Saturday, July 25, 2015

Some Days You Just Can't Get a Good Watermelon* (a rant)

*with apologies to Adam West.

So, for several days now with Janice's help I've been looking for a watermelon. A real watermelon, the kind with seeds in it.


  • None at Fred Meyers
  • None at Trader Joe's
  • None at Uwajimaya's
  • Sold out at the Kent farmer's market ("we had ten, and they went right away")
  • None at Valley Harvest, which turns out to have gone out of business since our last visit
  • None at Carpinito's
  • None at the Great Wall Mall's Ranch Market


Finally bought one of those seedless abominations, at Uwajimaya, since a mediocre watermelon is better than no watermelon at all. But seriously, what happened to good melons? My standards might be high, since I come from the area that produces the best watermelons in the world (my home town's only some thirty-odd miles from Hope, Arkansas). But still, watermelons without seeds are like those supermarket tomatoes of a few years ago, bred for shipping and not taste. Heirloom tomatoes and local-grown filled in the gap there -- where are the Black Diamonds, Dixie Queens, and the like?

--John R.


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5 comments:

  1. UnknownJuly 26, 2015 at 12:28 AM

    Farmers no longer raise many black diamond, Jubilee, or Charleston Grays as most nowadays enjoy the seedless varieties. They are bred for sweetness and some are quite good. I join you in missing the grays and stripes though.

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  2. UnknownJuly 26, 2015 at 12:29 AM

    John, this is Pam, not Kristy.

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  3. David BratmanJuly 26, 2015 at 9:52 AM

    When I visited Hope, which is near your end of Arkansas, one summer, I found plenty of roadside sellers of watermelon. But they only sold whole watermelons, which were useless to me as a tourist. I couldn't eat a whole one at once, and had no facilities for storing it cut. (Not to mention that I had no knife, either.) Nor could I find any restaurants that served watermelon, so I passed through great watermelon country watermelon-less.

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  4. John D. RateliffJuly 28, 2015 at 10:22 PM

    Hi Pam
    Good to hear from you. Have a good melon and think of me, getting by on so-so melons till I make it back to that farmer's market and see if I'm in luck.

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  5. John D. RateliffJuly 28, 2015 at 10:23 PM

    Hi David
    Yes, it'd be like an ice cream stand that only sold ice cream by the gallon -- I wdn't get any because I cdnt' bear to throw out most o it.
    Alas.
    --JDR

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