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Originally Posted by tuk50
brokenbar, what is the purpose of digging a three foot hole to plant into? Did you have a problem with your subsoil.. I notice the soil you put back in isn't full of compost or nutrients... I've never done that and get great melons, I do however have automatic irrigation that is necessary here because of the lack of rainfall from May to July. I dig about a 3ft diameter pit about a foot deep and mix my garden soil 50/50 with composted horse manure and stall bedding straw, that seems to work here. I'm willing to try the holes with peat moss and sand if I understood the reasoning. That's a lot of work and I'm basically lazy, unless it helps to get better tasting melons....LOL. My sandy loam is about perfect for melons and there is no lack of heat here so I'm willing to try anything once.
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I mix in aged horse manure also which I forgot to say. The three foot hole is to allow the tap root to travel down quickly. When you set the plants out, they just set there doing nothing for about two weeks (or so it would appear) In that time the tap root is traveling down. Then the plants just explode.
Originally, I came from a ranch in the California desert right near the border of Arizona and Mexico and there is no better place to grow melons as you well know (El Centro...watermelons up the wazoo!) I never grew melons as good as the ones in Wyoming. They get "to size" much faster and ripen much quicker. I had read an article written by this 91 year old man who won every year at the fair with his watermelons and this method is what he did.
In Wyoming, "days to maturity" was always a foot race to first frost. We had over 60 melons and two that topped 50 lbs the year before last which is the last year we grew them. I have read elsewhere about the "taproot" issues with watermelon and how, if disturbed, they just pout. All I can say is that it worked...superior fruit that matured faster (I do use old tar roofing shingles under each melon which also helped a lot.) I used to use the tractor auger but the holes were too big and took to much of the "mix" to fill them. Husband hired the neighbor kid to dig holes with the hand-held post hole digger (
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My soil in Wyoming was heavily amended or otherwise, it would have been a sandy/bentonite gumbo mix that was slightly alkaline. Mostly, digging the hole is to give the tap root that great unfettered start.