Watermelon is a highly cultivated vine-like flowering plant present in more than thousands of varieties. A fleshy sweet Plantae helps to relax blood vessels with high nutrition and low in calories.
Watermelon has its fondness among the people by its sauce preferences among the varieties of fruits. The presence of potassium, vitamin A and C make it mealier and provide multiple health benefits i.e., prevent stroke, control blood pressure, obesity, and overweight as well.
Watermelon farming needs a temperature higher than 25-degree Celcius. They have an extended, delicate, and climbing stem throughout his farming life cycle through germination to growing into a whole fruit.
In the early stage of farming, watermelon has highly dense fleecy hair which is muddy in color and vanishes in the passing time.
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Watermelon Cultivation
Watermelon seeds implant in a pot and relocate in the loamy soil for mid-level of nitrogen for enhancing the growth of the fruit. In an excess humid climate, watermelon suffers from pests like root-knot nematodes, fruit flies, and aphids.
Watermelon requires more than 85 days becoming a full-grown fruit than the other melon. Horticulture in Japan grows cubic watermelons for their convenience to store as they use metal and glass boxes for improving grain.
Due to present in the variety of cubic, square, and pyramid shape, they are pricy to purchase rather than the original shaped one. This shaped type of watermelon only belongs to the wealthy class of the consumer or buyers.
Watermelon cultivation can be done in numerous ways according to its harvest time and weight.
The Carolina cross produced the heaviest watermelon 29to 68 kilograms in about 90 days.
The little golden person takes 70 days from sowing to harvest.
Orangelo weight 9 to 14 kilogram and take 90 to 100 days till the fruit harvest
Cream of Saskatchewan grows in cold climate and harvest in 80 to 85 days
Moon and star are weighing 9 to 23 kilograms and harvest in 90 days
Densuke watermelon is firstly harvest and weighing 11 kgs
Melitopolski is highly cultivated in the region of Russia and take 95 days to harvest
Watermelon farming in horticulture shows a variety of improvements for the production of watermelon. Its hard crust made it more accessible to transport it from one place to another due to its oblong shape as well. Improvement in geographical conditions also provides to get an elastic environment for the cultivation of watermelons.
Watermelon is the garden-variety fruit that every grocery sells more often. China is the largest producer, and more than 40 states of the United States are cultivating watermelons. It is a smaller shaped variety of melons known as icebox melons as they have red and yellow color flesh.
Some of the groups are also seen in the variety of watermelon, which shows the variation in taste and texture of its flesh.
· Citroides group is a fleecy melon cultivated in the world for fodder with sweet yellow flesh.
· The Lanatus group is food for the traveler in the Kalahari Desert. Seeds are edible in this group and having juicy white meat.
· Vulgaris group is widely cultivated for the consumption of human and cattle feed as well.
Watermelon is mainly consumed in summer; it contains water more than 85%, and the rest is sugar with low-fat properties. It mixes with other fruit juices, wine, or pickles. Watermelon seeds are also consumed by a human after the roast and dried up.
In China, people consume seeds of watermelon on the eve of china new year, and in Vietnamese, people consume seeds as a snack on the Vietnamese New Year holiday.
Watermelon zest has vile flavors, which is used in making pickles, and people were making vegetables by stewing and stir-frying. Watermelon zest produces Amino acid citrulline.
Only vitamin c present in a significant amount and a low amount of nutrients with 30 calories per 100 grams of serving. It is also known as state vegetable or fruit in Oklahoma State due to its versatility of consumption.
Watermelon Farming Through Seeds
Watermelons grow from seed. You might be tempted to use seed from a melon you purchased, but it would just be time wasted. There are chances of it being a hybrid one. Hybrid is somewhat different from crosses not true to nature. Then, you would probably end up cultivating what is generally termed as pig-melons, which is nice to feed pigs only and not human beings.
What Kind Of Seeds To Buy For Watermelon Farming?
If possible, pick the open-pollinated heirloom variety of seed, if necessary. You will find far better and fascinating types in the heirlooms than in the regular collections at the local gardening center.
Start your watermelon seeds in the field, where they will spread. To germinate, the soil should be at least 18 ° C.
What Is The Right Approach To Watermelon Farming?
