BlankHow do you tell when a watermelon and cantalope are ready to pick? Our sugar babie watermelon are a little bigger than a basketball most of them and the cantalopes are pretty big also. The cantalopes are ivory with some light green showing thru.Any help would be appreciated!
Bonnie
Pick the lopes when they easily slip from the vine.
Sugar Babies are ready when the bottoms are yellow, the curly-q near the stem is brown, and they have a nice thump when tapped. You can anticipate the date to pick by counting forward from the day of planting, the number of days to maturity.
Thanks! I think the babies are ready!! The lopes have some time yet!!
Bonnie
How do you tell when a watermelon and cantalope are ready to pick? Our sugar babie watermelon are a little bigger than a basketball most of them and the cantalopes are pretty big also. The cantalopes are ivory with some light green showing thru.Any help would be appreciated!
Bonnie
the one method i have found to be reliable across all varieties i've grown is the "thump test."
Which is why I included the word 'AND' in the three conditions. No one condition indicates ready-to-pickness.
"Sugar Babies are ready when the bottoms are yellow, the curly-q near the stem is brown, and they have a nice thump when tapped."
the thump trumps all though - regardless of the tendril's condition and regardless of the color of the underside of the melon, if it passes the thump test it's almost always ripe.
One more thing, other than the color of the bottom, the tendril, and thumping. The 'feel' of the watermelon changes. If you grasp the top of the watermelon and drag your fingers across it, you get the impression of a subtle 'ropiness' in the rind in ripe melons. (This is one of the things I check if I buy a watermelon at the market -- where it's often hard to listen to a thump.)
I agree with you about not being able to use most of the normal methods with Sugar Babies, but I did find that the melons lost their shine when they became ripe. It does take a bit of practice to see the difference though.
susan, who just had a bra> i've been growing melons for a # of years now and i've found the
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