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.


5 comments:

Unknown said...

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.

Unknown said...

John, this is Pam, not Kristy.

David Bratman said...

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.

John D. Rateliff said...

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.

John D. Rateliff said...

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