Posted by marjolijn vos on November 4, 2009 at 8:08am
Help! Why aren't my watermelon seedlings growing? I grew the plants from seed, they have
grown at least 2 true leaves but now they seem to have stopped growing. Do I water more?
Feed them more worm tea? Last year I tried and didn't have any luck then but a vine did grow.
Maybe it is still too cold, though the cucumbers and gherkins are doing great. Look forward
to hearing some advice, thanks!
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Watermelons need the soil warmth. A good hint for this is to plant them in a black plastic plant bag, or plant them and then cover the soil around that area with black plastic, not over the plant..just around the soil to keep the roots warm. I have grown them and piled up grass clippings I put the plant inside a cardboard tube and clippings around that, as the plant grew I took the cardboard tube away and they grew well!
Good sunshine
This probably doesn't help much, but I have heard that they are very hard to grow. No reason was given. I have planted my second lot of seeds, the first just didn't do anything, though on digging up the spot where I plant them I couldn't find seeds, so maybe birds go them.
I had the same thing last year......they stayed the same size for about 4 or 5 weeks, but they eventually started growing and took over half the garden. I think it was just not quite warm enough for them to start with. This year, I only planted the seeds 2 weeks ago, and so far 3 have come up so hopefully by the time they're big enough to transplant it will be warm enough for them to go into overdrive! :-)
I put another thread about melons, I can grow lots of other cucurbits but melons seem to be marginal here. even getting them to germinate was a mission.I know they do not like to be transplanted very much, and they need average temperatures of around 20 degrees to do well I was reading recently.
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Good sunshine