Tutorials/Pumpkin and melon farming

For other types of farming see Farming (disambiguation)

Introduction
Melons and Pumpkins use essentially the same mechanics for growth, and can be easily farmed with the same techniques. Once the plants are mature, they will provide a steady supply of fruit for your needs.


 * 1) Pumpkin and melon seeds are both found in Abandoned Mine Shaft chests, but pumpkins can also be found growing "wild" in several biomes, while Melon Slices can sometimes be bought from Villagers.


 * 1) Planting a seed into Farmland produces a small stem that grows slowly over time, taking 10-30 minutes to reach maturity. Like regular seeds, melon and pumpkin stems grow faster if their block is "hydrated" (has a block of water within 4 blocks of it).  However, hydration doesn't affect melon spawning speed once the stem has fully grown. Bone Meal will force a stem to maturity, but will not immediately produce a fruit.
 * 2) Once the stem is mature it will begin spawning fruit (Melon Blocks or Pumpkins).  Each stem's fruit will appear in one of the four adjacent Dirt, Grass, or Farmland blocks, every 1–30 minutes real time (0.05-1.5 Minecraft days) and the stalk will visually connect to it.   Note that if a fruit forms next to another plant's stem, the other stems may connect to it instead of spawning.
 * 3) Once a fruit has grown (or the stem has attached to an existing fruit), the stem will not produce any further fruit until the existing one is harvested.  Also, if the block directly above a stem is occupied by a solid (and non-transparent) block, the stem will not bear fruit.
 * 4) Both sorts of fruit will revert farmland below them to dirt when they grow.  Pumpkins can most easily be harvested with an axe, and will drop whole as items.  Melons do not currently have a preferred tool, so you might as well use bare hands.  However, they will break faster using a sword, at the cost of double durability. While melons grow as blocks, the melons are broken into slices by harvesting.  In both cases, the harvested fruit can be crafted back into seeds.  Harvesting mature stems will also produce seed, (average 2 per stem) which can be used to multiply your plantings even before fruit appears.

Farm Layouts
Here are some suitable layouts. The percentages given are efficiencies. Parenthesized values are theoretical maximums, which assume there are free blocks surrounding the farm for the border plants to place melons. The maximum possible efficiency for any melon or pumpkin farm is 50% (one fruit per stem). Spaces where a fruit can occupy two or more stems will reduce the efficiency and yield. Question-mark blocks indicate anything could be put in that spot -- perhaps lighting, or other crops such as wheat, carrots, or potatos. You will probably want to cover the water with a slab.

If you just want a quick, compact farm, use design C below -- it has slightly lower efficiency, but will keep most of that if you surround it with, say, fencing instead of farmland. You can even slip in a couple of extra plants in the "open" spaces.

Basic Farms
The top-left method (A) has an efficiency of 48.88% -- in larger farms, this can be maintained by vertically flipping alternate rows of plots (see below). The efficiency of the bottom row (E, F) designs vary widely, and they may be obsolete.

Multi-level Farms
While the above designs all use one layer, the most efficient (49.38%) 9&times;9 farm can be created by using two layers. Design is based on design D, and cobblestone indicates spaces that will be covered (with dirt) by the layer above.

When replicated over a larger area, design G has spots where you will need to jump. Design H avoids that but keeps the same efficiency. For design H, the water source must be placed with care so that it won't spread into the "corridors". However, if there is the usual pit in the bottom layer (and matching hole above), the source block can be placed against one of the upper blocks, or 2 blocks above that layer. The position of the melon stems and dirt/grass/farmland blocks in the two farming layers can be swapped without losing efficiency.

Rapid-harvest Farms
The above layouts are optimized for high efficiency, at the cost of speed. They work best for infrequent harvests, with plenty of time for the field to regrow in between. For frequent harvests, the first following layout may be better suited; if harvested once per day-and-night cycle, it yields about 17 fruits per harvest (as opposed to about 13 fruits for the above designs). The second layout goes even further in that direction -- it does not use space efficiently, but instead gives each stem 2–4 potential places to spawn a pumpkin or melon, encouraging quicker initial growth at the cost of a clumsier design and reduced long-term yield.

Semi-automatic farms
Melons are destroyed and drop Melon Slices when a Piston of any kind pushes it, leading the possibility for auto-harvesting Melon farms. A simple Auto-Harvester would be made by placing an upward-facing sticky piston under each farmland block reserved for melons. When the sticky pistons are powered, they destroy all of the melons for pickup by the player. Using this technique, one can make a fully automatic farm as shown here, but it will take up extra space for the mechanisms. Here are a couple of examples:

Here is another design:

http://i50.tinypic.com/euhbbd.jpg

The above design can be made into massive farms.

Very large farms
Most of the above farms can be tiled to make larger farms, though in some cases, alternate rows or columns of the plots should be flipped for best results. This farm represents an expansion of design A (turned sideways), with the left column of plots reversed. (It also shows the farmland border for the whole farm.) The basic plots could be repeated further, expanding the farm in units of 9&times;9. Note that this design aims to make sure that each fruit only occupies one stem - as it increases in size, the efficiency approaches 49%