Abstract
<p>Cultivating of melon particularly in Central Kalimantan has been widely undertaken by farmers, however, the yields have not been able to meet the melon needs of Central Kalimantan's community. One of the breakthroughs in overcoming the problem is by growing melons on swamp floating beds, namely ambul technology. Ambul is growing media from decomposed floating aquatic plants, constructed with bamboo or wooden as a frame, that is let floating on waters. The ambul based on the consideration that the community lacks access to land for most of the year, which reduces opportunities for growing crops. The research design used was Split Plot Design with three kinds of aquatic plants as the main factor namely <em>Eichornia crassipes, Salvinia molesta, Eleocharis palustris</em>, and two melon varieties as subplot factors specifically Action 434 and Amanta. The results showed that the Amanta variety grown on <em>S. molesta</em> media produced the highest value of crop length on 1, 2, 3 weeks after planting (WAP). <em>S. molesta</em> was the best planting media for enhancing flowering by 11.43 days after planting (DAP) and weight of fruit (3.18 kg per plant. The variety of Amanta also had the highest value of root dry weight of 1.33 g per plant and fruit weight of 2.08 kg per plant.</p>
Highlights
Melon is one of the economically important fruit and is a source of vitamins and minerals to improve nutrition
The application of S. molesta as media of ambul based on the consideration that S. molesta is one of the many plants in the floodplain and its existence disrupts aquatic ecosystems as well as E. crassipes and E. palustris
The other aquatic plants were grasses, water spinach and limnocharis or sawah-lettuce which were potential to be used as growing media on floating beds
Summary
Melon is one of the economically important fruit and is a source of vitamins and minerals to improve nutrition. Melon production contributed only about 0.76 percent of the national fruit production (Direktorat Jenderal Hortikultura, 2015). Both of the area of harvest and production of melon increased from the previous year, the production only reached 121,949 tons with 8,632 Ha harvested areas in Indonesia (BPS, 2020). In Central Kalimantan, the harvested area is only about 66 ha in 2019, melon production reached 435 tons in 2018 (BPS of Kalimantan Tengah, 2020). The low production of melon is affected by some factors. Nutrients and water are the most factors that limiting to higher melon yields (Monteiro et al, 2014)
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