Charentais Melon

I received these seeds in 2018 as a with purchase gift, but I didn't try planting them until 2019. I started about 8 plants, and only had 1 melon.
This year, I had about 4 plants, and had 4 total melons on 1 plant. The melons were about the size of a baseball, with a cantaloupe like flavor. Very sweet. I actually like the size, as I was able to eat the whole melon with no leftovers.

Nicely growing vines, good climbers, set fruits, but unfortunately NOT enough time in zone 6B for this type to ripe, neither Petite de Gris type of melon I bought from SSE. All warm weather plants will not do well in zones 5, 6.

This melon grew great in my zone 4b garden. I got my seeds for this melon not from seed savers but I thought I would leave a review here. It was a great complex flavor, its less sweet than a home grown musk melon but more sweet than a grocery store type. I did grow them under a heavy fleece row cover for the first month they were in the ground. I think they might not have worked in my short season zone with out that. I didn't get tons of melons per vine, but my soil quality is rather poor and these didn't perform less well than the other melons I grew. The space I am in is new, and it takes time for great soil to be developed.

Purchased from Seed Savers - I can't believe all the melons i've got growing here in Oklahoma 7a. I planted probably 15-20 seeds and they apparently all love my clay/sand/compost raised bed soil and the hot, humid weather. Hundreds of blossoms and many many fruits. I think I'm going to set up a stand on the truck tailgate and sell them for $5 a piece.

I was completely blown away by the growth and number of melons for a single packet. Taste was very good. Charentais was one of our best two that we trialed for tolerance of heavy rain during final ripening. The flavor got a little bit washed out due to 8" of rain in a week, but was still great.

I grew this wonderful melon in 2021, in my apartment garden ( consisting of about 18 big pots) in Austin Texas zone 8, so had only 2 or 3 vines, in several of the pots, but harvested about a dozen small melons and the flavor was very good. Then after the harvest in October, some seeds came up volunteer in late fall. 2021 was a great garden year out of the ordinary, and many things did amazingly well, but still I was impressed.

I planted several varieties of melons a few years back. Deer ate the plants the first year I tried. So I screened in my beds to keep them out. The next year, the vines bore fruit but then became infected with powdery mildew.
Is there any way to prevent that?

I have grown these on the NH Seacoast in full sun and they are amazing. I suspect that the people who did not have much success maybe did not have full sun, which I would recommend. Zone 5, ripe around August 10 when I transplanted from seedings grown indoors. Look for them to start to turn color and smell. If you don't track them closely, the squirrels will make short work of them.