Watermelon – The Garden Lady

Watermelon by EssjayNZ

I think a good watermelon has got to be among the best fruits on earth. First there is that wonderful red color when the watermelon is cut. (Now there are yellow fleshed ones which I just tasted for the first time this summer at the Highlawn Pavillion Restaurant– it was delicious and so was all the food I ate there. ) Then the fragrance that emanates from the cut watermelon makes me recall the wonderful smell of swimming and summer when I was a child. And finally there is that sweet, but not too sweet taste of the watermelon- something so right, refreshing and delicious. Some fruits are too sweet for my taste, but not the watermelon.Â I love watermelon. I remember being shocked when my father-in -law told me that watermelons were fed to the pigs, where he grew up in Poland.

para los panas – for the friends by ruurmo

The seedless varieties are nice, but I never minded having seeds. They were not difficult to remove and one could have fun, the old fashioned way, by having a seed spitting contest- to see who could spit the seed the farthest. I guess this younger generation is too fastidious these days to play that kind of fun game which used to keep us old timers happily laughing for hours.

Continue reading “The Wonderful Watermelon”

A piece of watermelon.... by Rebeca Mello

TheGardenLady received this question from Bluelytes:

Would you know where I could obtain seeds of these russian watermelon varieties?:Â Podarck Solatsa or Skorospelyi Sakharnyi

Watermelon is one of my favorite fruits -Â if you can find them when they are ripe and fully sweet. That doesnâ€™t seem to be the case these days. When shopping for a watermelon if you see the stem end still remaining on the melon, one can tell that the watermelon was harvested early. This is a clue that generally the watermelon will be a disappointment. Hopefully, also, when you buy a watermelon, you will get one harvested locally so that you know the melon could ripen longer on the field.

China is the number one producer of watermelons. If Chinese watermelon are sold in US stores, they were probably picked before they ripened.

Your question intrigued me. I imagine that you are requesting a watermelon that you know is super sweet. So I did some research to try to find the seeds you yearn for.

I learned that watermelons are thought to have originated in the Kalahari desert of Africa. That makes sense to me because when I was a child, my parents planted a field of watermelon in a year that had a severe drought. We were surprised to see that even when the plants seemed to be dying we had the best harvest of watermelons we ever had. We had so many watermelons we didnâ€™t know what to do with them; so we children would break them open, eat only the heart and have watermelon fights with the leftover watermelon flesh. Pink snowballs in the hot summer. We had so many we couldnâ€™t give them away fast enough.

Family from Philadelphia drove down to the farm one day and loaded their car with so many watermelons that the car could barely move. Later we learned that just before they reached Philadelphia, their car had broken down from so much weight. It happened on the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.

Continue reading “Watermelon: where to find different varieties”