Anyway, I laid off from gardening for a couple years because of time. This year, Im gardening again and have corn, jalepeno peppers, sunflowers, and watermelons. My question is how do you guys weed around your watermelons?
The way they vine out everywhere make's it hard to hoe around them without chopping the vines.
I dont know what size garden you got going, but when I grew mellons in the past I always just weeded them by hand until the mellons started to grow from the blossoms and then I didnt bother weeding around them anymore, they seemed to grow so fast that the weeds were not a problem.
I used clean straw, nothing with manure in it, like mulch. Spread a layer around the plants after a good weeding by hand. This also keeps the melons off the ground which prevents rot on the bottom of the melon if your garden is real wet. I do the same with squash. You can also use grass clippings if you have enough. Then in the fall burn it all off or till it in. Works great.
I saw a really neat idea in "FARM SHOW" Magazine featured a couple years back un-fortunetly I live in a bad area for growing anything with vines
They had a suspended garden mounted on top of tall fence posts and a trellis type grid lay'd out with 5 gal buckets were used for the planters and the vines spread across the trellis and the mellons,zuk's and cuk's and pumpkins hung down thru the trellis out in the open & easy to pick, for particularly heavy ones they used old pantyhose and made slings to hang the big stuff as I remember they raised tomato's green beans underneath the trellis.
A different take on growing vine crops for shure so mabe try a small trellis & see if it works
My weed situation is looking better. The watermelon leaves are big enough now that they shade the ground and keep new weeks from growing. I still have a few tall weeds poking through that I need to pull. Ive already got a couple of melons growing, the biggest is about the size of kids balloon.
