Flowerbug, you must have a lot of rocks to hide those melons!
we have plenty of rocks all over the place, in this picture it shows the long skinny bean garden where i planted melons this season at the end closest to the stove. there's about 3ft of rocks and stepping stones to get over to get at the garden.
the melons do pretty well with the full sunshine and just being able to sprawl out over the rocks and pathways. i herd the vines away from the beans or there'd not be much there to harvest from the beans after they get overgrown.
I am starting to plan my spring garden and have made some changes. I removed a dwarf avocado that for the last 3 years produced a handful of avocados but they fall off. That area gives me a tiny bed. I will also stop growing 5 tomato plants along the deck steps. My husband is crazy about them there and they are by a walkway and aren't the prettiest things to walk by haha.
Mom is very picky about some things too, by the end of the season the tomato plants look like they've been through a war zone. this year was even worse because i wasn't picking up the chewed on fruits that the raccoons were getting at plus some others that were sitting on the ground and i figured the worms would get them eventually. now it's all cleaned up again and back to a more tidy state.
worms will have to dig down now in the trench where i buried them all.
After years of getting very little raspberries I have removed them. Now I will try and squeeze 13 tomatoe plants all along the fence. I'm hoping to have some room for a trellis that I have on my raised bed but it doesn't look like the entire thing will fit. I think the raised bed will look better without this huge trellis running down the middle.
i just like that it is much easier for me to garden in larger spaces without complications or other things getting in the way.
Also debating whether to plant my melons in the same place. Only 1 out of 4 tiny beds produced really well. I'm debating whether to move them to where the avocado tree was and just plant around 12 seeds there.
sunlight and enough moisture seem to be the parts that make the most difference. when i pick melons i can usually tell by how watery they are if they formed when we'd gotten a lot of rain. we have a few last melons that are forming and getting ripe now but i never know how they're going to finish up - between the powdery mildew and cooler temperatures i often can get edible melons towards the end of the season but they're not at all like the ones we get when prime melon season is here.
the two i cut up this morning the first one that was hidden in the rocks was watery and over ripe. barely edible but i kept some of it to eat as i hate to throw anything away. the 2nd one was more green and much better flavor.
hope your garden plans work out well for next year! i have to figure out where to put the melons next year too.
. I will have to sort things out altho it probably makes sense that a tomato from the Mediterranean that did well for Lorraine in Australia would be coming through in 2022. Still and yet, I've always found hybrids, whether f1's or otherwise to have something of an edge on the inbreds.
