Watermelon thumping

When one has tasted watermelon, he knows what the angels eat.
                                                                    Mark Twain

  Watermelon are the perfect late summer treat, deliciously sweet and crunchy underneath their garish striped rinds. To me, they evoke memories of checkered table cloths laid out on the lawn, brimming with all the fixings for a summer picnic. No watermelon; no picnic. Simple as that.

 Although they are 92% water, they do contain significant amounts of Vitamin A, B6 and C in addition to lycopene, antioxidants, amino acids and a modest amount of potassium.

  I love growing them. We harvest thousands every year, to rave reviews. I prefer cultivating seeded varieties; they are more reliably sweet in our increasingly unreliable Southern Ontario summers.

  The appearance of watermelons in our market marks the beginning of a ritual that has become so predictable to us as to be almost comical: the watermelon thump. We have several weeks ahead during which our market will reverberate with the sound of watermelon thumping.

  It doesn't seem to matter where in the world our customers come from. Everyone seems to know this ritual, or has inherited it from a parent or grandparent.

  The idea of rapping a melon with your knuckles is, of course, to determine whether it is ripe or not. There is a modicum of science to the practice, the fact that a ripe melon has a more hollow sound than an unripe one. It takes a skilled practitioner and the sound does vary between melon varieties.

 My advice to die-hard thumpers: the sound that you make rapping on your head denotes an unripe melon; the sound that you make by thumping on your chest approximates that of a ripe melon.

   Okay, it's an inexact science, but it does enhance the comic effect.

  Realistically, thumping a watermelon to determine ripeness is about as effective as kicking the tires on a car to determine if it is mechanically fit.

  A more effective method, and the one we use in the field, is to roll the melon until you find where it lay while growing and ripening in the field (the "ground spot" or "belly spot".) This spot should be creamy white or yellow. If it is light green or you can see stripes running through the belly spot, then the melon is immature.

  Watermelons will not mature any further after they are picked! We are extremely careful when harvesting our melons to try and avoid immature fruit for this reason.

  Mature melons also have a faded appearance on the top that you will easily recognize.

  Believe it or not, there is a new Melon Meter app for your smartphone to determine whether it is ripe or not:

  http://www.cnet.com/news/melon-meter-ios-app-listens-for-ripe-watermelons/

  Call me a Luddite, but we have resisted that one so far. It is clearly not as much fun as thumping.

  Come and get them while you can; it's a short and sweet season!

  Best,

  Guy