I have some French melon seeds, and from my research it looks as though they are grown differently from ours, with pruning of the vines as the plants begin to sprout and spread. I can't find more specific instructions, though, and last summer my French melons didn't do very well when I allowed them to spread naturally without cutting them back, as I do with American varieties. Does anyone know how to cut them back, or was it just a bad year for melons and they would normally have grown well without the extra attention?
Growing Melons the French Way?
Hi Greenhouse_gal,
If you can use the translater of Google, it can help !
http://gwmarcha.club.fr/taillemelon.htm
Dany
Dany, thanks so much! That's exactly what I was looking for. My French is fine so I don't need a translator.
Have you ever used that method to grow melons? I am wondering why we don't do it that way here - different varieties or simply different customs?
My grandparents were from Budapest, by the way.
Leslie
Leslie , c'est un plaisir lorsqu'on peux aider quelqu'un !
A ton service
I think I will try melons this way. Where did you get the seeds?
Thanks!
Portland1, I got seeds from France. You can find some at
http://www.frenchgardening.com/category.html?cat=Seeds--French%20vegetable and at http://www.gourmetseed.com/c=Lnp8uYRixDAx96HBX9QmWJzZh/category/gourmet_seed.vegetable_seed.melon/
The packet from one of the varieties had a description of that sort of pruning, but it wasn't very clear to me and lacked good illustrations. I would love to find more sources for French vegetables; I've written to http://www.graines-baumaux.fr/ for their catalogue, but although they send me emails about their products so far I haven't received a paper copy, and I'm not sure how ordering from them works or whether they'll even ship to the U.S.
Dany, merci bien! Comment l'as-tu trouvée, cette information? Moi j'ai cherché longtemps sans voir rien!
Leslie
Thank you Leslie! I am going to order seeds but I may need your help later because alas I do not read or speak French. The pictures seem pretty clear but I may have a question or two. Thank you Dany for the link!
Portland, I'd be glad to help with the French. I started off as a French major in college many many years ago, but then realized that I wasn't interested in any careers that that would fit me for so I switched to psychology. I'm retired from that and am now a painter, and we finally got to go to France, which was wonderful. I was really inspired by the gardens there and have tried to put some of their cultivation methods in practice.
We used to live in Bellingham, WA, by the way, so I've been to Portland several times. A beautiful city and a very forward-thinking state.
Leslie
I do love Portland and the "state of mind" in Oregon. I'm a retired architect - retired last year - and moved to Portland from San Francisco. It is nice to finally have time to garden and travel for pleasure instead of work!
Thanks for the offer to translate!
Pas de problème, as they say in France!
Did you have to take art courses as an architect, by the way? A friend of mine in the same field said he had to in order to produce those pretty elevations on plans.
Art courses were required but not in order to produce pretty plans. Architecture is an art, and principles of color, creating views, and especially scale are vital. However, I think the most valuable contribution of art knowledge for architects, or for anyone for that matter, is helping you to see things with a different eye, and thinking out of the box. My significant other, a superior court judge, and I were driving in the country one day and we asked each other what we saw. He could look at the exact same thing and see it totally differently. He could not grasp that I saw layers and scale and intrigue. Different thinking for different professions! Too bad he had no art classes!
I was an RN for many years and returned to school to become an arch and so planned and designed hospitals, where I think color and "a sense of place" are important.
So, is there such thing as French cucumbers? How are they different form ours? I have terrible luck with them. My tomatoes are always wonderful and prolific but the melons and cukes, not so much.
Didn't mean to seem dismissive; "pretty elevations" was meant to be funny. I actually do think they're pretty, though; they tend to use watercolors in a way I've never been able to manage. I normally stick to oils - mostly portraits but I have a series of paintings I did from photos I took in France, most of them figurative but not portraits per se.
My husband (also a retired psychologist) is musical while I focus on the visual arts, and we enjoy comparing perceptions about the two media. He likes coming to museums with me and hearing me describe what I see and I learn a lot from listening to music with him. I agree that color and a sense of place are important in hospitals; they should be warm and welcoming, as well as offering distractions to the mind when possible.
I don't know that there are specifically French cucumbers. I used to grow the Middle Eastern varieties and enjoyed those, but I've been having trouble with vine plants recently. There are a lot of interesting tomatoes, beans, peas and melons which are French. My favorite tomatoes are Cornue des Andes and St. Pierre, and I've been growing Pelandron bush beans which are amazingly prolific and very tasty. Last year was not a good year for melons for us, but I usually like Ambrosia.
Oh Greenhouse_gal I didn't take your comments to be dismissive! It's just that many people think architects do math stuff all day but in reality we design and then call the structural & mechanical engineers and say "make this work" and they usually roll their eyes back and sigh! And, pretty drawings do matter to convey a certain message or "genius loci" of a project.
I am going to explore some of the tomato varieties you mentioned. I don't have a greenhouse but I can start some seedlings under lights in the basement.
Isn't it interesting how different brains see the world around us. What a nice match you & your husband are!
You might be interested in a giant sunflower painted on an intersection by the folks in the neighborhood, with the intention to slow the traffic in the area. It has been amazingly successful, along with the "street art" in the area.
Google Earth and type in SE 33rd Ave and Yamhill, Portland, Oregon to see it.
