It is seed catalog season.
Mid-winter is the season of boundless ambition and opportunity.
Melons. Beautiful melons. New melons. Exotic melons. Heirloom melons. F1 hybrid melons. Orange-flesh. Green-flesh.
I have been growing melons nearly every summer since I was about 11 years old. It was a good summer job for me and my younger brother, David. Our father did most of the work at first, of course, but even elementary school-age kids can weed, move irrigation pipes, then pick and carry four-pound cantaloupes and 20-pound watermelons. He let us keep the proceeds from the sales. Both my brother and I had savings accounts at JCF -- Jackson County Savings and Loan. We each made a few hundred dollars per summer at first.
As we got older, the melon fields got bigger. More melons, more money to bank for college. When I could drive at age 16 the harvest, packing, and delivery part of the job became something my brother and I mostly handled. Blunt's ranch market at the north end of the Phoenix, Oregon city limits was a primary customer. Mid-season, starting about Labor Day and lasting for four weeks, we needed secondary markets. Sherm's Thunderbird Market was a high-volume grocery store, and they took time to deal with local growers.
I stopped growing melons to sell four years ago, when I turned 70. Sellable units of cantaloupes are boxes sold as weighing 40 pounds. They weigh 44 or 45 pounds, since I give "good weight." To have commercial quantities one lifts and carries around 40 to 50 pounds of melons several hundred times day. Too much.
Now I grow them to give away to friends. Grocery customers buy what they know. "Hales Best" variety cantaloupes are familiar to shoppers. They are excellent when picked ripe and handled properly, which is possible to do in season, and impossible out of season. Every reader has seen Hales Best melons.
Another common melon is the Tuscan variety. It was exotic and new 65 years ago when I first started selling them to Mr. Blunt and Sherm's Thunderbird. Here is an image of Tuscan melons from the True Leaf catalog.
Tuscan melons are sweet, with a Brix of about 15 instead of the 10 of traditional cantaloupes. (Brix is a measure of sugar content.) That means they can be picked less ripe than traditional melons and still meet customer expectation. Look closely at the very left edge of the melon in this photo. There is a stem remnant. It means it was picked before the "full slip" that would have left a smooth concave navel. That is how the melon would have looked had it been left on the vine and become "vine-ripe." Vine-ripe is far superior, but the Tuscan variety melon lets growers get away with picking underripe melons that customers will accept. A melon picked underripe has a longer shelf life.
The seed catalogs become temptations for people who aren't trying to sell melons. One can experiment with melons one is giving away. My favorite is this Santa Claus melon, also known as the Piel de Sapo. It is very sweet, with an intense taste I can only describe as "melon-y." Here is another photo of that variety.
You will rarely see the French Charantais melon in supermarkets or even at fruit stands. They are thin-skinned and delicate, so they don't ship well. Many of them split at the blossom end and are ruined in the field. They need to be picked under-ripe. But when you get a good one, it has a strong, concentrated flavor.
The seed companies tempt gardeners with new varieties. Here is a Kajari Sweet from Urban Garden seeds:
Here is a Snow Leopard from Johnny's Seeds:
Here is a melon called "Collective Farm Woman":
Here is a Tam Dew melon, sold by Mountain Valley Seed Company:
There are lots more like these. These look like fun to me. I am tempted to try them all and plant just one more row of each. It is hard to know when to stop shopping for seeds and planting more rows and to accept one's limitations. The more one plants the more one needs to tend. Old farmers, like old politicians, have difficulty knowing when to stop.
Cross pollination does not seem to happen. I expected it at first, but I have 40 years experience planting different varieties near each other and it has not emerged as a problem.
Peter Sage
Your melons are the best I've ever had--especially since they were fresh off the farm. I had no idea you started that enterprise as a kid. No doubt experience matters. Unfortunately cantaloupe don't grow well over here on the coast. Thanks for your clear-eyed blog. I don't always agree with you, but always find your viewpoint well considered and worth reading.