Tried my hands on experimenting with the oriental melon two years back, way before I got myself a community garden. Got some seeds from Known You Seeds of the hybrid ‘Silver Light’ whose description is given below:
“This oriental sweet melon is early, vigorous, and adaptable to hot and humid conditions. Fruit is a globe or flat globe, weighing about 400 g, uniform in size, with greenish white skin. Flesh is light green, sweet, and crispy.”
The plant is easy to grow and the right cultivar must be obtained for growing in the lowland tropics so that the fruits produced are sweet. Give it plenty of space to sprawl as it can be a large vine. Some people attempt to grow them up a trellis which is equally possible. The oriental melon is somewhat like a honeydew except that it is so much smaller, where the fruits are only enough for a person’s consumption.
I grew mine on the ground and faced some problems where the fruits are within reach by ants and other pests like snails and slugs. But the ants aren’t all that bad, come to think of it, because they crawl around and helped to pollinate the flowers when I wasn’t around during the weekdays.
‘Silver Light’ is a fast-growing and vigorous variety. It is rather resistent to downy mildew which many curcubits tend to get infected when they are grown here. Took about 2 months for it to flower from seed and about another two for the fruits to develop and ripen on the vine, notice the colour changes in the fruit’s skin shown in the series of pictures shown below.
Something that I would like to try next time is to practise the proper pruning methods observed by commercial farmers. Not only it results in a tidier vine, it also helps to direct the plant’s energy to help with fruit production.
The female flower.
The developing fruit, after successful pollination.
It is exciting to see the fruit enlarging every week!
This fruit’s almost ready to harvest – see the lightening of the rind’s colour.
Another fruit that is ripening…
The harvest brought home and weighed. As can be discerned from the weighing balance, the fruit weighs about 500 g!
