The Tropical Fruit Forum

Watermelon vines are highly prone to viruses, bacterial and fungal diseases. If you’ve grown Tomatoes, papaya, cucumbers or other plants susceptible to fungal diseases, you probably have a high bioburden which can infect your melon vines.

Looking at your picture, I would say that when your plant was smaller, you may have overwatered your plant. It appears, from the above ground vines and leaf size, that the roots may be weak and have not filled your pot. This often happens when the root zone is over saturated with water causing anaerobic conditions which are not conducive to root growth. The anaerobic conditions creates a good growing environment for the bad organisms.

To remedy this, be sure to start with good clean soil and preferably a watermelon variety that is disease resistant. Watermelon vines hate having their roots disturbed and they hate being transplanted but I’ve found that it’s best to start them off in smallish containers like a #1 container and let them completely fill the pot with roots before carefully transplanting them into their final container.

By doing it this way, you can control the soil moisture more easily and get your seedling in a strong healthy state before putting it into its final big pot. The roots should completely fill the #1 container before transplanting and this will ensure that it will have ample root mass to rapidly grow into the bigger container. Your plant should be given full sun and the shade from your nearby plants will slow down the growth of your vines. Once you transplant into the bigger container, water it thoroughly but let the soil dry out in between watering so the roots will spread out in search of water.

Simon

A neighbour had some Myrtus communis shrubs in the front yard. I'm guessing they were seedlings as the fruit on different plants were slightly variable to taste and colour.
Just slightly different flavours. I thought one was the best of the lot.
There are a bunch of wild Australian native Myrtus and relatives I have tried.
Here's one of them
https://www.sgaonline.org.au/midyim-berry/
If you are ok with wild fruit, I would rate Myrtus communist as quite pleasant, and very productive.

Thanks for replying! So hopefully they’ll complain about the heat but not die, good to know. As for your issue with lack of flowers, I obviously have no experience with this species but I’ve heard some places that fertilizers with too much nitrogen can cause them to grow really well but not flower, so if you haven’t looked into that already it might be a good lead, best of luck!

Ants are not pollinators (Except for a very few rare cases), and actually have compounds that will kill plant pollen. If the fruit are already set, I don't think there should be much issue though on their own (until the aphids come)