The Town Crier: Watermelon

Published 11:00 am Sunday, July 25, 2021

As the whale is to the sea, so the watermelon is to the garden, a giant among lesser beings.

A watermelon patch is a beautiful thing in the summer. If you drive by one, there they sit, getting bigger and riper and sweeter by the day. And watermelons have a mind of their own; sometimes the vine will journey outside the borders of the tilled garden space and put out a watermelon wherever it wants.

When this happens in a home garden you can see where the yard-farmer has had to mow around the wandering fruit as the melon is sitting in its own little nest of grownup grass. Finally, the day comes and it’s harvest time. Here comes summer’s most refreshing treat, what Mark Twain suggested as the “food of angels.”

A delicious summertime treat

The watermelon got its start in Africa in the southern part of the Sudan and was probably cultivated as long ago as 2,500 B.C. (about 4,500 years ago). There’s a picture of melon-type fruit in an ancient Egyptian tomb from about 2,300 B.C., and evidently the Bible mentions the Israelites eating melons when they were slaves in Egypt.

That first melon was probably a kordofan melon which they still have today in that area. Over the years, with breeding and cross-breeding, we have a delicious, sweet, refreshing summertime treat. Anywhere it’s hot, like Egypt or Georgia, people love watermelons. It’s about 92% water so it can be thirst quenching, and you can use watermelons as a way to get “clean” water when the creek or well is muddy.

We consider the watermelon a fruit but there are a couple of areas where it falls into the vegetable category. One way pertains to how it is grown.

Most fruits grow on trees, but the watermelon has to be planted each year with seeds like most vegetables. In another area, it is the official “vegetable” of the state of Oklahoma. In all other categories it is definitely a fruit.

Another oddity is that it grows on a vine so in some ways it’s a fruit with seeds in it like a grape. And in familial relationships it’s kin to a cucumber. I can see the resemblance.

Over the years we’ve developed watermelons with insides that are red, yellow, pink and white. Watermelons are usually full of seeds because that is their purpose in life, the watermelon fruit and water giving a good head start to the seeds inside, that’s if you leave one out there and let it procreate. But we do have seedless watermelons.

Seedless watermelons were developed more than 50 years ago. One place I read pointed out a science article written in 1951 talking about seedless melons, and another place said the first ones were in the late 1930s. It gets kind of sciency on how they get them and I don’t understand all of it but it has to do with male pollen with 22 chromosomes crossbred with a female flower that has 44 chromosomes and so the result is 33 chromosomes which will not develop seeds. It’s the fruity crossbreeding version of the mule.

And when the seedless seeds are planted, the plants still need pollen, so the farmers have to plant seeded watermelons in the field as well so the bees can pollinate everything. Seedless takes a lot more work and so are more expensive.

If you aren’t getting seeds in your ears …

Some people think seeded watermelons taste better than seedless. I only know my family says, “If you aren’t getting seeds in your ears, you’re not eating your watermelon right,” and that unless you have seeds in your watermelon, you can’t have a seed-spitting war with your cousins while you’re in the yard eating melon. I’m thinking that’s why I only have memories of eating watermelon outside as a kid.

“Let’s go outside and eat some watermelon,” my grandmother would say in the summer. She had an old well house that my grandfather had added some counters to. We’d go out there, set the watermelon on the counter and she’d start slicing. She always brought a salt shaker with her as she liked to salt her watermelon. The rinds got tossed in the woods, much to the delight of the yellow jackets.

A pumpkin will grow larger (over a ton!) but we generally think of those as a type of vegetable. I’ve read there are watermelons that have grown nine feet long. And the world record watermelon was grown just up the road in 2013. An accountant in Sevierville (Dollywood!) Tennessee grew one that weighed 350.5 pounds, breaking the old record by more than 40 pounds.

I read a little about it and he takes a lot of care, practically daily, to nurture his giants along. He brings the seedlings in and out of the house in the spring depending on the weather and then sets them out when things are just right. People have requested seeds from his behemoth to see if they can duplicate the feat.

Elsewhere in the world

The rest of the world has many ways to use watermelons. Here in the South, folks pickle the rind and use it as a kind of relish. In Japan they stir-fry the rind. Watermelon seeds can be roasted and eaten or made into flour. Watermelon seed flour can replace up to 50% of regular flour in baked good recipes. It’s gluten free and has all sorts of nutritional benefits.

Watermelon is great to sculpt for food presentations, with the most popular being cutting half a watermelon into a “basket” with a handle and putting other fruit in there along with the watermelon.

The watermelon has even inspired its own culinary utensil, the melon scoop, so you can make little round melon balls. Use the scoop on cantaloupe and honey dew melons as well and you have something that’s as pleasing to the eye as it is to the mouth.

In Japan they’ve mastered the art of growing square watermelons. When the melon first begins to grow they put it inside a square, glass container and the melon is confined and grows to the shape of the container. They come in at about $300 each.

In Italy they make a watermelon pudding that includes ingredients like chocolate and almonds. I’d have to try that before I make a judgment call … chocolate and watermelon seem an odd pairing, but then, who am I to question the founders of the Roman Empire?

The Russians make a beer from watermelon (and in the Soviet days anything else they could get their hands on), which is fitting since I saw where someone had made a “keg” out of a watermelon, hollowing it out and putting a spigot at the bottom so you could fill it up with a beverage and pour it out. And at the Cook Out restaurant here in town they feature a summertime specialty: a watermelon milkshake!

You know it’s summertime

Those first melons we get around here are usually from Florida. You know it’s summertime when you see pickup trucks pulled over on the side of the road loaded up with watermelons and a hand-lettered cardboard sign that says “watermelons $4” or whatever the going price is for that stretch of the road. Frequently the salesperson will be sitting under a beach umbrella in a yard chair waiting for the next customer to drive up.

The other place they show up is in a big, cardboard box on a pallet in the floor of the produce section of the grocery store. For months, no watermelons … then one day, like magic, poof! there they are. It seems to me the first ones are a little more expensive and then they drop a dollar or two as the summer goes along.

Top watermelon producers? Florida, Texas, California and, yes, Georgia! And the per capita average of watermelon consumption in the USA is almost 17 pounds per person. Here it is, the middle of July and I’m behind. How many pounds have you eaten so far?

FYI, the National Watermelon Queen for 2020 is Paige Huntington from Texas. There’s been a watermelon queen since 1964. They travel around and help promote watermelons and all the good things that come from them. I don’t know if spitting watermelon seeds is one of the requirements for the queens, but the world record is 75 feet, 2 inches by Jason Shayot of Texas. The record was set in August 1995 and hasn’t been topped since. Go outside and pace off 75 feet. I’m not sure I could throw a baseball that far.

Watermelon patch raids

It wouldn’t be right to talk about watermelons without talking about stealing them. There have been watermelon patch raids as long as there have been watermelon patches.

One story I like to relate is the tale of my college roommate’s father. As a teen in middle Tennessee, in the ’50s, he and some buddies were riding along a country road. They pulled up to a stop sign behind a watermelon-loaded truck. One jumped out and into the back of the truck, my roommate’s dad jumped onto the hood of the car to catch the tossed watermelon.

After one melon was tossed, the watermelon truck took off. The teens chased after to retrieve their friend with the dad clinging desperately to the hood of the car. It was the countryside and miles before the next stop sign.

Let that be your warning, would-be watermelon felons!

Mark Hannah, a Dalton native, works in video and film production.