Melons, Grapes, and Puncture Vine

It isn't all politics, all the time, everywhere.

Part One: Melons.

(I will catch you up on grapes and the noxious puncture vine in subsequent posts. If posts about melons bore you, skip reading now.)

I still grow a few melons in a small patch next to the vineyard. I grow them out of habit and inertia. 

Jerry Evans, with a sample of the melons we picked Tuesday morning

Southern Oregon residents will recognize Jerry Evans, the owner-operator-host of the fine-dining restaurant The Jacksonville Inn, now retired. It was a great restaurant. It served presidents, senators, celebrities of all kinds, billionaires, poor people, and teens on prom dates. He came out to the farm to look over my grapes and melons.

My father, brother, and I started growing melons in about 1961, when I was 11 years old. We sold them to local produce markets and to Sherm's Thunderbird, who made the effort to buy local produce. My brother and I each banked $1,000 every summer. That amount was over half of the tuition at Harvard; it was $1,760 my freshman year. Melons got me though college debt free.

My farm roots may have allowed me to win election to the county commission as a Democrat, notwithstanding the Reagan landslide election of 1980. My election opponents described me as a fish out of water, a local boy ruined by an east-coast education. But I was authentically poor. I drove an old truck. I got dirty working. I was proud to call myself a truck farmer. And people saw my melons, rubber stamped "SAGE" in stores. 

When I was freshly retired from my career as a financial advisor in 2015, I experimented with growing a large field again and I invited people out to see the melon field.

I had fun watching parents and kids eating watermelon.

Roy and Barbara Saigo

There was a problem. I had aged out of doing field work. Carrying multiple loads of 60-pound buckets of melons became more than my back could handle. 

I still host people at the melon patch, but do so a much smaller scale. My niece and nephew got a small taste of the farm six years ago.

My nephew, now age 18, is a huge help with the vineyard as we put up bird netting. More about that shortly.

There is an art to picking a ripe watermelon and there is some guesswork. The proof is when one cuts it or drops it.

But most of the other varieties of melons that I grow have an unmistakable look when they are ripe. Cantaloupes turn color, from greenish-buff to tan. The field is best picked every day to catch them at that first day when they will "slip." Refrigerated, they may last a week. On a kitchen counter they are still perfect for about three days.

The best way to have a melon that looks great on the shelf in the mass-market supply chain is for the grower to pick it a few days before that moment of perfect ripeness. The result is an OK melon. That is changing, though. Plant hybridizers have created a melon variety, the Tuscan-style melon, which is rather forgiving of being picked early. I am a melon snob, but admit that even when picked a bit green, they are pretty good. The ribbed melons being held by Roy and Barbara Saigo and the melons in the grey bin are Tuscan style melons. 

The yellow and green melons in the Saigo's hands are a Spanish melon called Piel de Sapo, sometimes called "Santa Claus" melons. In the U.S. at this latitude you would see them starting now. Look for this and try them:

They are astonishingly sweet and "melon-ish" in flavor.  They are my favorite. 

Melons are in season now. Ten months of the year you are doomed to eat, at best, pretty-good melons. Now is the time to eat a very, very good melon, especially if you buy them in a place that sources local fruit.

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