After seeing your thread, I pretty much saw myself and remembered all of my frustrations since February. I don't have an ideal setup for watermelons, but I still try to grow them. Here are the three types of scenarios/attempts since February:
Seeds in the Ground, Direct-Sow
This is closest to your situation, we all start somewhere. From February through June, I continuously threw watermelon seeds into the ground. I have tons of sowbugs/slugs. I saw nothing but failure since February. Frequently I would get a seedling to about 3 weeks development, only to find in one night that a slug wiped it out. This is in a 4-hour sunlight area with very fertile soil. Three sprouts in June appear to have made it into July. Here's what I've got going on today. Totally not ideal, but they are progressing. We'll see what happens.
Container Medley - 5 Sugar Baby, 2 Honeydew, 3 Pea, and 5 Garbanzo.
Neighbors would walk by and were like - dude, what kind of Christmas tree is that? Ever heard of Wholefoods? I found this to be insanely fun, especially if you consider I faced record heat and drought scenario here. First pic shows how this batch was doing by early June.. set this up in April. Last pic shows status of my sugarbabies (roughly 5 in production with 2 looking promising) as of today. Peas - did great, seeds re-planted in other containers. Garbanzo beans - easy. Last pic shows what happened to those. Honeydew - in critical condition with failing leaves & flowers (leafminer/sun-damage). Pot is in 8-hour direct sunlight, frequently turned and repositioned. I just want the sugarbabies then I want to try cantaloupes later this month.
Pot with 9 Sugar Baby seedlings - Emergency transplant after spill
In late May I did another pot with 9 sugarbabies, with intent to transplant to ground. After 1 month, the pot fell in the worst imaginable way - straight upside down, flat impact onto hard cement. stems on multiple plants snapping. My heart literally sank.
No chance to plan; with my bare hands, I grabbed everything I could and gently placed the tangled mass of plants directly on a clear patch of soil. I surrounded the exposed roots with additional soil. I propped up each stem with sticks . I covered the area with shade for 36 hours and dumped 2 gallons of Vitamin C transplant solution per day for 3 days straight. Result was surprisingly effective.
Now, 6 remain in good condition, densely packed together but still showing satisfactory development. You can also see in the nighttime shot: tomato, nasturtium, peppermint, wild arugula - all jockeying for position. So here I turned a potential disaster into potentially the best sugarbabies I will have yet - we'll see. It shows that strong early development in containers prepares the plants well for life directly in the ground.
Moral of the story: be patient, work with what you have, persevere. Many tactics work after enough adjustments and attempts.
