Vegetable · Cucurbitaceae
When to plant melons
The highest soil-temperature requirement of any common garden crop.
Start seed indoors
4 weeks before
Counted from your last spring frost.
Plant out
3 weeks after
Counted from your last spring frost.
Days to maturity
70-90
From sowing to a first picking.
Those weeks become real dates once you name a place.
Timing, in frost-relative terms
Seed packets rarely give calendar dates, because a date that suits one latitude is wrong at another. They give offsets from the last spring frost instead, and those offsets are what make melons plantable anywhere.
- Start seed indoors 4 weeks before the last frost.
- Plant out 3 weeks after the last frost.
- Expect 70–90 days to maturity, counted from sowing.
Getting the timing right
Plant out three weeks after last frost, not two. Black plastic mulch or a cloche raises soil temperature enough to make melons viable several hundred kilometres further north than they otherwise would be.
Frost tolerance
Melons stop growing below 15C and never fully recover. Frost is fatal, but the real limit is cool nights.
Classified as tender, with damage expected below 0.5°C (32.9°F)32.9°F (0.5°C).