Mystery Melon Melo-Drama

At a garden blogger get-together toward the end of March, Laura of Some Like It Hot brought a few melon seedlings to share, unnamed second generation starts of seeds saved from melons she grew in ... Lancashire Rose & I each took one .... did anyone else try to grow them? Thanks again for sharing, Laura!

Our vegetable patch is too small for a melon to sprawl so after repotting it into a recycled cardboard container I stuffed the box into a corner of the compost bin. That seedling grew fast, making enormous leaves and tendrils.
By mid-June it had produced a few melon-like objects, but instead of growing - they just did this I'm not sure if it failed because the melon flower hadn't been pollinated or if insects made holes that set off rot.
A few weeks later the chance of getting fruit looked pretty good

One melon was looking fabulous for quite awhile - although it didn't look like any melon I knew. But while it was still green and hard, something attacked the bottom, the stem was chewed, and the weight of the melon had pulled against the wire, damaging the stem even more. I took the melon inside and weighed it, wondering what kind it would have been. At six pounds it was much larger than the store-bought Tuscan melon - but the interior hadn't matured - looks like Melon #1 was a fail.

A couple of small melons were still on the plant.

After Katina tweeted that critters had chopped her crop I ran out to find Melon fail #2

We took the evidence over to the patio table and cut it to see if we could guess what kind it was - but there was no real color and no scent.
Maybe the remaining melon would grow if I netted it and supported the stem with an S hook

During July the netted plant kept growing and by the 26th some reticulation was showing - was it a cantaloupe like the one grown by RockRose?

Our Melon #3 almost delivered a sweet ending to our tale, but last weekend I found it on the ground, mesh & stem chewed through and skin chomped. The poor fruit bled orange, but not the burnt orange of a University of Texas fan - just the pale orange of a melon taken too soon.
It wasn't fully developed but it sure looked like it would have been a cantaloupe.

Apparently in my garden protective mesh can't be plastic - it would have to be steel! Back in Illinois in the 1990's famed gardener Trudi Temple told us that in order to get any fruits or vegetables for the table she had to build a wire-roofed-and-sided-enclosure with more mesh buried under the ground to prevent animals from digging from underneath.

Sometimes I daydream about having a small version of that enclosure here.