Watermelon Woes and Wonders                                            by Tom Motley

Seasonally, I review my old farm planting records and Motley Farm Report articles published by C&S Media (Farmersville Times, Princeton Herald, et al), just to compare past ag conditions with current. I note that in 2007, for example, watermelons were replanted three times at my Merit farm. Discouraged, I wrote “All the rain and overcast days combined to create slow-growing plants and encourage drowning for those that tried to make it. The third planting has produced some beauties, but I’m just praying there’s enough sunlight and heat left in September to let them mature fully. The TV weather-persons are not encouraging on this matter. But they’ve been wrong before.”

That year I recorded growing Tigger melons, Moon and Stars, and Black Diamonds (my childhood favorite). The weather was my enemy during my first attempt at growing Tigger melons. The mature fruit’s skin is supposed to be a bright yellow with lively red zigzag stripes. Mine apparently stayed dark-green, with pale yellow stripes and very small. A white flesh melon, I thought the tiger-patterned fruit would make a nice alternative to cantaloupe. It did, in subsequent, more successful years. Don’t get me wrong. I love chilled (or grilled) cantaloupe, especially with some generous drops of Tabasco or Trappey’s applied. The combination of the fiery condiment and the cold or hot sweet melon is a tasty adventure.

As a kid, in Beaumont, the appearance of watermelons signaled the end of summer. Those kinds of wonderful memories of seasonal availability of foods are primary motivations behind my years in organic food production and sales. Food grown locally, without pesticides, with a genuine sense of terroir, simply cannot be available year-round. For example, our salads are lush with bright green organic spinach and oak-leaf lettuce throughout the winter in North Texas. Our summer taste buds anticipate those fall and winter greens as the heat wanes.

In late August or September, Dad would bring home huge Black Diamonds he’d get up around Crockett or Woodville. He would buy from farmers deep in the Piney Woods of East Texas, near oil fields he was working. Black Diamonds love to grow in a good bit of sand. Red clay is an extra bonus.

Air conditioning was nonexistent in Beaumont homes then. Theaters, like The Bowie (where I went on Saturdays to watch serials, cartoons and a feature film for pennies) offered the new “refrigerated air,” but it was a novelty. In the evenings, as neighbors waited outside on porches or lawn chairs for houses to cool down, a table would be set up in the front yard and the neighborhood Dads would gather to slice chilled watermelon for everyone present. Kids delighted in spitting seeds and teasing each other if you swallowed one, melon vines would grow out of your ears.

A cold Black Diamond watermelon being opened is a feast for eyes and ears, as well as taste. As a youngster, I stayed close by for the unveiling, so to speak. With elbows hung on the edge of a picnic table covered with a checkered tablecloth, I can see myself grinning with expectation at the fat round dark green melon’s treasure. A sliced line in the skin begins the ritual. Like an earthquake, the watermelon’s beautiful surface splits open with a distinctive, loud ‘c-r-a-a-ack,’ revealing the reddest fruit on earth, with perfectly symmetrical lines of black seeds throughout.

Into my early teen years, my aunt used to take us to a watermelon stand in Oak Cliff. We always went at dusk or night, when the late summer air was cooling. The Watermelon Garden was on Davis Street, next to the Penguin Drive-In, on a corner lighted on both sides by strings of bare light bulbs that fanned out over the place like a used car lot. Picnic tables covered the whole area.

We could buy watermelon by the slice, or if there was a big family, the owner would divide a big Black Diamond at the table. Like oversized round green basketballs, the melons floated in large tin tubs of ice and frigid water.

Watermelons like to rest in cold water. I tell my customers to be careful not to leave their purchased melon in the fridge too long. Today’s refrigerators, with their advanced dehumidifier (frost-free) systems, will suck that rich moisture and juice right out, if the melon is left too long in such a dry environment.

In one summer’s farm journal I noted: “I treated recent dinner guests to my organic Black Diamond watermelon for dessert, practicing the ritual of childhood, outside under the shade of the pecan trees. The kids loved spitting seeds at will and laughing about how next year’s yard would likely be covered in watermelons. That would be fine with me, and the horses.

Horses cherish watermelon as much as they do bois d’arc leaves. The dinner party marched down the hill to the barnyard with watermelon leftovers gathered in sticky, sweet-smelling hands (large and small). The horses were standing in a line, like royalty, waiting for gifts to be offered by attentive valets. Our evening’s entertainment was watching these enthusiastic melon lovers celebrate the summer's harvest with gusto and loud slurping. Equine juice machines, they were.”

.