Didn't we already cover this? ......but I doubt it would speed up the ripening process anymore than trimming a tomato plant would speed them up to turn red.

As noted earlier, if you prevent new melons from forming, it will probably help speed up existing fruit. Do that by clipping off those tiny new melons. Probably best not to hack off foliage.

At this point in the season, I would trim back the vines. We don't have much growing season left up here, the goal is to get the the plants to expend the energy growing and ripening the fruit that has already set rather than expending energy on vining and flowering -- any fruit set into August likely won't ripen, and if it does it isn't going to be very sweet. Note this advice is for colder zones.

ETA: I don't have time to fiddle with pinching off flowers, so I go the trim back the vine route.

Of course, plants get their energy from sunlight on foliage, so trimming the vines is going to reduce the energy that the plant has available to ripen fruit. That is, if you cut off all the foliage, and just left the melons, thinking that all the energy would get shunted into the melons, the plant would simply die, because there wouldn't be any energy.

Doesn't cutting vines stress the plant out to some degree? You don't want smaller stress watermelons, you want to get at least a few quality melons for your efforts. You have 7 weeks of Summer, a few more weeks of warm days without frost after that.

Don't be ridiculous -- I don't cut off all the foliage, just the long crazy vines that are running everywhere and producing small fruitlets a foot or more past the point of the fruit I want to ripen. IME the melons tend to set the fruit a few feet down the vine, there's plenty of foliage left, trust me. And 7 week of "summer" or summer-like weather isn't enough to sweetly ripen fruits that set past mid-summer, not even those personal-sized ones -- they end up pretty much tasteless, if they ripen at all. The days are shortening and the angle of the sun isn't as high -- the amount and strength of sunlight later in August and into September just isn't going to cut it up here, no matter how hot it might get.

Hey, why not try it OP? If you've got multiple vines, cut some back and leave the rest and see what happens.

My point was not suggesting that anyone cut off all the foliage. It's called an extrapolated argument. As in IF you did that crazy thing, this is what can be expected. If the idea is that cutting off foliage can help accelerate melons, then the extrapolated argument would be that cutting off all the foliage would speed them up enormously. Yes, that would be ridiculous, but I'm suggesting that, to some extent, cutting vines might be as well.

Again, vines and foliage are where the plant gets energy. But the more melons you have on the vine, the less sugar is going to end up in each one. Cut off the extra melons. Not the vines.

Check this out.

https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/edible/fruits/cantaloupe/cutting-back-cantaloupes.htm

Thanks guys! Sorry for the double post I could not find my original one. I do not think if i cut of a "sucker" vine 5 feet away from the fruit (and further from the base that started the plant) it will affect the fruit. I seriously doubt that energy from sun travels down a vine let alone down a vine then to another vine. Trimming small fruit is a good idea.

You seem to think that the newer vines are suckers sucking energy from the older vines. The vines help build the energy for the plant, the plant has a vascular system and roots, it's one plant. If you have room, let it grow, Snip off new melons that won't have a chance to get mature that do suck energy from the plant, so you will hopefully get less quantity of melons, more quality melons.