Orangeglo - Variety Show

Orangeglo, Sweet Siberian (front left), Chris Cross (back left),Moon & Stars, Mountain Yellow Sweet

It has been quite a while since I did a feature of a veggie variety on the GFF blog.  So, I said to myself, "Self, let's do a Genuine Faux Farm blog on a veggie variety."  Since I can be pretty convincing sometimes, I agreed to do just that.

It has been a few years since we have seriously grown watermelons.  Yes, it is true that we would grow a fair number of them to make sure our CSA members would each get one.  Even longer ago, we would try to grow way too many of them in hopes that we would have a bumper crop and we could try to market the excess.  The problem was twofold.  First, it was never as easy as you pretend it will be to find the unplanned market when you do have the bumper crop and second, if you secure that market it always seems like there is some sort of disaster that prevents you from having the excess you wanted to have - especially when you grow as many different crops as we did.

If you are a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm share grower, there are problems with growing traditional sized (larger) watermelons.  Unless you have share pickup at your farm, you are stuck with bringing a full load of watermelons AND all of the rest of the produce at the same time.  In our case, at the point watermelons got ripe, our shares were full of all sorts of other neat things.  Our truck was full to the gills (so to speak) with everything else - there was really no place to put the watermelon.

And watermelon do not pack particularly well.

Even if we selected watermelon varieties that were smaller, we were often stuck with packing issues.  Still, if we had a good watermelon year, we worked to find solutions - and usually managed just fine.  We even arranged to have someone bring their truck to the farm and come with us to our distributions.

Now that we are not growing watermelon for anyone other than ourselves, we were left with the choice - which watermelon variety would we choose?

Sometimes it is difficult to give up the opportunity to grow a wide range of cultivars.  It was fun just trotting out five or six varieties and seeing how each of them did and how each tasted.  There was also a certain amount pleasure in describing each and their relative strengths to those who were trying to select which one to take home.

In the end, we went with the watermelon that we felt had the best combined texture and taste - probably according to Rob's taste buds more than Tammy's.  This isn't because Tammy is not allowed to have her opinion.  It's more that Rob is a bit more persnickity when it comes to watermelon in the first place.  Tammy would be fine with several varieties, and Rob might actually pass on some of them... or just eat a few chunks and leave it at that.

Orangeglo has a fruitier texture and taste unlike many of the highly marketed watermelons you can find in stores currently.  Most of those fruit are a bit grainy and more water than melon - in my opinion.  Orangeglo is a bit more 'pulpy' in texture and has a definite flavor that is clearly watermelon, but with more depth to its sweet flavor.

Yes, it does have seeds in the cavity, but unlike some heirloom varieties,the seeds are usually very well developed and pretty easy to find and remove.  I will admit that some varieties we tried had seeds EVERYWHERE and it was hard to appreciate the taste, even if it was excellent.

Vines are usually pretty reliable once you get them started.  We planted a total of six seeds and transplanted all six this Spring.  Of those, four survived the deer and rabbits.  In return, we got one full sized melon (about 20+ pounds) and four or five smaller melons (10-15 pound range).  I am not counting the fruit a deer stepped on in that count.

I can't say that we did particularly well with our cultivation and care of these plants in 2022, but we did well enough.  And, the production was in line with what we typically expect from this variety.  Unlike some of the hybrid, production melons that many commercial growers favor, these melons do have a fairly wide range of sizes.  The largest I think we have seen was approaching thirty pounds.  But, it is pretty common, in our experience to have about a quarter of the marketable fruit land in the 20 pound range and the rest landing at 10 to 15 pounds.

Orangeglo does love it when you promote visits from pollinators.  So, some variety of flowering plants in the area will increase the likelihood of fruit set. We usually plant our watermelons in the same area as our melon plants.  We like borage, calendula, zinnia, marigold, buckwheat and sunflowers in that area.  We even tried sunn hemp one year and the vines liked to crawl into the sunn hemp (but it was hard to find the fruit).

We did try watermelon next to winter squash one year, but found the watermelon vines did not compete well with the squash.  They just don't start crawling fast enough and the squash take their space before they can really get going.  We have grown watermelon with both straw and paper mulch, but our best production has been on bare soil, most of the time.  Does that mean I think that is the absolute best way to grow watermelon?  Probably not.  But, remember, watermelon never were one of our primary crops, so I didn't expend THAT much energy thinking about how we grew them.

But now that I've had a tasty Orangeglo or two this year, I might create a side project for 2023....