Description

Large Orange Watermelon
Citrullus lanatus

Watermelon with pale orange flesh. It is not the sweetest of watermelons, but it is very tasty and addictive. Once you start eating them you don’t want to stop. Can become very large. 10 to 26 pounds. Well suited for zone 4b. Harvest when the first tendril and the small leaf are dry.

Full sun, rich and well drained soil. For best results, grow on black plastic mulch and protect from cold nights at the beginning and end of the season. Sow indoors mid-April and transplant after any risk of frost. 1 cm deep. 40 cm between plants.

Germination: 96% in November 2023
Ecological seeds produced at Catherine’s Ornamental Garden.

Note
In 2019, the first time we tried to grow Petite Yellow watermelon, we harvested this one. Just looking at it, it’s clear that it’s not Petite Yellow: it’s not Petite, and it’s not Yellow! We informed the supplier so that he could tell us which variety it might be, but he wasn’t very cooperative. Normally, we wouldn’t have tried so hard to identify it. But damn, without being very sweet, all the melons we had, we couldn’t stop eating them.

Looking through the catalogs of several seed companies, we found a melon that closely resembles it: Clay County, a variety dating back to the early 1900s. The pattern of the rind, the color of the flesh, the size of the melon – everything matches, even the number of days to maturity (80 days).

We decided first to see if the seeds we had harvested were conforming and uniform. We grew our seeds in 2020 and concluded that the variety is fixed. So we added it to our catalog in January 2021 with this awful name, until we find out which variety it really is. Since then, we have brought in Clay County seeds from 2 different sources and received 2 different varieties. So the mystery remains.