Watermelons Get Small (점점 작아지는 수박들)

이젠 수박들마저도 개인을 위한 작은 규격으로 개발된다고. 하기야 혼자 사는 사람들 냉장고에 수박 두는 것도 힘들더라.


HOPE, Ark.

IN this dusty field filled with experimental watermelons off Highway 174, there is but one sound that matters.

It’s a deep, soft pop, like a cork slipping free from a wine bottle. You hear it when a pocket knife cracks the green rind on a watermelon so full of wet fruit that the outside can barely contain the inside.

Terry Kirkpatrick, a professor of plant pathology at the University of Arkansas, spends a lot of time here popping open watermelons. He’s searching for deeply colored flesh that is crisp but not crunchy and so juicy that pools fill the divots left by a spoon.

The taste has to be exceptionally sweet but just slightly vegetal, so you know it came from the earth and not the candy counter.

These days, a good watermelon also has to ship well, which means a thick rind and a uniform shape. It has to be small enough so people pushing grocery carts in big-city stores will buy it. And it can’t have seeds.

All of that describes his small hybrid triploid beauties with names like Precious Petite and Orchid Sweet. They are very likely the future for many watermelon farmers, but they are also heartbreakers for a lot of people around southwest Arkansas who miss the old-fashioned seeded melons that now grow in only a few fields.

In many ways, Hope, a town known for both President Bill Clinton and the giant melons that were celebrated at its annual Watermelon Festival last weekend, is a microcosm of the watermelon world these days.

Around Hope, people still talk with fondness about heavy, oblong watermelons with names like Jubilee, Black Diamond, Georgia Rattlesnake or even the Charleston Gray, a relative newcomer from the 1950s and the first watermelon bred to have a tougher rind for shipping.

All of them can grow bigger than most kitchens can handle, some stretching over 2 feet long and weighing more than 50 pounds.

They’re the ones just right for greasing up and throwing in a pool for the kids to chase. You eat them ice cold, spitting the big black seeds at your brother.

And they are delicious, the kind of perfect watermelon an eater of grocery store melons can only fantasize about.

But they’re increasingly hard to find. At roadside stands here, you’re more likely to come across a hybrid called the Super Sweet 710 that farmers like Ernest Brown grow. It has seeds, sure, but it lacks some of the personality of the older varieties. It’s just a bit flatter in flavor than the Jubilee Mr. Brown prefers. But the 710s are cheaper to grow, a little smaller and more uniform.

“You can handle them better and stack them better,” he said.

The game, however, is in small, seedless melons.

Only about 2 of every 10 watermelons sold in the United States have seeds. And only a tiny percentage, agriculture experts estimate, are the old-fashioned heirloom varieties, all with seeds, that once made up all the watermelons in America.

The larger, more traditional-looking seedless “picnic melon” that flooded grocery stores in the 1980s still dominates the market. But the future is in what the industry calls personal melons, or the slightly larger icebox melons — round balls of sweet without seeds and, some think, without character.

The personal melon, weighing no more than six pounds, accounts for only about 12 percent of retail sales, according to United States Department of Agriculture research.

But its popularity has grown steadily since the early part of this decade, when seedless hybrids like the Pure Heart and the Bambino began competing in the new cute-melon category.

“Most people, particularly the urban people, would rather have a small one,” Dr. Kirkpatrick said. “With the big ones, you fill up all your Tupperware containers and you’re still not done.”

For farmers, much of the appeal of the smaller varieties is simple economics. Plant an Arkansas acre with big watermelons and you might get 40,000 pounds. An acre of personal melons will yield 65,000 to 80,000 pounds, Dr. Kirkpatrick figured.

The small melon is what sells at New York Greenmarkets and other farmers’ markets. In Franklin Township, N.J., Susan Blew pumps out a steady supply of dark green Sugar Babies — icebox melons, no more than 12 pounds. Sometimes she sells even rarer heirloom varieties like the Moon and Stars, which is larger still and whose deep green rind is stippled with what look like splotches of yellow paint.

