In your closet?????? With lights?
Did it come out of the closet?????? =) Nancy

The vine that produced it!

Wow. I guess you don't have to worry about critters!
Never knew this was possible.

I assume there are grow lights?

There is that one grow light just above the pot. The rest is from sunlight.

Um, why?

This is all part of my experiment to see if different melons and other vining fruits can be fully grown and produce totally indoors.

Here is what it looked like three months ago.

I have to assume that a significant fraction of the commercial melon crop is grown indoors. Well, in greenhouses, rather than in closets, but still. If you've got water, light, and warmth, you're probably good to go, whether under a roof or not. You'll get something. Now melons absolutely need heat to develop their sugars, so in the summer an air conditioned house is probably not the best place to grow good melons. Real winter melons might do better.

Number two.

Greg, that's amazing. I admire your adventurous spirit. Did you have a reflective surface behind the plant, so that it would get a lot of light from both directions? If not, you should try it. The hydroponics places have all kinds of stuff like this, or you can just use white cardboard or aluminum foil.

Did you hand-pollinate?

I'm amazed that this worked with such a small pot. I thought that melons like to make huge root systems.

I did hand-pollinate.
During the Fall to Spring months the sunlight reflects off the back of my closet so it also gets light from there. I also use the one grow light.

That is pretty impressive. Is the light strip basic or HO? Also what variety of melon and how'd it taste?

This is so cool! I wanted to do something similar this past fall/winter but life interfered. Just seeing something grow when it is all grey out is so awesome! Plus, fruit tastes so nasty in the stores. I might try growing a Navajo Winter watermelon in the garden this coming spring because they supposedly keep for a few months :). Thanks for updating us!

The light is a 24 inch fluorescent grow light and the type of melon was Minnesota Midget. The melons that came from this plant were much sweeter and juicier than any you could find in the store.

why havent you shown us a pic of the inside ... drooling too much after cutting them open.. to pick the camera back up ... lol...

any observations as to rind thickness etc???

ken

The skin was around 1/2 inch thick or less. The rest was the edible orange area.