Watermelon Wisdom

David Jones and his brother Adam are the latest generation of Joneses to work their family farm and they’re raising their own children right there, too. Happy Jack’s Pumpkin and Produce Farm in Frankfort, Kentucky covers about 200 acres and supplies produce to three different farmers markets weekly, including two in Louisville.

We’ve been buying Happy Jack’s sweet corn, heirloom tomatoes, beans, melons and yes, pumpkins for nearly 20 years to serve in our Holly Hill restaurants. Happy Jack’s was the site of a long-running annual harvest dinner and was featured in an episode of our Up Home video series.

Since we’ve gotten pretty good at navigating its patchwork of fields (once the off-road mode was mastered), we drove out to the melon patch on a recent summer afternoon, for a walking tour with David among the vines.

David told us how they planted their watermelon in four 600’ long rows, each row three feet apart, although by early August it was getting hard to see where one row stopped and the next one started, the vines had sprawled so much. Some had been completely picked over and were now on a second wave of fruit-bearing.

Happy Jack’s grows at least three varieties of watermelon for a season that lasts from early July through mid-September. We saw Jade Star, Sweet Gem and Walker. Jade Star and Sweet Gem are both roundish, with nearly green-black rind, and the Sweet Gem is seedless.

The seedless Sweet Gem is grown alongside the Walker, a classic oblong, deeply striped, and seeded melon. David says, “ A seedless melon won't pollinate itself. It has a third chromosome that tells it not to make seeds. So you have to plant a seeded variety in line with your seedless one so that it will pollinate.”

We asked David the age-old question: how does he know when the melons are ready? “The main thing we look at is where the stem comes out of the melon and connects to the vine at the joint. There's a leaf, and the main thing is this tendril. That tendril will dry back down to the stem and that leaf will dry all the way back. And if you pick one up, it’ll have a yellowish or cream-colored blush on the bottom.”

As a farmer, David appreciates watermelon’s keeping qualities. He said they take up so much space, they might not be feasible for smaller farms but they store well and take no effort to sell.

And according to David, the farm crew enjoys the melon harvest, which is not nearly as tedious, say, as picking beans. “Everybody likes picking watermelon 'cause you can toss 'em in, try to hit somebody, get yelled at if you drop one.” David says they’ve filled 16 bins already this summer. Each one holds 70 or 80 melons and they can easily sell four bins every week.

Apparently everyone enjoys eating them too, even the farm chickens. “They’ll eat the rind, they’ll eat everything but the thinnest layer. It’ll be hollowed out.” David and his two young sons like to eat their watermelon in slices from a bowl, preferably while sitting out on the porch.

We asked David for some parting words of watermelon wisdom. He said with a laugh, “You can't grow too many of 'em; you can't plant 'em fast enough. Everybody loves them in the summertime.”

And David’s advice for choosing a sweet ripe melon? “I’ve seen and heard a lot of customers try to tell a ripe one at the market but the ‘thumping and smelling ‘ doesn’t really mean much. The best they can do is trust their farmer that they brought quality melons to the market.”