Both are grown here commercially, at least for farm market and farmstand sales. I've seen watermelons at our local farmer's market easily in the 30 to 40 lb range, produced in SE Michigan. One county over from me, Livingston County, Michigan, is known for its melons -- although primarily for giant canteloupes ("Howell Melons") they also grow other kinds there. Almost all of the melon farmers use black plastic mulch and drip irrigation. There are a few things to consider, though: 1) Use varieties bred for cooler conditions and shorter ripening season. There are quite a few larger watermelons that do well here, especially the Moon and Stars heirloom types. For honeydews, Earlidew is a very good one, very large melons and short season. Johnny's has some new ones for this year bred for short seasons as well, I'm trying those this year, despite the ungodly price of the seeds ($8 a packet). Burpee Early Crenshaw is a GREAT crenshaw for the north, makes HUMONGOUS melons in about 90 days. 2) You need to use season extending techniques -- start them early indoors and transplant, otherwise, the fruit will ripen too late, in September when the nights are cool, which means poor flavor generally, although it varies year to year with the weather, I've seen Septembers in Michigan that were by far the hottest month of the whole summer, strings of 90 degree days lasting into early October. 3) Probably have to be more vigilent against fungal diseases in cooler, wetter climates than in hot and dry climates, but it's probably no worse here than in hot, humid SE US regions.

You've gotten a whole lot of good information and suggestions here. Some of it sounds conflicting, but mostly it's not. Read all you can on these forums and in gardening books, especially those written for your region. You will quickly get the whole picture. I like your plan of action! I garden in raised beds too. I agree with seysonn that you should combine some of those small beds into one long bed. You'll get a lot more planting space that way, and will save work and money on edging them out. If I were you, I would divide your six foot wide corn/bean beds into two three foot wide beds side by side, but with a 3' path between. When you get raised bed soil in great shape you will sink to your ankles in it if you walk in the beds. You can still get pollination in your corn if you plant the two beds side by side. And, you'll have much easier access to beans in a 3' wide bed. I also agree that four feet wide will be too wide for raised beds. Three feet to three and a half feet will be far better. By reducing your beds to three foot widths, you can pick up another foot in your 2' paths. I have three foot wide paths between my beds and that is perfect. I have no trouble getting my wheelbarrow in for any job I want to do. Four foot wide paths is a waste of planting space, in my opinion. I also agree with the comment on pine straw. It is truly wonderful mulch. Since you have lots of leaves, use those as soil amendments and save the straw for mulch on your paths. ALSO, use it as mulch inside your beds. When you set your transplants in the beds in the spring, like tomatoes, peppers, etc., immediately put a thick layer of pine straw mulch over the entire surface of the bed and around your plants. This one thing alone will reduce your weed problems dramatically. When you plant vining crops, mulch the entire bed except the hill where you plant the seeds. Then as the vines spread, they will grow over the mulch. Your fruit will be clean and your bed will be weed free. See? The only time I ever plant a bed without mulch is when I am sowing the entire bed as a block like carrots or crowder peas, with no rows or paths in it. When I do this, I am always reminded why mulch is so great. I have to pull a lot of weeds until the crop plants get large enough to shade them out. I think your plan looks really great. With a little tweaking, it will be a garden to be proud of. Best of luck to you!

Yes, that is cheap. I am not sure how much you use, how often, whether it is quick or slow release, etc; and you have to be careful with numbers like 4-5-3 when comparing products. The fertilizer numbers can be used to calculate how much of a fertilizer needs to be applied to equal 1 pound of the nutrient you are trying to add to the soil. So if the numbers on the fertilizer are 10-5-5, you can divide 100 by 10 and this will tell you that you need 10 pounds of the fertilizer to add 1 pound of the nutrient (nitrogen) to the soil. If the product is 20-20-20, you only need 5 lbs of the product --- thus, while the 20-20-20 might cost more than the 10-5-5 brand, the actual expense based on application might be less! For example, another excellent product that may seem expensive by comparison is Intrepid Blue Ribbon Biodynamic Fertilizer which is 6-6-7, but is around $18.95 for a 5 lb container. However, you only use 1 tablespoon per plant, it is organic and it also contains strains of soil microorganisms. One "tub" of this has lasted me all season and my garden plants look good. Remember, you only use one tablespoon per plant per application! I use it at transplanting, flowering, and heavy fruiting periods. I also take soil sample with a test kit to see what the plant needs. Here is a link that might be useful: Intredid Blue Ribbon Biodynamic Fertilizer

While a power interruption of a few hours isn't of great consequence to people with a freezer ... longer periods can be rather hair-rising. I've thought that it might be good idea for people where they have power interruptions from time to time to gather a group of, say, four to six or so, to share in buying a generator, possibly of somewhat better quality and capacity than one person would wish to, alone, to move from house to house when the power is out, to keep the food in the freezers intact. Some people where I visited with a generator wanted me to fire up their furnace, but most have an unbreakable connection to the power box and I was unwilling to risk the possibility of the main switch getting reconnected inadvertently, thus pushing power back out on to a line that the linemen understood to be dead, possibly with drastic consequences. Where codes allow, I think that it would be advisable for people to have a push-and-twist connection between the power box and the furnace. When the power is down for an extended period, most people are not going to their place of employment, so would be free to move the generator from member's house to member's house during the day and night ... or even to help an outsider, should they so choose. It would be necessary to have at least one member who had an establishment large enough to store the generator without its being a nuisance. Such a plan would provide cheap insurance for people with a substantial amount of expensive food in their freezers ... and have you noticed how the price of that food has escalated in recent times ... while the wage increases earned by most ordinary workers have been much more ... meagre? Does anyone foresee a substantial change in that scenario, any time soon? ole joyful