I’m the melon steward this year so let me know what you guys are looking for in melon grexes!
So far I have two in mind:
Polar melons. For people with short seasons and cold summers. Only very special seeds will make it in this mix that will be heavy Lofthouse genetics because they are so early.
Delicious and everything else. For maximum diversity with an emphasis on especially delicious. (What else do people love in melons. Firmness?)
Any other requests?
If I want a firm melon, I can get that from the grocery store… I like my melons melt-in-the-mouth soft. I regret that I focused so much on muskmelons, that I didn’t develop a green-fleshed melon.
Taste and aroma for sure!
And I’d like to see some disease tolerance included. While we don’t have a problem with season length down here, we have lots of disease/fungal pressure. I’ll be primarily selecting for this along with taste.
I’m very interested to see if any plants from the GTS and L-O grexes (that may have been selected for earliness) may have the added benefit in my climes of producing fruit before such pressures get too bad.
Don’t worry, after I adapt your original strain to my location I plan on making one with it. I’ve not rediscovered the best tasting melon I grew years ago so I’m just going to have to make it.
Are you talking about muskmelons or watermelons? Either way I can barely imagine improving on those I already have. Other than, I’m working on pushing them to produce more but smaller fruits per vine but expect that is going to take significant time to accomplish, if it’s possible at all. I’d love muskmelons the size of baseballs hanging in bunches from a trellis but tasting like mine do now. I could go up to soccer ball size for watermelons. Oh, and indeterminate too, ripening over a few weeks instead of all at once.
I think with water or musk melons and probably most other things, a lot depends on climate and soil and SE Indiana is quite hospitable to melons.
I was talking about muskmelons, I grew a green fleshed melon years ago when I first started gardening and the flavor & aroma were absolutely intoxicating. Unfortunately the seed had been mislabeled and the seeds I had saved ended up getting lost when I moved. I’ve been trying to rediscover it for a decade now so I plan to use Joseph’s landrace and cross it with a separate green fleshed melon grex.
Wrong hemisphere so not a contributor but reliable production and great flavour are my main interests. I have both green and orange fleshed melons in the mix (though this last season the green fleshed ones didn’t fruit). One white fleshed melon turned up but I’m not keen on those as they don’t have much depth of flavour.
Would this include cucumbers? A friend of mine has a cucumber which she says runs 45 days.
No, @Kimzy is the cucumber and watermelon steward. This is just for C. Melos
If this is for muskmelons then honestly the more colors and flavors the better. The more flavor and smell the better, and the more fruit the better. I think all that comes down to the 2 you listed though. Quick growing should mean that it grows more for those with longer seasons, and more diversity means that we’ll get more and more flavors.
Long storage life would be really nice, if we have enough seeds to make a mix like that. I know there are some melons with a shelf life of two months or longer (Christmas and Piel de Sapo spring to mind). That would be an excellent foundation for a landrace.
Flavor and aroma are the name of the game for me. I’m also in a very melon-friendly climate. The thing holding me back from playing with melon crosses is our house love of Armenian cucumbers, which are also C Melo. I’ve got 4 “melon” varieties and 2 “cucumber” varieties on the same trellis at the moment. Although we were joking this morning about saving some seeds just to see what a cuculoupe tastes like next year.
Long ago I grew a melon grex, developed from “the farthest north melon grex”. It improved over the years, to grow quite well in a good summer. But then, if it rained into the flowers, they were flooded, and no insects would try to pollinate. All the flowers were facing upward.
What I would love, was a melon with nodding flowers 
Then it would be protected from rain, and possibly set melons in every warm summer, even even if rainy.
Lots of melon tasting has been going on over here. Very very delicious melons.
Who is sending in melon seeds? Show us your melons! How do look and taste? What were your biggest challenges?
Originally I had some green fleshed melons in my grex. But those must have been needed warmer temperatures because this year there has only been one half green fleshed melon, so I’m especially hoping some of you are sending in some non-orange fleshed melons. Are all appreciated though.
Easy to tell when it’s ripe would be nice. My first year growing melons they smelled amazing long before they were actually ready to eat! (The less said the better about my second and third years, but now I know what not to do next year…)
I’m not certain if rain matters that much or if flower direction would make difference. Either insects aren’t active because of the rain or it very well might be that flowers don’t produce pollen when it rains because it’s cooler. Melons are little harder to observe on pollen production since they have so little, but I have done some observations with watermelons and lowest I have had pollen produced was day high of 16C. Then it was just one plant. Flowering had gone down and even those that flowered didn’t have pollen. I suspect melon behaves similarly although treshold might be a bit different. One summer there was cool rainy period in the middle of best time to get them pollinated and flowering stopped because it got too cold. That was first year I had more varieties and those were staple varieties that weren’t all the best for my climate. Now I have melon mix that is heavily farthest north melon mix. Maybe haven’t had the most difficult summers to test it on yet, but I think it has potential. I’m trying to improve cold tolerance and have picked up one F1 variety that has huge flowers to hopefully improve visibility and pollen produced. Natural selection should eventually select for lower treshold for pollen production.
There should only be smell if they are at peak ripeness. Sometimes damaged fruits are like that or fruits that have had forced ripening because of stress where they don’t have time to develop sweetness. That’s my own observation and I don’t think it’s really a variety trait. Usually many varieties develop close to peak sweetness before they are fully ripe.
for my ‘Miniliscious’ melon (for which most of the original genetics was ‘Farthest North’) there were a number of criteria for selection.
Apart from the usual great flavour/deep colour/single serve size criteria, the more subtle issues are:
splitting when ripe or overwatered : CULL.
susceptibility to slug/millipede damage - avoid if possible
another issue alluded to above is the issue of determining ripeness.
I’ve selected toward 3 ripeness indicators:
colour change, perfume, and slipping (slipping is disarticulation of ripe fruit from the stem with slight lever or twisting action.)
Another ‘fault’ for me is mushy flesh when ripe - I want the flesh yielding not crisp, but some of my selections have slightly deeper coloured ‘over-ripe’ patches that are very slightly mushy - still very tasty and my tasting panel doesn’t mind it, but I’m aiming for 11/10 
I’m keen to incorporate bush habit but Im struggling to get the crosses done.
gm
I ate a delicious cantaloupe this year. I’m going to contribute the seeds from it to the delicious mix grex. It was grown by one of my neighbors, had thick flesh that was sweet all the way to the rind, a tiny seed cavity, and despite the seed cavity being tiny, it was stuffed with lots of viable seeds. A great combination of traits.
Sadly, it was orange-fleshed and looked exactly like a grocery store cantaloupe on the outside. Nothing special about how it looked. Sorry, Julia. 
But boy, was it tasty!
You might be getting more orange fleshed as cross between orange and green/white tends to be atleast partially orange. I noticed this in some first generation crosses and later have contributed pale orange to crosses. Some I knew I had planted green/white fleshed so it was obviously from cross. Might need to seperate those with white/green flesh if want them both evenly. Similarly I have had lot’s of orange fleshed watermelons although I only had one variety that was pale orange. Not as many yellow/white fleshed even though it must have started with quite even spread between red and others. Now it’s probably 40%/40% orange/red and 20% yellow white at most. Might seperate them someday, but now it’s just a good sign of mixing.
