These insightful advice on how to grow garden fresh cantaloupe will produce sweet flavor juicy fruit that is a delight to eat. Growing your own fruit is a great way to get outside and into the Earth and also save a little money along the way. It is always a great experience to watch your produce go from just a tiny seed to the full blown fruit you see in front of you at the grocery store.
But if you are a novice gardener, maybe you do not know quite what to do to achieve that goal. One fairly simple fruit to start out with is cantaloupe. That sugary sweet orange melon that rounds out any beautiful fruit salad can be easily grown in your own backyard if you follow all the necessary instructions and make sure that you do everything you can to nourish it to end.
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Ask any homesteader, fruit grow on their own land taste better than any piece of fruit that they can buy.
What you will want to do first is decide if you want to start from the seed or start from the seedling. The difference between them is that the seed will take a bit longer to sprout, while the seedling is already sprouted. If you wish to start from a seed, make sure that if you do not plant it outside until after the threat of the final frost has come and gone. Cantaloupes love warm soil, so if there is still a threat of frost, it will ruin your attempts at sprouting. If you are staring from a seed and you want to start them inside, you can plant them in a nutrient rich soil about three weeks before the final frost. This will allow them to start sprouting before you transfer them outside. When you are ready to plant your seedlings make sure you plant them in a nutrient rich soil that is fully exposed to the sun. They will need to be adequately spaced apart as these plants tend to migrate and grow outward with vines.
Because cantaloupes are not exactly attractive to pests, you should not need to worry about spraying any sort of insecticide around them. What you will need to do is make sure to water them about 1 to 2 inches of water a week. You want to only water them at their base and avoid letting water sit on any of the leaves. This will only cause rot later and you do not want that. Keep on top of any weeds that feel the need to grow around the seedlings. You will want to keep them under control because they can start to choke out the baby plants if they are not taken care of.
After all of your hard work and coddling of your baby cantaloupe plants, it should take about two weeks for you to see your first bulb. This will be the beginning of your fruit.
What you can do then is wrap it in panty hose (this will help support your growing melon) and place a bit of tinfoil underneath of it to keep it warm, which will keep it warm and will give it a sweeter flavor. After about another two weeks until they are ripe, but make sure that you do not pick them until the rinds change from green to tan. This will ensure you are not picking them too early. If you see a crack in the stem, this also means they are ripe. You should easily be able to separate it from the vine, but if it comes off on its own, it is over ripe. You can keep an uncut cantaloupe for 5 to 6 days.
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