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:
Good job. Excited for this project.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you think if the early ones were separated they could push this population earlier and earlier? Would it be a worthy sub-project?
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.
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?
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
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.
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?
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.
I have been negligent on documenting my watermelons, just growing and eating them but I do have some old pictures. I had posted these over on HG but the disappeared when I killed my Photobucket account. The first one is like those that have the thick white part that still just tastes like the rest.
These are all from your seeds and are the foundation of what I have now. Can't seem to find pictures of those with yellow/orange skins. Some of them have dark stripes or spots and some the reverse of that, yellow with white stripes. All kinds of weird things show up, only thing constant is the great flavor.
Nice! That orange fleshed one looks like it's out of the "improved Orangeglo" project that we've had to put on hold because 2 watermelon projects is probably 2 too many in a household with incipient diabetes. (Orangeglo x Sweet Siberian). By improved, I mean we wanted it smaller and willing to grow here in Canada.
Okay, after a brief pause, we had a flurry of watermelon picking and even a little eating. Unfortunately I am NOT impressed by the quality thus far. We had trouble with a couple that went bad due to damage to the rind. I did keep seed from those but it's hard to assess what they were like. Other than kinda small.
Here's the next one up that we are actually eating. It rates a 6.0 to 6.5 which is a good point lower than what I usually expect to plant seed from. But it's the only large early melon, so it may be in regardless. There was one, even larger and earlier one, but we did not even record it or save seeds after agreeing that it rated a 4 or 5 - supermarket quality, in other words.
Edit: Meant to mention, 2.613 kilos, or about 5.75 pounds.
Not going to post another picture; the melons are starting to look pretty consistent. We've been composting A LOT as not being up to standard, which is fairly distressing, but we have seeds from 8 of them saved at this point, and I would hope another 4 to 6 to come.
Problems are less that we didn't get the size or the number of melons hoped for, and more that we are just not that impressed by flavour this year... which is a bummer.
Putting out another call for Bill. Bill! Are you there? Are you okay (I worry this year)? Did you grow any of these, and if so, how did they do for you?
Whereabouts in Ontario? I'm just by the border, and have been working with watermelon for a few years.
Sadly, my 2020 season was a total disaster. Spider mites got into my "nursery", and wreaked havoc on my seedlings, which scrapped the whole harvest. I'll be more vigilant this winter.
Dominic, I'm in Meaford. You say you're by the border... where? LOL. Ontario has a lot of border.
Sorry about your year. I had to scrap a year when a stray seed of something else got into my watermelons and would have contaminated them. Perhaps interstingly, but still. So maddening.
Quote from: Ferdzy on 2020-12-06, 05:44:07 PM
Dominic, I'm in Meaford. You say you're by the border... where? LOL. Ontario has a lot of border.
Sorry about your year. I had to scrap a year when a stray seed of something else got into my watermelons and would have contaminated them. Perhaps interstingly, but still. So maddening.
On the Québec side, close to Ottawa.
Oh goodness, I was picturing Windsor.
What are your watermelons like?
Quote from: reed on 2020-08-12, 02:26:50 AM
A lot have the small black seeds like you mentioned, do you think that might go along with the great flavor?
Hate to side-topic this thread. Feel free to put this topic back on track after my post.
Reed, i can't find my original post where i mentioned the small black seeds, but i think it was along the lines of "I have noticed that the really good ones in my domestic landrace (and the general population in general) are skewed toward small black seeds despite much diversity put in."
I am working on re-doing the watermelon genetics portion on my website and just learned some new things about watermelon seed genetics. When it comes to watermelon seed size, seed size is controlled digenically: medium sized seed is dominant over both short and long. Smooth black seeds are also dominant over any other color, so it makes sense that in any watermelon landrace the trend would be toward medium smooth black seeds.
Just resurrecting this thread to comment that I have direct-seeded the watermelons for this project about a week ago, and they seem to be about half up after some fluctuating temperatures including up over 30°C (about 90°F). Next 4 days are going to be cool though, with night time temps down to 5°C.
I have also sent seeds off to some other seed growers for feedback from them on what they think of it.
I'd love to hear back from somebody at OSSI as to what is happening with the seed I sent last year.
Quote from: Ferdzy on 2020-12-06, 08:06:17 PMOh goodness, I was picturing Windsor.
What are your watermelons like?
I had just miserable results at my old place, growing season too short, soil too heavy, failure to properly control weeds. Rarely had fruits reach maturity before freeze. I hope I'll do better at my new place.