Do NOT plant your watermelon seed in a container or big bowl, unless you have an incredibly short growing season. Neither buys watermelon seedlings from a nursery. Watermelon seeds germinate within a few days, simply and rapidly.
Watermelon plants quite quickly outgrow the seedling stage and do not like transplantation. You don’t save a great deal of time, and you end up with a poorer vine.
Avoid all this needless hard work and stick your seeds in the dirt, about 2 cm or an inch deep.
Watermelon Vines Need A Lot Of Care
The watermelons need soils that are dark, warm, and permeable. It allows the land to develop melons. There are some benefits of growing the soil: A slab or hill is free draining. If you have thick clay dirt, bring the bed certainly up.
Mounds are beautiful even when the soil is somewhat unfortunate. To raise watermelons, make a mound of healthy soil with plenty of compost in it. Often, after using much of the compost, farmers plant them in what’s remaining over from a compost pile.
When you want to grow stuff in tidy circles, or if you’re going to plant a broad field, raise watermelons on ridges, much as the growers do.
The Benefit Of Mulching
Watermelon cultivation needs to be very diligently done. A few things like mulching that one needs to keep in mind. Melons have deep roots and require plenty of water. Therefore, you need to ensure that the field is never dry out, in case it dries, so mulch helps.
Mulch holds weeds down. Weeding may disrupt the strong roots, so it’s best not to let them rise. Watermelons are starving animals.
If your mulch is like compost or old animal manures, it’s excellent. Watermelons can tolerate relatively fresh manure and fertilizers.
Otherwise, periodically feed the watermelons with anything like pelleted manure or other sustainable fertilizer.
Once the vines are two meters thick, pinch the ends. Encourage branching. When your watermelon vines get bigger, they seek to take up more space. Unless they start smothering specific stuff, you should warn them to keep to their region by smoothing the ends of the vines, so they develop in the right direction.
Watermelon Harvesting
Watermelon is a summer delight fruit loved by all ages. In addition to its great taste, it provides lycopene refreshment in the hot summer. It requires relocation after the germination of seeds more than 75-degree F and for growth more than 65 degrees F.
Throughout the watermelon cultivation, watermelon requires a warm season to grow as their sizes, shape and texture of zest vary from climate, so their best production came from the south and southwest regions of the United States.
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For cultivating watermelon, it requires a heavier feeder than the other fruits. Before planting, the soil has to be compost and manure was rotted in it to provide the warmness to the sown seeds.
Sown seeds start growing in the form of fruit; then fertilizers were mainly starting dressing up side by side. It requires a ph scale of 6 to 6.5 and more than 80 days of the warm summer season to grow up.
It is a fragile fruit to time in sandy, muddy soil. The soil will be moist, and water needed in the field will be 1 to 2 inches per week. Watermelon farming soil contains a high amount of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, but after illuminating it into flowers, it needs less nitrogen for further growth.
Watermelon elevates in a row sun-dried atmosphere, as they are not much sweeter as they are ripe, so the harvesting part plays a vital role in the life span of watermelon. The texture and color of a watermelon show whether the fruit is ripe or not.
Pests of Watermelon:
The leading watermelon killer is leaf-eating beetles (also destroying the flowers), including painted and dotted flea beetles, pumpkin beetles with or without markings, whatever you call them.
They all look alike, all doing the very same: nibble away on your watermelon plants. However, if they are a significant concern, it’s just an indication that your watermelon is stressed.
In a safe climate and decent soil, stable watermelon does not draw so many beetles. A watermelon should also grow quickly enough to manage any beetles.
The other primary concern with rising watermelons is mildew, a disease that makes the leaves appear like white dust. Fungus thrives in wet environments.
In the tropics, you may not be able to avoid beetles or mildew until the rainy season build-up starts. And it’s not worth it anyway…
The unbearable heat and humidity aren’t healthy produced watermelon conditions. Develop anything that needs rain, waiting for another dry season to produce watermelons.
Conclusion
In this guide on how to do watermelon farming, we have tried to explain all those steps and techniques that are required to produce a quality crop. However, you are solely responsible for crop failure for any reason. Don’t worry, this is not a kind of alarming signal. It’s just a precautionary statement. In the end, we would like to advise you to take any watermelon farming-related decisions at your discretion.
