Hydroponics Tuesday

The Endless Cantaloupe
7/29/2008 7:49:00 AM

Sadly, it's going to be a short post this week.  We've got a good portion of the growing units out-of-commission, so we don't have all that much to report.  However, we do have some good news to report... Our own Max Parker has returned from the recent Maximum Yield expo.  We'll be posting a full write-up in next week's post.  We're still gathering our material.

However, we do have some news from the garden this week... I'm the first one to admit that I have no experience with growing melon; so this is all new to me.  We're growing a cantaloupe at the moment, and it's really growing. It's growing about 9" each and every day.  I never knew that cantaloupe was a climbing vine...  Shows what I know.  Take a look at this fellow climbing the light stand:

Hydro-2008-07-29a.jpg

I'm not sure how far it's going to go... We're training it along the light stand, and then across some support twine.  Here's a shot from a different angle:

Hydro-2008-07-29b.jpg

As you can see from last week, it's gotten to be a very big plant in a hurry.  Updates to follow.  I expect that next week should be pretty busy. 

Posted By Max Parker, Tuesday, July 29, 2008 12:47:23 PM
Great Cantaloupe, Ben. I hope that when it sets fruit it's not too heavy to be supported.
Posted By Ben (Hydroponics Tuesday), Tuesday, July 29, 2008 1:37:45 PM
I'm pretty sure that we'll need to "net" the fruits when they start to appear. When we visited Epcot a few years ago, they had lots of pumpkins growing on arbors. All of them had net "hammocks" for the fruit. It appeared to work very well; I'm thinking that we'll do something similar.
Posted By Max Parker, Wednesday, July 30, 2008 3:09:35 AM
I see. Good idea, the fruit can get heavy. I've heard of some cool things done with plants at Epcot.
Posted By Ben (Hydroponics Tuesday), Wednesday, July 30, 2008 6:58:05 AM
Take a look through these posts on my personal site... We visited Disney and Epcot a few years ago, and I took pictures during the "backstage" hydroponics tour:

http://www.barnyardbbs.com/Blog/tags/disney
Posted By DJK, Friday, August 01, 2008 2:30:08 PM
My strawberries are doing the exact same thing!!!