This is my very first attempt to grow winter melon [dark green] or also known as wax gourd or kundur around my market area. This type of wintermelon are the long and huge ones ,usually you would only buy a small chunk off the entire fruit. Many would boil and make a nice delicious drink or used for cooking with vegetables or make soup.
This project started with drying the seeds, planting them in separate containers and took a few days for the seeds to germinate and grow. Two healthy young plants were then transferred to my raised growing section around July and these creepers seems to be growing and going everywhere by day.
More and more tiny yellow flowers start to bloom and will attract plenty of bees and bugs to pollinate the flowers or munch on the leaves. Try to get rid of those giant grasshoppers, they can kill your winter melon plant by munching on all the leaves and the young fruits.
There are more than 20 tiny little hairy melon growing but only a few will eventually grow into a smooth skin fruit in months ahead. Many will drop and some will be eaten by bugs, I don’t use pesticide, so this experiment is based on nature by design formula not maximum yield concept. Within 1 month, a few will eventually grow bigger and hopefully they will survive the journey which is said around 3 months before one can harvest them.
Finally, around October, I managed to keep a few winter melon growing and not knowing when they are ready to harvest. The closest guess is the ones which has drop all its hair and with a nice waxy smooth surface. This very first melon is 2 feet long and weigh 11 kg, pretty amazing.
The 2nd fruit is smaller, around 8.7kg.
mybigSfarm 