I'm seeing melons!

In my 2 organic community garden rows, where I have lots of room and also where I hoe my rows into hills and add compost to each spot as I plant something, I have melons starting to appear. Its the closest I can get to SFG because they shut down the garden each fall and plow it up to add cow manure.

This is one of 2 New England Pie Pumpkins I found under the leaves. There may be more because my 3 plants are getting huge.

A view of my three pie pumpkin hills.

Here's my very first Sugar Baby watermelon on the vine today. I hope this is the first of at least a few. I have 4 watermelon plants, 2 from seedlings where the new baby is growing, and 2 vines from seeds that I planted later. Blossoms on those but no babies yet that I could find. They were ideally sweet last year and the family loved the few I got from this garden then.
I place foam insulation boards under the melons to keep them off the ground, away from water and mud and also to find more easily among the thick leaves.

Lookin' GREAT! I am jealous. All my melons were destroyed by the stoopid striped cucumber beetle

camprn....
I worried about that but as soon as my plants started to grow I loosely covered them with light-weight row covers and just put piles of soil on a few of the edges to hold them in place. It was enough to keep most of the bugs away.

Those white things in the garden are my row covers over the pumpkins.
When the blossoms started, the plants were big enough to uncover and fend for themselves, with the bugs having moved on to greener pastures. The few I find I pick off when I water them.
I did the same with the cukes and the watermelons and all are thriving right now with tons of blossoms and lots of bees.
For my cucumbers, I wrapped the row cover around the outside of the cages until the blossoms appeared.

This is how my 3 Bushy cuke cages looked on July 9th, mummy-wrapped.

Here's my 2 cages of Homemade Pickling cukes today, unwrapped and blossoming and with little itty bitty babies under those leaves.

I highly recommend any gardener to stock up on light-weight row cover for pest prevention. I use it in my SFG as well and it saved my cabbages from flea beetle last year.

I'm really impressed, it looks so good!

I am doing 1 bushing cucumber this year, should I be putting them in a cage? It's still really small compared to my vining cucumbers.

Krazikan....
This is my first year with Bushy cukes (that's the variety name but its supposed to be a bush-type variety) and I cage all my cukes, so this one also got caged.

If you have yours in SFG beds, you want some kind of trellising or cages so they don't take up too much space.

In my SFG beds I have my other cukes with a straw mulch and concrete reinforcing wire for their climbing towers.

Here's one of my SFG beds. These are Burpless Beuaty, Lemon and Summer Dance, all started later than those in the community garden so I wouldn't be harvesting them all at one time.