I want to do an update of my melons, sharing my thought about them after I ate most of them. There are quite a few things that I had not considered, and now they are quite important for future breading or selection of my melons. I think I am not quite there to do various landraces, but I will keep the traits in mind. I also want a steady harvest of melons through all the season, and I want my winter or long term storage melons.
0- Variety/diversity. I like my plants to be different, to have many forms, flavors, colors, shapes, textures, sizes, smell and patterns. I do not mind if I have to plant a lot of seed if I want that diversity. Most of my melons are crosses and I will continue to cross them.
1- Flavor. I think is the main important factor, when you find a very sweet one you want to eat more of them.
My rating ( 0 to 3)
I got like 3 melons very sweets <1%. It is a 3.
30% super nice. It is a 2.
30% its a melon. It is a 1.
30% inedible. It is a 0. It could also be that it has worms or split.
2- Vigorous plants. This has two meanings. Plant produce harvest of a melon an then the plant die. And can be the plant produced more than 1 melon, two to three. Also the plant has to withstand the heat and local conditions.
3- Long term storage. Some of the varieties are suited for storage, is historical that the people here saves melons for long term storage. It is difficult to eat all of them when harvest time, and I want to eat melons in winter.
4- Earliest fruit. Smaller fruit takes less time to form? And you get an earliest harvest. I prefer both but I see the advantages of 3 smaller melons instead of a bigger one.
5- Melons continue to ripen when harvesting and melons changing colors when harvest… One thing is when you harvest a big melon because you do not want to go bad and found it that is not ripen and you found sponge or cork flavor.
6- Melons that not split for a sudden storm, inconsistency watering or sprinkle time. All my orange melons got splits and the bugs got inside.
I call this Island of fire. They like volcanic soil and dryness. I think one of the parent is “melon amarillo canario”.
1- Favor, most of them were a “it is a melon” or “inedible” and the bigger melons were supper nice. I think most of them did not make it to the ripeness stage and the flavor suffer a lot.
2- I got a lot of smaller melons and a lot of seeds, the seeds are big compared to the others melons. They like it in my context, I think it was the most productive variety this year.
3- They are kind of in the middle for long term storage, they are not spoil earlier but can store more than a month.
4- I think most of the plants only got one melon and then the plant dried.
5- They do not change colors when they are ripe, maybe they become yellow but you do not see the ripeness.
6- They were very resistant to split when inconsistency watering is present.
I was going to say that the melons with some of the green skins were crosses, but there are the smaller ones and can be even more unripe.
I call these Passion Chip. I think one of the parents is “melon arizo”. I do not have any photo of the earliest ripen melons.
They were the earliest and because I had more more seeds available I planted a lot of them.
1- Flavor. All of them were super nice.
2- They kind of like it in my context. I needed to replant a lot of seedlings, I got quite a lot of holes in my lines.
3- I ate all of them so I did not test the long term storeability. But I feel like they got bad less than a month.
4- The firsts plants produced 2-3 melons each throughout the season, but the yield decrease. I did not need to plant more seeds, but in the same space I got less melons. Most of the melons were small, less than 15 cm / 6 inches.
5- They change color when ripen and they ripen kite fast. I like a lot this feature, it not a priority to have, but I like it.
6- They got soft skin when ripen so I recommend to harvest them when you see to starting changing colors to avoid bug damage.
