Cantaloupe is one of the more mild flavored melons one can grow in their garden. The soft orange flesh is lightly sweet, but still quite pleasant. While it doesn’t lend itself to cooking or preservation, it is a nice early summer treat.
Cantaloupe Details:
- Family: Cucurbitaceae
- Growing Season: Early spring to late summer depending on your climate
- Growing Zones: 3 through 10
- Spacing: 36-48 inches (91-122 cm) apart
- Seed to Harvest time: 70-85 days
- Indoor Starting: Can be started indoors 3-4 weeks before planting, but not recommended
- Earliest Planting: After danger of last frost
- Watering: Water 1-2 inches per week, keeping soil moist, but never wet. Do not let the soil go completely dry ever. Mulch is recommended to keep soil from drying out.
- Sunlight Requirements: Full sun
- Planting: plant seeds 1/2 inch (1-2 cm) deep keeping spacing in mind. Starters may also be used, but their shallow roots make transplanting fairly traumatic for the plant.
- Weeding: Weed melons often as pulling larger weeds can disrupt their shallow root system. Daily weeding is always recommended if it is viable.
- Harvesting: Harvest ripe melons by simply pulling them off the vine. Ripe melons have a melon smell to them and will easily come off the vine. If the melon resists at all when you tug on it, it is not yet fully ripe.
- Known Pests: Aphids, use insecticidal soap or introduce predatory insects like lady bugs where permissible. Powdery mildew, spray with vinegar solution at a ratio of 2 tablespoons per gallon of water. Squash bugs, remove by hand and clear any eggs under leaves when found. Wilt disease, use a food safe fungicide.
- Other Known Problems: Letting melons sit directly on dirt can cause problems with both discoloration, uneven ripening, and pests invading from the soil. To prevent these problems when growing melons on the ground simply apply a decent layer of dry mulch under where the melon is growing. This will not only help prevent problems, but also lead to nicer looking cantaloupes.
More About Cantaloupe
Cantaloupe, like most melons, are not a long haul fruit. they are hear for a bit, nice to be eaten while you have them, and then that is it. While they are a nice fruit to have they are not a high priority on the self sufficient living priority list. Since they don’t keep long and cannot easily be preserved, they are considered a nice to have more than anything else. On top of this if you grow them on the ground, they are huge space hogs.
To make cantaloupe more viable for your garden you have two major options. The first is the use of a trellis. As cantaloupe are vining plants (like all Cucurbitaceae) you can grow them vertically quite easily. The downside to this is that when a cantaloupe is ripe it falls right off the trellis. This isn’t typically an issue if you check daily, but if you’re not an everyday in the garden kind of person, you will surely want to avoid this option.
Option number two for making cantaloupe more viable for your garden is using them as part of a larger companion planting scheme. The nature of the plant to spread out and shade the ground with its broad leaves can help cool the soil and keep the ground moist for other plants. This works out because the leaves are often far spread from the root system so you can use the vines as ground cover without competing with other plants. This does take a bit more planning, but can work really well in conjunction with flowers that repel pests and herbs that have aggressive roots.
Cantaloupe Tasting and Food Notes
Cantaloupe are one of the most mild sweet melons around. Their flavor is inoffensive, but not very powerful. While they certainly have the unique melon like flavor that most sweet melons do, it’s fairly subdued. This is why cantaloupe is often found in a fruit salad where the flavors are often a medley of sweet notes from high to low flavor profiles.
While not quite as sweet as a good watermelon, cantaloupe are far more consistent as their size doesn’t vary much from plant to plant.
While researching cantaloupe recipes there wasn’t a lot that came up. The most common non-fruit salad use for cantaloupe is a chilled cantaloupe soup, but we can’t say this is a common or even well loved recipe.
Overall, a cantaloupe is what it is and it’s a nice fruit to enjoy like you would most other melons.
Should I Grow Cantaloupe in My Garden?
Unlike other plants we review, we can’t recommend cantaloupe for your homestead unless you really love it and have extra space for it. The fruit doesn’t keep well, it’s not used in many other recipes, it’s not majorly nutritious, it has shallow roots, and it is susceptible to a lot of pests. If you really enjoy cantaloupe it is one of the easier melons to get a consistent flavor profile from, but we wouldn’t recommend this be something you grow on a whim. Even with good companion planting cantaloupe is a very personal choice for any garden.