Welcome to growing your own food and your own backyard. If you are new to my channel please consider subscribing and don't forget to hit the like button. It is now September 5th. I'm in zone 5b and this is the first time I'm growing watermelon sugar baby bush. I started the watermelon from seed April of 2020 and I put this watermelon in the container in June of 2020. Unfortunately, Colorado's weather is very fickle and it is on steroids. We have been breaking records of 90 degree temperatures for at least 70 days during the summer months. Yesterday we broke a record at 101. Today is going to be 98 and Monday, Labor Day is going to be 94. And believe it or not Tuesday the high will be 43 degrees. Our low Monday night would be 34, Tuesday night 32, Wednesday night 27, Thursday will be back up in the 80s, nighttime temperatures in the 60s. Will this watermelon plant survive the freeze? I doubt it. So I'm going to have to harvest the watermelon. Unfortunately this plant ended up with spider mites. We had a drought this summer. It was a tough year gardening. I was very successful on the majority of my crops. But this was my first time ever growing watermelon sugar baby bush and by the time I realized I had spider mites. I really had to come in and just blast the watermelon leaves with a jet spray water and then I had to spray it with neem oil and I continued treating it with neem oil until I was able to get the spider mites under control. But you could see the dammage. Now here's a lot of the new growth here and you can see I've got a lot of flowers. Look at that. I've got a lot of flowers and here's all the new growth that looks really healthy. You can see the new growth right here that looks healthy. But this is the older growth here that was impacted by the spider mites. Unfortunately the plants not going to survive the low temperatures of 32 and 27 degrees this week. So I'm going to have to harvest the watermelon. So I only got two watermelon this season. Again this is my first time growing watermelon baby bush and we'll see what I was able to accomplish. So I'm going to go ahead and harvest it. Now I did put a sling on both these watermelon and because of that I was happy to see that they did really good. So I'm going to go ahead and cut the sling off this watermelon. This one didn't particularly grow that much. So I'll go ahead and cut this. And I'm going to go ahead and cut the sling off this one as well. I thought the watermelon would get a lot bigger but this is about as big as it got and it's a little elongated so that might have a lot to do with the pollination. So I'm going to go ahead and cut this. So I got two baby bush, sugar bush, sugar baby bush watermelon alf this fine even with the challenges I had growing this summer in a drought during the entire summer as well as having to combat spider mites on this plant. So I'm going to go ahead and cut this watermelon and see but I was able to accomplish. I am going to grow this next year. However, I am going to learn from my past mistakes. I'm going to have to monitor it a little better and help pollinate the watermelon along the way because the pollination was really slow this summer and unfortunately I did help pollinate it but not as much. So I'm really going to monitor that next year. Lessons learn. If we get a drought next summer, I'm really going to have to just monitor and make sure that I keep this plant wet down because spider mites are very, very prominent during hot dry summers. Again, we were in the 90 degree temperatures which is okay for these type of plants as just was to try for the plants and watermelons love humidity. So I'll make some course corrections and hopefully next summer when I grow this again, hopefully I can do a better job. So let's cut this watermelon and see what it looks like. Okay. So the moment of truth. We're going to cut the watermelon and see how I was able to do this summer with growing my first baby sugar bush watermelon for the first time. So I think I'm going to go ahead and cut it like this. See what it looks like. Oh, it doesn't look very good. Was it right? And unfortunately I had to harvest it because we're going to get freezing temperature Tuesday. So it needed more time to yeah, it needed more time to harvest. I needed another 30 days on this watermelon. Unfortunately with freezing temperatures hitting us Monday night and Tuesday night and Wednesday night, there was no way I was going to be able to keep this watermelon on the vine. So unfortunately it doesn't look like it's ready to be harvest. I'm not sure what it tastes like. I'll go ahead and try to sample it. It's not too bad. It's semi sweet. It's really soft. It's really a shame that trying to grow watermelon and zonfai b with a short growing season. And this is the type of watermelon that does have a short growing duration. I needed another month in order for this watermelon to ripen. One of the beauties of growing food is you learn from past mistakes, you learn from your experience and you do a course correction. So more than likely I would probably hope that I can extend my growing season a little longer and do see what I can do next year. But thanks for watching. Just wanted to share with you my experience in growing watermelon for the first time and order some of the situations that impacts a small business grower or a person who's growing crops in their backyard or someone's interested in growing their own food and what to do next time in order to be able to have fresh watermelon. So thank you for watching and don't forget to hit the like button.