Fired up the 1982 Troy Bilt Horse 8hp Briggs today(Bought it new, BTW). 500 ft or row of Silver Queen in the ground today. 75ft ft. of cantaloupe 50/50 Ambrosia and El Gordo. 100ft. of Crimson Sweet water mellon.
This year, I purchased a big dump trailer load of composted horse manure, and a giant triaxle load of composted leaves. The horse manure compost all went in my corn/bean patch, along with some of the leaf compost. I figure I've already boosted the nitrogen up to max and I'll not use chemical fertilizer this year. All the woodheater ashes of two families also went into the corn/bean patch, along with about 100 lbs of lime. I figure I'm good on nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium with it and won't need to add anything more. The corn goes in first, and after a couple weeks when it is maybe 8 inches high, I plant the green pole beans right beside the row of corn, as close as I can get. Not sure how much row I have, between 400-500 feet I reckon. I get massive amounts of green beans, bushels of the stuff. I'm probably overdoing it, but the neighbors like the stuff enough that they come over and get what I can't use. I worked my corn patch in with my 8 hp Briggs 60's vintage Montgomery Ward tiller. Ain't no vintage TroyBilt, but it gets the job done. This year's corn will be Merit variety. Got lots of frozen seed to use up still.
What the heck are you doing with all that watermelon? A hundred feet is a lot. I don't have the room available to grow them here without plowing up new ground, and I'm about out of ground. I used to have access to a close relative's farm (sad day when they sold it) and had a great success one year with growing watermelons, maybe two hundred feet of watermelons. I got literally hundreds of extra watermelons, planted way too many but just wanted to see what happened and had the equipment to do it. There was a herd of six horses there and they went nuts over the sweet melons, we had horse fights happening over watermelons. My fun with the extra melons was watching those horses get so much pleasure out of eating them.