Pumpkins, muskmelon, sweet potatoes, ... did I overdo?

May 23, 2018

Hi, this is the first time I've tried a sfg and I'm doing it with my kids. I let them choose some of the plants and I really took it to heart when I read that you can grow big things on a trellis in a sfg. I bought two 3' by 6' and 1' deep beds. But now as I continue to try to learn about these things, I think I may have overplanted or I worry that the trellis I'm building is not strong enough, etc. I'm not seeing pictures of anything this extreme on the internet. Across the back six feet of the first bed I have a seedling of halloween pumpkin (2 squares), muskmelon (2 squares), and two sweet potatoes (1 square each). I am building a conduit trellis for it: 8 feet across so it can have an extra foot on the sides, and 8 feet high (but I lose a foot since the bed is a foot deep), with a piece of conduit at the halfway point as support too. I drove 4' rebar into the ground for all three vertical supports. I have potatoes in front of the sweet potatoes but other than that I have spring veggies in front that are not doing very well because we didn't have a spring, I'm guessing. Is this completely insane? Either I'm going to have quite a spectacle or the whole thing is going to crash (literally). I am also just worrying that nothing will have enough room to grow. Any advice? Should I pull up half of it, or just go for it and see what happens? Or is there an inexpensive tweak that I need to do? Or can I have some of it sprawl over part of the garden itself and some on the trellis? The other garden is only slightly less crazy. A mini watermelon in the left two squares, two tomatoes in the center two squares, and pie pumpkin in the right two squares. Same trellis. Thriving summer veggies already in the rest of that garden. Thanks!

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