She’s never thought about growing those really big melons with all the seeds, though. For one thing, the climate’s not right. And even if it were, she doubts they would sell.

“People just like a sweet, little melon,” she said.

But in this part of Arkansas, where the soil is sandy and the summer hot enough at just the right time so the watermelons grow particularly sweet and big, that kind of change comes hard. Growing up here meant 40-pound watermelons, and even those were considered on the small side. You ate the first of them on the Fourth of July and spit your last seeds on Labor Day, when you were just about sick of watermelon anyway.

And for fun, you went and looked at the giant watermelons. They’ve been grown in Hope, like a sporting event, since the 1920s. The biggest compete for local honors and are still auctioned off at the annual watermelon festival here, held last weekend. The lesser ones supply the watermelon-eating and seed-spitting contests.

Hope dominates the international stage as well. The world’s biggest watermelon on record, all 268 pounds and 8 ounces of it, was produced here in 2005. The man who grew it is Lloyd Bright, 67. Six world champions have come from his fields.

“When I was growing up, the guys were always talking big melons,” said Mr. Bright, a retired biology teacher and school administrator who got into the big-melon game in 1973.

These giant watermelons, called Carolina Cross, grow so fast that a day or two after one shows up on the vine, it’s the size of a small loaf of bread. They’ll continue to put on three or four pounds a day. Mr. Bright sells a few of his biggest for $75 to $80, and he peddles the seeds online, sometimes getting $20 for a dozen from watermelons that topped 200 pounds.

“That’s just enough to pay for the gas and fertilizer,” he said.

Before he harvests the seeds, he cuts out the hearts and puts them in the refrigerator to eat. He says they’re delicious, though his monsters weren’t ripe when this reporter was standing in his fields late last month, hinting around for a taste. He won’t harvest the biggest ones until later in August and September.

Those giant watermelons point up another division in this town that might be even deeper than the one between the economic promise of the personal melon and the tradition of the Jubilee.

“There’s big and then there’s good,” Dr. Kirkpatrick said. Although a colleague in the plant pathology department, Clay Wingfield, is testing some Carolina Cross in the extension center’s fields, neither is convinced that the little melons are the best for eating.

“I do, in fact, prefer the old standard watermelons, mainly for nostalgic reasons,” Dr. Kirkpatrick said.

Still, some of the personal melons grown in his test fields can develop a texture and balance of flavor that rivals even the best Jubilee.

He’s even going to grow some smaller watermelons next year for the local farmers’ market, which Stephanie Buckley recently started eight miles from Hope in the historic town of Washington, population 148.

Ms. Buckley, who is not afraid to pair a sleeveless dress with cowboy boots, moved to Washington five years ago with her husband, Joe, the superintendent of the state park that envelops Washington. She is a transplanted Mississippi debutante turned farmer, an admirer of the agriculture guru Joel Salatin, and a woman who says she loves the Lord and hates hypocrites. She blogs about all of it as The Park Wife (theparkwife.blogspot.com/).

“I don’t do giant watermelons,” she said.

In her view, Mr. Bright and the civic boosters who ceaselessly promote the giant watermelons are not very concerned with quality and taste. The whole idea of growing for nothing but size, a chemical-heavy practice that involves culling plenty of healthy, unripe fruit to let the vine turn its attention to the most promising watermelon, is not what the growers at her market are about, she said.

“It’s two different worlds,” she said.

The market, which runs twice a week, features only Arkansas-grown produce sold by the farmers. The three sellers of watermelon offer the real Jubilees along with a limited collection that includes icebox-size Desert Kings with their yellow flesh and even the Carolina Cross, albeit small ones.

Dr. Kirkpatrick, who sells his own blackberries and vegetables at Ms. Buckley’s market, is always on the lookout for a Jubilee. They taste good, and they have lots of seeds.

“I grew up in the country, and the ability to spit seeds is something that is an art,” he said. “You just have to spit seeds once in a while.”

(Source: NYT)