Hopeful

We threw some old watermelon seeds into the raised bed garden a few weeks ago - I think they were the yellow watermelon variety - and soon we had a monster vine growing onto the rocks on the East side of the pool.

Pretty leaves on a pretty vine.

I checked for fruit and found a lot of dried up watermelon starts like this in mid-August.

This part of the vine is on the lawn so it wasn't dried out due to the hot rocks.

Then, last week I checked again and found a baby watermelon about the size of a hacky sack on a vine growing across the rocks! It was probably forming when I took the picture above.   I moved the vine onto the lawn so that the little melon wouldn't fry on the rocks.

My Furry Baby

A couple of days later when I was watering and checking on my melon, I found two more babies ... bigger babies.

How could I have missed those 2 bigger melons? Well, they were very camouflaged under the leaves.

Middle Melon

Watermelons require 65 to 90 frost-free days to reach harvest so I may have to cover some melons in plastic this fall. Or maybe these are of the fast maturing variety? We'll see....