Ontario Gold Watermelon

[Ferdzy]

Since I've started the process of seeing if this can be registered with OSSI, I guess this is the place to post about what I'm calling Ontario Gold watermelon. Some of you may know that we've been crossing Golden Midget with other watermelons and growing out their offspring for a number of years now, and we are starting to have some good and consistent results. This is likely ((Golden Midget x Crimson sweet) x (Golden Midget x Grover Delaney)) F4. We planted 3 spots (2-3 seeds) of each of the 9 best watermelons from last year. Here's what they looked like a week ago - I think they are about 50% larger but otherwise look a lot like this now:

[AndrewB]

Good job. Excited for this project.

[Ferdzy]

Noticed the first watermelon forming today. It's very hard to check because the vines are now so thick I have to really want to search for them, and I don't! It is so unspeakably hot. So far everything looking good, but for a few minor virus-spots which I am ignoring.

Bill, are you growing these? How are they doing?

[reed]

I'm convinced a lot of the weird colors and wonderful flavor in my melon mix originated from Ferdzy seeds. I don't worry about selecting for a particular color myself.  I have too much fun not knowing till I chop one open.

[Ferdzy]

Ha, I'll tell Mr. Ferdzy. That was more his mix. I went down the rabbit hole chasing after the golden-when-ripe gene. He's looking forward to this project finishing and having a more eclectic mix again.

[Ferdzy]

Here we are about a month out from that first picture. Plants have, uh, filled out a bit. There are a few relatively large melons forming (like, 3, I think) but mostly the vines are full of male flowers and male flowers only. I think what happened is our heatwave/drought struck just as flowering started and they almost completely stopped producing female flowers in response. We've gotten a lot of rain the last couple days and it has cooled things off to a more reasonable 25°C (about 75°F) or so, so I hope we will get another wave of fruit forming in the next few days before it heats up again.

All three of the fruits forming seem to be the round ones, not the oval ones.

[Ferdzy]

Well, happy to say I was wrong about there being three melons. I'm still a bit unimpressed by the numbers, but they are coming. And I should remember that every year I think there aren't that many and then the leaves start to subside a bit, and they breach like a big pod of whales.

[Ferdzy]

Things are moving along. Oddly, there were just a handful of melons formed, then 2 weeks with nothing due to heat and drought, and then a second much larger wave of melons - both more of them, and they are already mostly bigger than the first ones. Here's some of them. That second one was one of the earliest ones, and looks like it will be ripe soon.

[AndrewB]

Do you think if the early ones were separated they could push this population earlier and earlier? Would it be a worthy sub-project?

[Ferdzy]

Andrew, earliness has been part of our goals since the beginning. In addition to improving the flavour and texture of the original Golden Midget, we wanted to keep it early and make it larger. To some degree there is a conflict there - it takes more time to make a bigger melon, generally. However, given that it isn't just the melon that turns yellow when ripe, it's the whole plant, I think there is an upper limit on size. Unless there was something really amazing about later melons - and there usually hasn't been - we've selected our seed melons from the first 12 to 16 to ripen each year.

When I think about it, there was only one "exception" and it wasn't really an exception. It was a melon that self-seeded (it's rare for watermelon seeds to survive a winter in the open garden here) and turned out to be exceptionally vigorous. It was late to form a fruit but since it germinated when it was ready in the garden, it was at least a month behind the ones I started in pots. It brought a tendency to a little more seediness that I like, but it increased the strength and resiliency of the whole project by a lot. Since that one, we seem to have stopped with the pots and just plant them out directly in the garden.

Normally really small melons like the very earliest this year would be discarded. Because I think their small size is environmental rather than genetic I am thinking we should leave them in for consideration anyway. They need to meet the usual standards of flavour, texture, and not excessive seediness as well, of course.

[Ferdzy]

Okay! Here we go! Picked the first good watermelon of the year yesterday. I say first, though a couple of days ago I pulled out one that had split when almost ripe. Haven't had much splitting in this project  but many of them first formed during a period of heat and drought followed by a period of regular storms (not unusual around here) and that's a test. So here's the first one that counts.

Not as big as I would like at 969 grams (a bit over 2 pounds) but respectable. Just a hair off round to oval, bright yellow with thin slightly darker lines every inch or so. Nice thin rind, few smallish black seed, excellent texture. How's the flavour, you ask? It's good. I would have liked it a hair stronger but sure can't complain about the sweetness - very sweet. We rated it a 7.5 on a scale of 1 to 10. Keep in mind that in 10 years of growing watermelons we've issued one rating of 9 and zero ratings of 10. We're tough graders, so this is a half a mark off the best of this type. So yee, and also haw. Now that the first shoe has dropped there should be a veritable avalanche over the next 2 weeks.

Anybody heard from Bill? I haven't heard from him all summer. I hope he's okay. Bill, you out there? How's it going?

[AndrewB]

That is a very nice watermelon. I like your scale of rating. Last year I picked up a cheap brix meter to measure sugar content on a more scientific scale. Especially helpful for citron- watermelon hybrids. I found out the Citron melons can be as low as 2% sugar.

Here is the one I got

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DL2NJYS/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apap_1ZxlyJVQn8XAz

[Ferdzy]

Interesting; much cheaper than I would have supposed. And yes, I would think citron melons could be very "dry".

We're happy enough just to give them a subjective rating though. We're also looking for the elusive "tastes good". Sweetness is part of that but not all of it. By the way, since one of the grandparents of this variety was Crimson Sweet, it has just a drop of citron melon in the mix somewhere.

[reed]

I like the smaller sized melons. I select for it but still not easy to find one under five pounds. As far as flavor most all of mine, again largely originating from Ferdzy seeds, are about as good as a melon can be. Lots of melon flavor and sweet, sweet along with it. I'd say most rate in range of 9.5 - 9.9, can't go ahead and give a 10 so as to leave
a little room for improvement.

A lot have the small black seeds like you mentioned, do you think that might go along with the great flavor? The pink ones especially, often have a thick white rind or what looks like rind but tastes just as good as the pink part. Have you seen that in any of yours?

[Ferdzy]

Reed, the pale pink and small seeds suggests maybe from Grover Delaney, which was one of the melons thrown into the mix. I don't necessarily get thick rinds from that influence, but I do get a fairly consistent smooth, dense texture. None of the loose, watery, sponginess that can sometimes turn up. And even though I only grew it as Grover Delaney once, in a fairly poor year, my impression is that it's a great watermelon. Should be better known.