Amazing melons!
Melon ‘Alvaro’
Modern varieties have made growing melons much easier and some can even be grown outside, though they still need a warm and sunny spot. Melons are quite simple to grow if you stick to a few rules. First, buy seeds of a variety that’s suited to the cool, British climate such as ‘Alvaro’. You should expect to get four melons per plant.
When seedlings have four or five leaves, pinch out the growing tip and allow four sideshoots to grow – each will bear one melon. Melon plants can be grown up netting but it’s easiest to let them grow on the ground, on landscape fabric or straw.
The plants produce male and female flowers and you should try to pollinate one female flower per sideshoot at about the same time, so they all develop together. This avoids one setting first and getting big at the expense of the others.
Pollinate the female flowers (which have a baby melon behind them) by picking off a male flower and pushing it in the centre of a female flower. Pinch off the subsequent sideshoots when they’ve two or three leaves to keep plants tidy, and keep them well watered and fed.
You can tell when the melons are ripening when cracks start to appear in the skins at the stem end and when they start to smell of melons! This is a sign to stop watering so the melons get really sweet and, once picked, the plants can be discarded.
Melothria (cucamelon)
Recently rescued from obscurity and now widely recommended as a summer salad ingredient, the cucamelon is easy to grow, and productive.
The fruits have a taste like cucumber and are eaten whole, sprinkled in salads. The vigorous plants have leaves and flowers like a tiny cucumber but the plant itself is large and sprawling and can easily reach 2m (6ft 8in)) high and wide. It will sprawl over everything in its path! It’s worth pinching it out and pruning growth back so you can easily find the petite fruits, which are best eaten when small. They look like tiny watermelons and are slim when young and the size of grapes, but become rounder when older and by then the skins are tougher. Plant it in the greenhouse or in a pot on the patio in a warm, sunny spot.