Melons are fun

I grow melons because they make people happy.

     "Drop the melon. Let's hear it crunch. Really. Go ahead.  It's OK. Drop it now."

        My instructions to farm visitors

Melon tourism is a thing.

People have inquired about the hail damage on my melon crop. Three days after the storm it looks like a few melon plants will survive. Most won’t, but I planted 400 hills, enough for 2000 melons. If I get 10% survival, I will have enough to let visitors to the farm have some fun.

Most people like melons. Watermelons are a bright happy color of red. Americans associate melons with dessert and outdoor picnics and summer birthday parties. 

Food starts at a farm, not a store. City people are so removed physically and psychologically from the source of their food that for most people, most of the time, going to a farm is an event, like going to a zoo. I try to make my farm a fun outing.

August and September are my favorite months to have visitors. Melons are ripe then. People enjoy letting their children climb onto my small John Deere tractor. Children can sit in the tractor seat and move the front end loader up and down and rotate the bucket by pushing a lever in different directions. It is noisy, but not too noisy. It is safe; the tractor can't move. I wash the tractor before I know there will be guests. 

The second thing I do is show people how to pick a ripe cantaloupe. In about five minutes visitors learn to distinguish the color of a ripe one from a similarly sized unripe one. Ripe cantaloupes "slip," which is the word for melons sliding easily off the stem. Un-ripe ones stay stuck to the vine. At first people are amazed that I can tell at a glance which ones will slip and which will not. Ripe ones are beige-ish green and unripe ones are greenish-beige. When visitors figure it out they feel a sense of accomplishment.

Then the finale: Picking a ripe watermelon, dropping it, and eating it. This starts with going around the field thumping melons and listening to the sound. Unripe melons sound hollow. Remember this: "Sounds like a drum, the melon is bum."  A ripe watermelon sounds "full." It goes "thud" in a dead sound. I help the visitor pick out a ripe watermelon, then we carry it to the side of the field. I ask them to drop it. Dropping a watermelon at my farm is likely the first time a person of any age has ever intentionally dropped a watermelon. It feels naughty somehow, but they do it. 

Dropped from three feet in height, a watermelon breaks open but doesn't get mushed up. The flesh inside is exposed. Using a clean pocketknife, I cut the heart into chunks and people eat it standing up, spitting out seeds in the field. One melon is usually enough, but I urge people to eat all they want. I point to all the other melons. Part of the fun is the excess. Then they take one or two home.

That's it. People seem to like it. Parents and grandparents take pictures of their kids.

My father, Robert Sage, grew up at the farm that I now own and care for. He realized that his young sons needed a crop to grow that they would find exciting. So, at my age of eleven and my brother's age of eight, my father had us help him plant and care for a small melon patch. We sold the melons to people operating a roadside produce stand on a then-vacant lot the corner of Jackson Street and 4th Street in Medford. We got to keep the money we earned, which meant we got to deposit it into our college fund bank accounts. It was fun to have money, and Jackson County Federal Savings and Loan paid us 4% interest. We got money just from having money!  It seemed like such a sweet deal.

That was the start.