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Watermelons in container(s)

T

Towlieee

Curious if anyone has grown melons in containers (well I know people have, lots of people do) but if anyone here has direct experience.

I started an already growing Sugar Baby and Crimson Sweet way late in the season, bought them already growing from walmart, didn't have much hope for them.  Put them in 'aprox' a 12ish gallon storage tote.  After moving to our new apt, 3rd floor balcony, where I only get 4-4.5 hours of direct light, I transplanted into a 45 gallon tote with aprox 37-40 gallons of the cheapest potting soil money could buy ($2.44 per bag, they are sitting in like 10-11 bags of potting soil)

I've been hand pollinating by ripping the males off and molesting the females lol, so far many melons have took to it, I actually am up to like 17 or 18 melons between the two plants!  They all started to explode recently.  

From what I read online, people say "pinch of X amount of melons per vine"  or "pinch of leaves".  I wont dare pinch of leaves, thats where the energy comes from!   But I'm scared when my melons blow up, that the vines might not be able to support all of them at the same time??????

I've been scared of over watering my melons and my jalapeno in a 5 gal bucket and my pair of baby red bells in a 5 gal bucket, as well as over nuting them, been hitting them with 10-15-10 fairly regularly, at least once a week full strength, sometimes during the week 1/2 or 1/3 strength.  My cheap potting soil is really "light", tons of, eh, mulch in it

This pic is from I believe one day ago, my largest melon haha, it's exploding with growth, this is the sugar baby variety, which that plant alone has like 12-14
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geeme's advice is great. The square foot gardening styles are absolutely amazing.  I've never had good luck with watermelon in containers.  Very often, my vines would get a kink at the container lip and then dye.  Also, it seems like the plants really benefit from the vines having ground contact. 
 
I was going to setup a trellis, but the way the sunlight comes in to my porch, I get just as much light having them up high or down low, there unfortunately is another apartment building across from us, so they get light from around 3 to 7:30/8 ish  Having them go up, they get sunlight later in the day, and I can't hang them over the balcony railing.

I do plan on supporting any melons that are "dangling" using whatever means necessary, every morning I find more and more melons, actually just found another one a few minutes ago lol.... Only legal "crop" i've ever grown is melons, as a young teen, and had tons of awesome melons.  First time container growing, and first time growing peppers, everything looks awesome, so I feel that I am doing something right, just worried my melons don't have a big enough root system to support all their fruit!   
 
So as I do more research, many people online say to thin the melons out.  I currently have around 17-18 melons total growing on the two plants, like 12-ish on my sugar baby alone....  I have tons of vines, most of them have 2 melons each!  

I want to make sure my melons grow to maturity, but at the same time, I feel "wrong" to pinch off some of them.  What is everyones input on that?  Should I let it do its own thing, or should I get rid of some of them?  
Like I said before, I monitor them and water regularly, plus they get frequent 10-15-10
 
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