Spider mites...on my cantelopes, on my watermelons, on my eggplants. Research says..increase humidity, spray the plants with water to knock 'em off, remove seriously infested leaves....daily routine.
As Rosanne Rosannadana would say "It's always something."
Ok...that was pretty interesting. Eyeballing for a female flower, connecting it to a male flower on the same plant was simple enough. The next part is quite a delicate process: the removal of the male flowers' petals. The petals I snip off with the manicure scissors. Then there is left a firmer green outer sheath that within lies the area the pollen is on. Very gently, I peel this away to reveal an 1/8 inch diameter, 1/4 inch long ...thing. I still do not know the scientific name for this part. (sorry) Then I take this and insert it gently into the female flowers center, hopefully pollinating the flower. I now fully understand that this area is just too small for a bumble bee to do the job. In a few days I will see whether the first flowers took...either the tiny fuzzy female part will begin to grow or begin to turn yellow and fall off the plant.
The steps I took were written in present tense because every morning I hunt for female flowers and repeat the process in hopes that I may have a crop of cantaloupes.
Alrighty...why are my cantaloupes not fruiting? Well, I looked it up. Very convenient this internet is. I remember, as a youngster, being sent to the encyclopedias to find my answers. I don't know that the 'C' book would have an answer to why my cantaloupes are not fruiting. Only because there is a level of detail that, if provided for all topics, would make the 'C' book weigh alot more. So then I would need to go to the library hoping that there was a book with this information in it. Time. Internet saves me time. I do wonder, though, what part of my brain is being sacrificed by not needing to go through longer hands on processes to find my information.
Anywho, I looked up why my cantaloupes are not fruiting. On the vine I find many 1 inch long stems with flowers and then there is also, a little ways up, a flower, on what looks like a tiny cantaloupe. The male flowers and the female is what this is, just like on a squash plant. I read that honey bees are very responsible for pollinating my cantaloupes. I also read that the female flowers must be pollinated by the males from the same plant. We leave the doors of the greenhouse open and there are plenty of bees, just not honey bees. I watch bumblebees hanging around the flowers on my Wall of Fruit. So it's all by chance that a bee, a bumblebee, which is much larger than a honey bee, will come from a male flower and go visit a female on the same plant.
It is suggested to buy a colony of honey bees if one is to grow a serious crop of cantaloupes. Short of doing that were directions on how to hand pollinate my melons. So, what am I doing this morning? I am locating male flowers and female flowers on the same plant. I am carefully detaching the male flowers from the vine. I am then removing the outer petals. I am inserting the male pollen into the female flowers. And then marking every female I have molested with a red marker. There is just something a little lewd about the whole process. Fact remains though, that I have put so much time and energy into helping my Wall of Fruit be beautiful and productive that to stand by and only hope that a bee by chance will fertilize a melon is unacceptable. My European Cukes and my Sugar Baby Watermelons are fruiting like mad. I want cantaloupes, too. The vines are there, the leaves are there, the flowers are there. There should be melons, too.
So, off I go.
