Melons!

Melon season is surely upon us. The packing shed at the farm is stuffed full with bulk-bins of watermelons and musk melons. Unfortunately, the melons at the bottom of the bins are rotting faster than they can be eaten or sold, so the stench of rotting melons has settled in the air alongside the sweet aroma of a ripe honeydew. The whole farm is littered with the rinds of half-eaten field snacks. There's nothing like finishing a long harvest and gathering around in the shade to pop open a ripe watermelon. We all stand with dampened hair and dirty hands as warm melon juice drips down our chins.

I remember taking care of young watermelon plants very early in the season. Many of the young transplants died in the cold weather, so I spent one morning seeding watermelons directly into the ground. Another day, I had worked for hours placing metal hoops along a bed of seedlings to keep row cover in place above the plants. The seedlings were were planted into plastic so another day was spent removing hardy weeds that had snuck into the holes in the plastic alongside the melons. Later on, after summer set in and it was too hot for row cover, I helped to roll up the row cover and remove the metal hoops to be stored away for use the fall.

Finally the harvest is here. It's sort of a nuanced harvest. You can hear ripeness by holding the fruit next you your ear (like it's telling you a juicy secret) and knocking on its rind. The ripe ones make a resounding wooden sound. Those whose sound falls flat are underripe, and those whose rinds are soft are overripe. I shared this information with my crew and we set to work on one of the large daily melon harvests. We selected the ripe fruits and set them into piles, clearing out a whole planting. Then, with a bulk bin in the bed of the truck I drove along the edge of the field and with each stop I received melons to place in the bins. My crew and I became professional melon-tossers, throwing the fruit fire-line style from our piles on the ground and collecting them in the bin. Even in the intense heat of this drought we managed to have a blast picking this signature summer fruit.