[oldman]

I have a project for next year where I'm going to need quite a bit of seed. Because I'm too cheap to buy 200 seed of lots of different watermelons and not know what will grow well, I'm going to start with about 10 seed of each variety. I'm planning on starting 4 seeds indoors around April 15 and planting 3 seed outside about May 10 and another 3 around May 25 when I transplant plants into the garden. If I have less that 10 seeds of a variety or its germination rate is known to be less tha 70% I'm just going to start all of those indoors. Varieties will be kept together and isolated with rows of tomatoes running east and west (the wind is typically out of the south when they'll be blooming) That may be overkill as I still plan on hand polinating to make sure I'm not gettiing crosses before I want them.


The goal of having seed from varieties I can get to fruit locally is to do a landrace watermelon project starting next year. I want to eventually be able to get something edible and interesting by July 4 in Zone 5.



In no particular order here are the varieties I have to grow out.

Jubilee, Tendersweet (Orange), Moon & Stars (red), Tom Warson. Black Tail Mountain, Bradford, Charlston Grey, Pride of Iowa, Moon & Stars (yellow), Carolina Cross, Ali Baba, Halbert Honey, Yellow Morrow, Clay County Yellow Meat, Borries Yellow, Mountain Sweet Yellow, Rare Watermelone (red seed, gift in order, packing looks like seed from china?), Ice Box, Rattlesnake, Perola, Sun Gold, Chubby gray, Illniwek Red Seeded, Cobb Gem, Cream of Sasketchewan, Golden honey, Golden Honey Cream, Early Canada, Golden Midget, Stone Mountain, Super Redheart Stone Mountain, Dunbarton, Peacock, Arikara, Red-Seeded Citron, Calabria, wweet Siberian, Crimson Sweet, Black Seeded Ice Cream, Klondike 3, Verona, Bermuda Moon and Star, Iopride, Moon and Star Kansas, Moon and Star Minnesota, Texas Black Diamond, Fordhook, Red Seeded Ahahi, Texas Wheeler, Davis-Benny Citron, and three unnamed varieties from a professor emeritus at the local ag college. Maybe more.


I've never grown more than two different varieties at once. Will I need to do anything special for disease control or any other problems? Also, are there any varieties I should be growing that aren't on my list? Since my primary objective is seed should I still cull down to a few melons per vine? Is this gioing to be an insane amount of work or mostly just watering?

I plan on using this thread to provide updates, But won't be planting seed until April.