The recent Independence Day holiday featured fireworks and food for many families with one of those foods more than likely being watermelon.
July 4 and the preceding weeks mark watermelon season, and unfortunately for watermelon connoisseurs like me, the holiday also marks a time period when homegrown watermelons become less abundantly available.
I am not choosy about the color. Both red and yellow are equally tasty. The yellow ones remind me of my childhood; my mother’s cousin grew fine yellow ones and delivered to us a few from his harvest each summer. After a day of work or play on our family farm we’d cap off the day with a late evening watermelon cutting on the picnic table in our yard. I also don’t mind seeds. In my opinion, seeded melons taste better and are worth the trouble of removing seeds. Allen Eubanks of Eubanks Produce told me a few months ago that each seed represents a visit from a bee. Bee pollination is vital to watermelon production.
Early in the summer I enjoyed a delicious red one and a delicious yellow one from Eubanks’ farm at Rocky Creek. Last week I bought a few at Wayne Lee’s Grocery and Market that had been grown by Stanton Fairley at his farm in Basin. I haven’t eaten one this year from the Courtneys, Crooms, Stringfellows, Howells or any other growers I know, but I’ve never had a bad George County watermelon.
Picking the perfect melon is an art, and I’m always eager to learn new tips. Selecting a watermelon from a bin in a grocery store or produce stand takes a minute or two. Each melon must be inspected for scars and should be free of bruises. Small “creek bed” indentations along the outside are okay as those signify bee action. Also, check out the bottom of the melon. Examine the area where it was lying on the ground and opt for a melon with a cream color. Of course, a watermelon must be thumped. Thumping is the number one method of the selection process. While recently thumping melons at Wayne Lee’s I enjoyed quality conversation about watermelons with some gentlemen whose faces and demeanor expressed age and wisdom. An older man told me watermelon ripeness revolves around the stem. “If it’s brown, it is good and ripe,” he said. Chats with two other men yielded the same sage words. All agreed thumping is essential. A shopper must thump the melon with a flick of the fingers or tap it with knuckles to determine if it sounds hollow, a sign of ripeness. An unripe melon will ping at a high pitch when thumped, and an overripe melon will sound dull like a thud.
Plenty of old wives’ tales exist associated with watermelon selection. Our nephew Sam visited last week and told of a straw trick he had learned from old-timers in northern Alabama, where he lives. If you place a piece of broom straw on top of the melon and the straw rotates 45 degrees, the melon is ripe. If it doesn’t turn, the watermelon is not ripe. I didn’t witness it, but my brother-in-law swears Sam placed a piece of Bahia grass (in the absence of broom straw) on four melons and the grass only moved on one of them. Once cut, three of the melons weren’t ripe; however, the one on which the grass turned was indeed ripe.
