Vegetable · Cucurbitaceae
When to plant winter melons
A large waxy-skinned gourd that keeps for a year in a cool room, which is where the name comes from rather than from any tolerance of cold.
Start seed indoors
5 weeks before
Counted from your last spring frost.
Plant out
2 weeks after
Counted from your last spring frost.
Days to maturity
110-140
From planting out 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 winter melons plantable anywhere.
- Start seed indoors 5 weeks before the last frost.
- Plant out 2 weeks after the last frost.
- Expect 110–140 days to maturity, counted from planting out.
Getting the timing right
Start indoors five weeks before the last frost and plant out two weeks after it. It needs a longer warm run than a pumpkin, so it is marginal in cool summers.
Frost tolerance
Killed at 0C. The wax bloom that makes it store so well only develops on fully mature fruit, which needs the whole season.
Classified as tender, with damage expected below 0°C (32°F)32°F (0°C).