How to grow watermelons

Watermelon is a warm-season vining crop that spreads well beyond the footprint of most other vegetables, with a single hill needing roughly eight feet of clearance on every side to run. Gardeners grow it for a sweet, chilled fruit at the height of summer, something that cannot be matched by anything bought at a store days after picking. It goes into the ground only after the soil has warmed, spends most of the season as low sprawling vines, and fruits over a stretch of weeks from midsummer into early fall.

The hardest part of growing watermelon well is knowing when to pick it, since the fruit gives almost no visual cue on its own. University of Georgia Extension lists three signs to check together: the tendril opposite the fruit stem drying out completely, the underside where the fruit rests on soil turning from white to yellow, and a dull rather than sharp sound when the rind is tapped. A second-year gardener who relies on a single sign, most often thumping alone, ends up cutting into fruit before the sugars have developed and loses it to a hollow, watery center that counter ripening will not fix.