How to Take Care of Melon Plants in the Rainy Season
Planting melons during the rainy season is certainly not the same as caring for watermelons in the rainy season, but both require extra effort when compared to the dry season. However, this does not mean that carrying out the planting process outside the habit cannot bring maximum profit.
The way to care for melon plants in the rainy season in the style of Rembang farmers is to carry out more intensive care and provide proper nutrition. With these tips, they can even produce an average harvest of 10 tons, with melons weighing around 2.5 kg.
How to Take Care of Melon Plants in the Rainy Season
High rainfall will usually increase humidity in agricultural land, this is certainly a scourge for melon farmers. The high humidity also triggers the appearance of mold or fungus that can damage the plant and also make it rot quickly.
There are several solutions that you can try to overcome these problems, apart from intercropping melon and chili plants.
- Using Stakes
Making stakes that are shaped like clotheslines will indeed cost production, but considering the great benefits for your melon garden, we think making stakes needs to be considered. This technique can also be relied on in how to grow giant watermelons.
Make stakes from bamboo poles with a height equivalent to an adult’s knee along the bed or extending along the direction of the mound. This technique is known to be able to maintain 2 to 3 melons with an average weight of 2 kg. In addition, with the presence of bamboo stakes, melons will not touch the moist soil surface.
The risk of being infected with fungi or harmful fungi can be minimized compared to allowing melon plants to grow longitudinally directly above the soil surface.
- Raising the Bed
When planting melons in the rainy season, make higher beds. The goal, of course, is to prevent stagnant rainwater from hitting the melon plants. The recommended bed height is around 1/2 meter or approximately 60 cm.
- Using Plastic Mulch
If you feel that making bamboo stakes is too troublesome, then another way to care for melon plants in the rainy season is to cover the beds with plastic mulch. The plastic mulch material will prevent rainwater from falling to the soil surface, thus maintaining soil moisture.
This method is also commonly used in treating shallots in the rainy season.
- Spraying Fungicide
To prevent the emergence of mold or fungus, we need to spray a fungicide on melon plants. Do the spraying at least every 3 to 4 days later.
- Give the correct dose of fertilization
If we take care of melon plants in the rainy season by using bamboo stakes, the dose of fertilizer needed can be more than usual. Here is a fertilization guide that you can look at.
Initial fertilizer, give NPK fertilizer with a dose of 35 g
Follow-up fertilizer, give Urea fertilizer with a dose of 300-400 ml of urea solution with a concentration of 2 kg / 100 liters, as well as NPK fertilizer with the same dose and concentration.
- Diligently tidying up the plants
Melon plants are known for their lush and large leaves, this is one of the problems for farmers. The leaves that are too dense often cover one another so that the process of photosynthesis is hindered.
For this reason, we must be diligent in tidying and parting the leaves so that sunlight can enter properly and the plant growth process takes place optimally. Or you can also grow melons by planting melons with a lying system.
Pests and diseases attack melon plants more intensively during the rainy season because moist soil and land conditions are the most popular means of life for various pests and diseases. You should do regular checks to overcome this so that if there are seeds of pests and diseases that appear, you can take care of them.
Faster handling will certainly make it easier for us to control the pest population so that it does not spread and make big losses on agricultural land. For more details, please read how to deal with smallpox melon.
- Regularly Sanitize
Likewise, maintaining sanitation or environmental cleanliness is one way of caring for melon plants in the rainy season. Remove all weeds that appear and interfere with plants, because the presence of these weeds will usually be followed by pests and diseases.
Weeds become a comfortable home for pests and diseases to breed without our knowledge, so, never be careless with the presence of weeds on your farm. Get rid of it immediately before you lose.
The way to take care of melon plants in the rainy season that we should not miss is to do a hydroponic planting system. This technique has been tested by several farmers, and the results are very satisfying.
The advantage of growing melons hydroponically is that we can adjust the number of nutrients given to the plant by ourselves so that the sweetness level can be maintained. In fact, after being tested, melons grown hydroponically can have a sweet content of 15 Brix, far above the average sweetness level of 11 – 12 Brix.
However, what must be considered when carrying out this hydroponic planting system is to close the nutrient tap so that it is not exposed to rainwater. If the nutrients in the hydroponic liquid are mixed with rainwater, the sweet taste of the resulting melon will decrease.
Good luck trying how to take care of melon plants in the rainy season as we said above, good luck, and the melon harvest will be more abundant.
