How Do You Know When Watermelons Are Ripe

If you've eaten a watermelon lately there's a good chance it came from South Georgia. South Georgia is known as the watermelon capital of the world. We've been growing watermelons all our lives. Now the ones I grow in my garden is a crimson sweet and I'm going to show you today how we know when a watermelon is ripe to pick out of your garden. Over time I've heard a lot of different things about telling how a watermelon is ripe. Talking about the green in here, how green it is or how pale it is, the belly if it's yellow, thumping it, and all kinds of things. There's all kinds of tales out there but we're going to show you the way we know when a watermelon is ripe. It's been in the upper 90s the last few days and this watermelon got a little sun or got a little blister there. This watermelon would be cold in a commercial market situation here, there's nothing wrong with it to eat. When we see a little sun on there that's a good indication that watermelon is ripe but this is the surefire way to find out. There's what we call a curlicue that's attached to where the stem meets the vine right there and you can see that curlicue right there has to be dried up all the way back to the main stem there. If it's dried up all the way back to the main stem, we clip it and we know we've got a good ripe watermelon. Alright, here's an example of one that's getting there but it's not quite ripe. We follow back the stem, we find that curlicue and we look at it and it's dried up about halfway and you can see it's got some green in it from halfway back. So this particular one is a few days off. This one here is probably a couple weeks off, it's a little bit on the small side and you can see there where the stem connects to the vine there, that curlicue is green all the way out. And it will start drying from this end and work its way in. This particular one is probably a couple of weeks out. These are the two that the curlicue was dried all the way back up so we're pretty sure they're ripe. Now this is a crimson sweet. It's a little larger than some of the varieties that grow nowadays. Some of the varieties that grow now are smaller so you can get them in the refrigerator. These older varieties tend to be about 20-25 pounds. They do have, it's a seeded variety. The flesh in it is a little bit sweeter to me and a little bit firmer than the newer varieties but there again you've got the seeds to deal with. So we're going to cut this one right here and show you what it looks like. It probably stood to wait a couple more days but let's look at it, it's pretty ripe in there. Look at that heart right there. A lot of good watermelon right there. When they start getting ready, we'll pick them, put them underneath the big shade tree where they'll stay cool, the sun stays off from them, go out there and I'll eat one or two a day. I love watermelons and a watermelon a day will keep the kidney stones away.