Growing melons in your garden can be a rewarding experience, providing you with juicy and sweet fruit during the summer and early fall. Getting the most out of your melons requires you to harvest them when they are ripe, however. It is sometimes
Growing melons in your garden can be a rewarding experience, providing you with juicy and sweet fruit during the summer and early fall. Getting the most out of your melons requires you to harvest them when they are ripe, however. It is sometimes difficult to tell when a melon is ripe, but you can use a few indicators to find ripe melons.
Changes in the vine of the melon may indicate that the melon is ripe. Depending on the types of melon that you grow, these changes can cause the vine to dry out at the point where it connects to the melon or cause the small curly tendrils that spiral out from the vine to begin withering and turning brown. Checking the vines of melons is not a perfect indicator, however, as these changes sometimes occur up to a week or more before the melon reaches optimal ripeness.
Thumping and Squeezing
Thumping or squeezing a melon can give you an idea of whether it is ripe or not. When you thump an immature melon, the sound typically has a somewhat metallic ring to it, while ripe melons produce a more hollow sound. It can take practice to develop an ear for this, however, and if you aren't familiar with the difference then the two sounds may be very similar. Squeezing or pressing the end away from the vine can be used to indicate ripeness in small melons such as cantaloupe and honeydew varieties since they become softer as they ripen.
Melons often undergo visual changes as they ripen, especially melons such as cantaloupe which undergo 