Our Vertical Garden area was much smaller this year than the past couple years, but it still yielded some very interesting results. We focused mostly on melons and for the first time found a melon that seems to not adapt to the trellising.

We tried two watermelons, the ‘Little Baby Flower’ red, seeded watermelon and the ‘Yellow Mini Tiger’ seedless watermelon. The ‘Little Baby Flower’ did very well, with lots of melons set that grew well and tasted great. They did crack when we had the rainy spell mid-summer, but that isn’t abnormal. The melons were okay on the trellis, although it was better to tie them up somewhat. It was also easy to identify ripe melons by looking at the nearest tendrils.

The ‘Yellow Mini Tiger’ had problems from the outset. As a seedless variety, we needed to plant the variety seeds and the pollinator seed. The pollinator grew readily, but we had to plant all 10 of the variety seeds to get a single plant growing. That wasn’t an auspicious start! We finally had one plant growing, after a few weeks. As the summer wore on, we had melons set on both the pollinator and the variety vines. Unfortunately, the melons were just large enough and the vines just brittle enough that they kept falling off the vine before they were completely ripe. Maybe we waited too long to try tying them up, but we lost a number of melons to breakage. The vine didn’t set nearly as many melons as the ‘Little Baby Flower’ and we never got a fully ripe melon. So…not so much a winner, at least on the trellis!

The other melon trellis was some more specialty melons, with the ‘Sun Jewel’ Asian melon and the ‘Snow Leopard’ honeydew melon. Both of these melons did relatively well. The honeydew was fairly productive, especially once we got the hang of knowing when they were ripe. It wasn’t as productive as some of the cantaloupe varieties we’ve grown in other years, but was still good. (The ‘Snow Leopard’ honeydew was a white fleshed melon.) The ‘Sun Jewel’ Asian melon was very productive, although it cracked in the rain and then slowed down a lot later in the summer. The thing with the ‘Sun Jewel’ melon is that it is different from what we expect of a melon. I was telling everyone that if you thought of it as a melon, you would be disappointed in the flavor, but that if you expected it to taste like a sweet cucumber it would be enjoyable.

The last part of the Vertical Garden is the vegetable arbor. I’m only going to talk about the two varieties that were on the Vertical Garden side in this post. I’ll save the other two varieties for my discussion of the Kids’ Snack Garden. The ‘Golden Honey Bunch’ cherry tomato and the cucumber were on the Vertical Garden side of the trellis. The cucumber – well, I doubt it was the fault of the individual variety. We just didn’t get it up and growing in a timely fashion. We ended up trying a couple different varieties and still struggled with germination. Not that it mattered…the tomato completely filled the trellis all on its own! The ‘Golden Honey Bunch’ was a real star in the garden this year! The tomatoes tasted great and the production was spectacular.