give up a bunch of valuable growing space for one of our more difficult (and often unsuccessful) growing efforts.
If you wonder why we do this to ourselves, it’s because it is highly challenging. We enjoy a challenge and doing something that is rather difficult, plus we learn a lot through the process. We also think it’d be highly beneficial to the northern growing world if we could establish a baseline for outdoor northern melon growing. We got closest with our Minnesota Midget trials, but our goal is to widen the variety selection a bit.
So, we’ve crossed yet another variety off our list this year! We do have one plant still growing in our greenhouse, but this kind of effort has always been a lot less interesting. Heck, we’ve done plenty of “impossible” things in our greenhouse (like okra and eggplant, for example), so this just doesn’t quite have the challenging appeal that outdoor grown presents!
We were hopeful to bring you better news this season, but alas, this is where we are at. We’re still figuring out what we’d like to do with this growing space. With 45+ days remaining in the season, we’ll likely grow something out that can produce in that relatively small amount of time!
