PLEASE HELP-baby watermelon plant dying from the roots out

I got this plant 6 weeks ago. it seems like it's just going vine by vine now. first the vines will go all limp and look like they're wilting (I make sure it's watered daily). i just don't know what the problem is. i've never grown anything before , so this is very shocking and saddening to see happen to my poor plant. my grandma tried to spray it with a fungicide of some kind but the problems is only getting worse.

please look at these pictures: http://imgur.com/a/NYf3e
notice the one little melon is all black now. it's very sad. there also appear to be a few ants around the plant and on the leaves. could they be affecting it?

can anyone please please help me out? can i save the plant?

looks like it has some kind of wilt disease. Watering every day could actually be doing it. As long as the soil in the container feels moist, it doesnt need watering, too much water for just about anything is not good for them. Also im wondering if the plant is overheating being placed there with the wood chip mulch, if it is anything like our back deck, that stuff can get really hot. and while they are a heat loving plant, they can only take but so much. I had to move my tomato plant off of the back deck a few weeks ago because the tomatoes on the vine were literally being blanched on the vine from the heat.

could the heat really be causing the one melon to turn black?? the vine looks healthy but it's just that melon. I'm not sure if it's been over-watered, since it's been pretty rainy lately, but the soil does dry out kind of quick (might be overheating?)
do you think the plant could be saved?

No. It looks like you have several diseases going. The vines look anything but healthy and I suspect the roots have rotted. I don't know of anything that you can do at this point.

yeah the heat wouldnt have anything to do with the black melon, that is probably coming from the disease it has

1) Roots of all plants need oxygen as well as water. When you do water thoroughly soak the root zone. Then let the surface of the soil get fairly dry before watering again.

2) I would plant them in the ground.
Watermelons, like most of their relatives, can spread their roots quite widely so that in hot spells they can still reach water. They may wilt in the hottest part of the day, but they recover as it cools off. This does not seem to cause any problems for the plant. A container heats up a lot more than the ground, and the roots can burn when the soil heats up in the container.

3) I would keep working with this plant, but any that permanently wilt should be removed.

The following is only one partial solution to one problem, and it won't help plants that are already stressed or dieing.

Say you have a plant in a pot, and realize that the pot is holding too much water (or not letting in enough air). For example, the pot never gets light even if you wait several days between waterings. When you try to flush the pot, not much wtaer comes out the bottom when you add too much water at the top.

OK, your potting mix holds too much water, or has no voids and channels to let air in.

The preliminary diagnosis is seeing nothing come out the bottom when you water heavily, or never being able to get the pot "dry" (light) by withholding water form a few days.

The conclusive diagnosis would be pulling the rootball out of the pot. If you don't see any roots, or they are few and feeble and only exist near the top or sides of the pot, you may have water-logged roots. If the potting mix is wet everywhere, and you don't see little gaps with air instead of water, you may have a water-retentive potting mix.

In advanced cases, it may seem that the plant can't take up water even when the root ball is soaked. That may mean that the roots have already rotted away fromn the water-logged parts of the mix.

You might see roots only where air CAN reach the roots, like along the very edge of the root ball where soil pulls away from the pot and leaves a gap where air can sneak in.

The brute force solution is to re-pot the plant in a faster-draining mix. If roots have really drowned, rotted and died back, you won't even need to root-prune.

(The other brute-force solution is to throw the plant on your compost heap and start over with a new plant. Of course any plant you throw away immediately tries to become the healthiest and fastest-growing plant in your yard, so keep an eye on it after throwing it out.)

But if you don't want to re-pot or re-start, try this to either diagnose or cure the situation. Use some water-absorbent fabric to continuously wick excess water OUT of the pot. That will let air IN and might cure the problem in one step.

Set the pot on top of a folded towel, or layers of absorbent fabric like cotton flannel, Tee shirts, denim, or many synthetic fabrics. Anything that absorbs water or wicks it well.

You can replace the towel each time it becomes water-logged, or get fancy.

To be fancy, drape one end of the towel DOWN so that water drips from it into a tray or pot BELOW the lowest point of the water-logged pot. Now capillary action AND gravity combine to allow water to seek a lower level.

Capillary force is much stronger than gravity for small amounts of water moving in a wick or through soil, but you already beat that by extending the capillary zone of your rootball to include a flap of toweling hanging DOWN below the pot.

Capillary force makes the towel or the soil equally attractive to water, so it will move out of the pot until the towel right under the pot is exactly as wet as the soil in the bottom of the pot.

Gravity convinces the water in the towel that it would rather be at the bottom edge of the towel (and dripping away) than at the top of the towel where it touches the potting mix. So water flows down and out of the towel. More water flows from the bottom of the pot into the towel, and keeps flowing down and away.

Water in the top of the pot flows down to the bottom of the pot.

This keeps happening until all of the pot and most of the towel come to the same degree of wetness - no perched water, and only as much capillary water in the soil as there is in the towel.

Since your potting mix is too fine, it will still hold more water than the towel, BUT at least SOME of the voids and micro-channels or pores will finally drain empty of water and become gas-filled CONDUITS for oxygen to diffuse in through, and C)2 to diffuse away through.

In short: set an unhappy potted plant on top of a towel, and either let the towel drip away, or change it when soaked. If that lets enough air into the potting mix that the plant can finally drive roots into the whole root zone, the plant will thrive if that was its only problem.

You can do the same thing with seedling trays if you, like me, can NOT stop overwatering your darn seedlings!

http://allthingsplants.com/ideas/view/RickCorey/646/Bottom-Watering-Seedling-Trays-with-Cotton-Flannel-Prevents-Water-Logging/