What an interesting idea, to paint a sunflower to slow traffic! I wonder if we could do something like that in our local arts district. I can just picture it...
I always start my plants in the house anyway; I use grow-lights and Gardeners Supply styrofoam self-watering flats. But even with the grow-lights I always found that the plants would become spindly, so as soon as I can now I put them outside in the greenhouse where the light source is even and they don't tend to stretch themselves out. My greenhouse is unheated, though, so I can't start them there, and besides, I like to be able to watch them more carefully. I had problems growing mine the year I tried to do it in the basement; the growing medium grew a white mold and it seemed to inhibit the development of the plants. What I do now is bring a couple of stools into the kitchen and put my flats and grow-light setup on a piece of plywood on top of them. They're not there for that long anyway and I can keep an eye on them that way.
I designed our house; I knew what features I wanted and planned it all out. But we had to have a licensed engineer draw the plans so the builders would have something to work from. I've also seen a lot of elevations because I was on our local planning board for many years. I have a lot of respect for someone who can visualize a building and then make it a reality!
Leslie
greenhouse gal, may I share a little something that's been amazingly useful to me which you might do to help with the germinating of plants? I believe I picked it up here, somewhere on DG, but it might have been elsewhere too.
To fend off the moldy-fuzzies and stimulate quick germination, we all wish for one of those heating pads or under-sand heating elements like the big greenhouses have, but what I've found immensely useful and handy is to buy one of those very low plastic storage containers, the sort made quite shallow so as to slip under a bed, and fill it with those tiny christmas lights that only cost a couple of dollars and set my germinating plant flats on that. I have a little battery-operated outdoor temp reader whose sensor I slip into the flat under the clear top to monitor the temp, and from the readings I get from that I massage the string(s) of lights (up to three in series is safe, the labels say) and from that and published best temps for germinating, I either bunch up or thin out the pile of lights under the flat. I'm germinating a small flat of cucumbers now, and they want 90 degreesF so I have all the lights bunched up at one end of the box. My final addition is a motion-activated 'screamer' to scare off the chats de la maison so they aren't tempted by the warmth to sleep on (and crush!) the little plants! The alarm is fantastically useful and marketed as 'Scraminal' or 'Scramimal' as in 'scram, animal!' (a crude heart-cry we Americans often employ when we find the dog sleeping in the lettuce bed and similar) and I wish I had a hundred of them, it is so useful. The sound is appalling, deafening. No one and nothing can withstand it. er, except a slug, perhaps. Not sure they have ears. They might be able to *feel* it, though.
Anyway, even with the $35 Scranimal thingy figured in, I don't think my set-up is as expensive as one of those mats and they're miniscule anyhow. My light box is 2'X5' or so. I can get two full-sized flat onto it with some room for individual pots at the end. You might want to try this. Most of us have the remnants of this plan lying about the house already.--Melis
Hi, Melis! Actually after I wrote my last reply on this thread I bought Park's Bio-Dome seedstarting system and a heat mat to go with it, so I did have some bottom heat, which definitely helped. On the other hand, I had a nice crop of white mold, too, but I scraped it off and then ignored it, and it didn't seem to harm anything. I didn't like the coir plugs that came with Park's system, though; you can really only plant one seed per cell, which meant that I was short on plants if some didn't germinate, or if cutworms or pill bugs mowed them down after I set them out. But the Gardener's Supply system won't permit bottom heat, so I'll have to come up with some hybrid method next spring.
I have been pruning my melons as suggested; so far I don't have laterals yet but I'm sure they'll be coming along soon. Naturally it's not as clear where to prune as the diagrams suggest, but I did my best! I'm curious to see what the results are. Is anyone else using this method now?
Leslie
Leslie, can you sort of paraphrase the technique as you understand it?
Melis, go to that French link for the diagrams, and here's the translation for the directions. But this method is only appropriate for old French varieties; because of lack of cheap help, the newer varieties have been developed not to need this kind of fussing. All of my varieties are older ones, though, so I want to see how this works on them!
First trimming:
When the plants have 4 or 5 leaves, cut the stem above the first 2 true leaves. After you do that, two laterals of the first generation will develop at the axis of the two leaves.
Second trimming:
After 5 leaves have appeared on each of the two laterals of the first generation, trim those off above the third leaf. The second generation of laterals will develop at the axis of the remaining leaves.
Third trimming:
In the same way, trim the laterals of the second generation to 3 leaves. The laterals coming from the third generation which will develop will have female flowers which are easily recognizable.
Fourth trimming (pinching):
As soon as little melons have started to grow (one says that the flowers are "knotted") cut the stem, leaving one or two leaves above the fruits. If the vine has too many fruits, don't hesitate to save only the best developed ones. You will then have melons that are better nourished, larger and tastier.
thanks. Not sure I followwhich French link you mean, but I think I get the prosedure, and I am growing old varieties, so this should be a perfect fit. Again, thanks!-M
Melissande, there's a link to a page in French in the second comment under this thread; dany12 found it for me. Nice diagrams. It's not as easy to figure out on a real live plant because they're not as neat and as obvious as those drawings, but it still gives you a good idea of how to do it. I need a visual, not just a verbal cue for something like this! Which varieties are you growing?
Leslie