Last year's cantaloupe produced tons of melons, it was a hybrid. This year I only got one melon and it was from a volunteer from last year's. The plant produced a lot less and the melon was a slightly different shape and a little larger. Seeds from an F1 are not likely to produce the same results as the parents. They usually revert to one or the other of the parent plants. As you go down in generations you get more likely to have the same results as the parent. If you had other melons in the same family odds are they crossed and you have seeds that will produce another first generation. Sometimes the desired results of the breeders comes at F2 so some hybrids seeds are F1 and some are later generations. Since we don't know the variety or what generation it was we really can't even guess what your results would be. You could save your seeds from your F1 hybrid, your F2 could be very different and if you saved the seeds from that your F3 could be different again. I don't know at what point in the generations they consider a hybrid to become open pollinated. Unless you did your own unintentional cross pollination an open pollinated plant will breed true. Many of the heirloom varieties are old seed catalog inventions and the original stories of the seeds being handed down from generation to generation were the biggest invention about them. I prefer the flavor of open pollinated varieties for everything but corn and I like saving seeds. With melons I get more reliable results with hybrids so even though I want the flavor of OP I'd rather have melons. If you wanted to save the seeds and still get results, plant one vine of your saved seeds next year and see how it does. If you like the results the year after only plant the seeds from your original saving. If you just want to be a seed saver you would save yourself some years if you started out with OP varieties.

Anyway, my melons were not hand pollinated, but I did a pretty thorough check of my neighborhood, where barely anyone gardens, and certainly no one else is growing melons. Amy Goldman's book said 1/2 mile should be safe. So, I'm confident there wasn't cross pollination. Martha, To quote from Suzanne Ashworth's Seed Saving book; "Any two or more varieties within the same species must be prevented from crossing in order to save pure seed" Your Blacktail will be OK, but both Schoon's Hard Shell and Honey Rock are in the same species, C. melo, so they will cross. I think what Amy might have been referring to was a 1/2 mile isolation distance between varieties within the same species if hand poillination is not done, and Ashworth quotes the same distance. So if you are growing all three at your home then Blacktail is probably OK if no other watermelons, C. citrullus, are within about 1/2 mile. But the two others would have crossed unless they were separated by a 1/2 mile distance. As for seed maturity and viability , Ashworth says seeds are not mature until the melons are ripe to eat. Although I used to grow a lot of melons I never wanted to do the hand pollinations to get pure seed. For many years I also offered peppers at SSE but bagging blossoms was also not my thing and x pollination can be upwards of 70% without caging or bagging. So I stick with tomato offerings at SSE. Due to physical disabilities I'm down from 200-250 varieties/year to about a dozen, but self pollenization is the rule for tomatoes and it occurs about 95% of the time. Hand pollinating melons and squash and cukes was just too much work for me. Even Amy, who is a long time close friend and you'll see my name on her thanks page as she is on my thanks page for my heirloom tomato book, seldom hand pollinates her melons unless it's a very rare variety, and as you know, offers very few as listed at SSE. Actually she sent up a nice basket of melons just last week. Lovely. And as I eat them I'm not saving the seeds b/c I know darn well she probably didn't hand pollinate them. She's too busy finishing up her book on squash. Hope that helps. Carolyn

I have saved seeds from these for years and planted them the following years and grown good crops from them, but this year i am getting no muskmelons. Any ideas?

I hope you got them out of the water and let them dry out. I've seen other posters leave seeds moist for too long and they start to sprout. Floating could be a sign of bad seed since it would mean they are light. I've never tried floating seeds to test for viability. With melons and squash type seeds it is pretty easy to tell the good from the bad. Good seed is plump and unbendable. Well they will break with enough pressure, lol, but withing reason. Bad seed is thin and bends easily. Remy