We love seedless watermelon.
Let’s get that out of the way first.
There is something undeniably convenient about cutting into a watermelon and eating slice after slice without having to navigate around a bunch of hard black seeds. There is a reason seedless watermelons have become the standard in American grocery stores. Today, roughly 90% of the watermelon cultivars grown for U.S. consumption are seedless.
And yet, the watermelons we grow at Oak Spring have seeds.
Why?
Partly because we have limited space, and partly because we think a farmers market is a good place to grow something you can’t find everywhere else.
Seedless watermelons are actually pretty weird
A seedless watermelon isn’t simply a watermelon variety that somebody found growing without seeds.
Most seeded watermelons are diploid, meaning their cells have two sets of chromosomes. Seedless watermelons are generally triploid, with three sets. That odd number makes the plants largely sterile, so they can develop fruit but can’t produce normal mature seeds.
Those little soft white things you sometimes see inside a seedless watermelon are actually undeveloped seed coats.
There is another complication: although a seedless watermelon can’t produce mature seeds, its flowers still need to be pollinated to stimulate fruit development.
So farmers growing seedless watermelon also need to grow a seeded “pollinizer” variety nearby to provide viable pollen.
What does that look like in practice?
Well, you plant them in a pattern: Onza, Onza, Onza, Ace. Onza, Onza, Onza, Ace.
Onza is the seedless watermelon we’re trying to harvest, while Ace is there to provide the pollen. The two are intentionally easy to tell apart in the field: Ace has a distinctly different rind, so at harvest you know which melons are the seedless crop and which ones are the pollinizers. That way, nobody accidentally ends up taking home the wrong watermelon.
In other words, growing watermelon without seeds requires…growing watermelon with seeds alongside.
So why don’t we grow seedless?
We certainly have nothing against them. Again: we love seedless watermelon.
And we celebrate farms focusing on heirloom varieties- like Bradford Family Farm in SC.
But every crop on a small farm is competing for a limited amount of space.
A commercial seedless watermelon planting requires space for the seedless crop plus pollinizers. For a farm our size, that really matters.
More importantly, we aren’t especially interested in reproducing the grocery store produce section on a smaller scale. Though when done right with seedless varieties that are really focused on flavor- rather than shelf life- you can get a GOOD seedless melon. In the past we found usccess and satisfaction with varieties Onza and Ocelot.
Seedless watermelon is wonderfully easy to find. Seeded watermelon, increasingly, is not.
So if we’re going to devote precious field space to watermelon, we like the idea of growing something a little different.
This year we grew Natsu Cocoa, a small red-fleshed seeded watermelon. It’s the kind of watermelon you can bring home from the farmers market and finish without needing to invite twelve people over.
It also has real, old-fashioned, spit-them-over-the-porch-rail watermelon seeds.
Some people probably consider that an inconvenience.
Other people come to the farmers market specifically looking for it.
And that’s part of what makes growing for a local market fun. We don’t have to grow exactly the same things that travel well through a national supply chain or fill supermarket produce departments. We can use some of our limited space for varieties that have become unusual precisely because something more convenient replaced them.
Seedless watermelon won that particular popularity contest, and frankly, we understand why.
But we’re happy there is still a little room in the world for the kind with seeds.
