It depends on what you want. If you wanted the largest possible big Orangeglo melons, you probably should thin the fruit to 2 per plant. It is probably more desirable to have two nice, large beautiful, high-quality Orangeglo watermelons per vine than 3, 4 or 5 fruit that are lesser quality. If you want more fruit but smaller ones, don't remove fruit, but understand that most watermelon plants set more fruit than they can mature. On their own, if they have more fruit than the plant can support under the current conditions, the plants can abort what they consider excess fruit.

With Blacktail Mountain, I've let them carry up to 6-8 melons per plant, and all were good quality. Blacktail Mountain is a producing machine in our climate as long as it has well-drained, fertile soil and some irrigation (though not excessive) in the hottest part of the summer if rain isn't falling. This assumes ideal growing conditions (hot, sunny, but not too hot and not too dry until the melons are approaching maturity, then dry is better as irrigation at that point can ruin their flavor).

With all watermelons, you must be careful to avoid overwatering and overfertilizing or you can eat up with big melons that have white hearts instead of the proper colored flesh and that have no flavor. At that point there is nothing you can do to fix them, but you'll remember to not overfeed or overwater the next time you grow melons.

Remember that melons need fertile, well-drained soil but then they don't need lots of fertilization after that. They need adequate water but not too much. I usually leave them alone once planted and don't irrigate if I can avoid it. Pampered watermelon plants often produce poorly or they produce poor-quality fruit. Luckily, here in our climate, one thing we can give them with no special effort whatsoever is all the heat that they crave.

I wasn't sure if having so many close together on the same vine would affect the quality, but if it will naturally abort anything in excess of what it can support, I will leave them.

How long does it take the Blacktail to ripen once it sets fruit?

Cynthia

Dawn, I'm planting some sugar baby plants today. For future reference, how many melons should I allow per plant?