I thought I might try to grow some cantaloupes for personal consumption. The problem is that I can’t seem to get the sugar very high in melons.
However, I once tried a local grown cantaloupe the guy simply called Candy melon. I’ve never been able to find the seeds of “Candy melon” so just thought I’d ask the sweetest cantaloupe you’ve grown?
The one I grew last year was excellent. It was not only sweet but also aromatic and productive. The variety is called F1Sivan. It is a charentais melon, a wonderful French cantaloup, IMHO.
I found that heat plays the biggest part of growing sweet melons. My larger, musk melons like ‘Honey Rocks’, never got sweet in the NE, so I started growing Charentais melons that are much smaller but get sweet!
I bought a charentais once at a farm stand while doing a road trip. Talk about fragrant! I put it in the buick i was driving at the time for business and fragrance from this melon permeated the entire vehicle. Ate it that night at the motel I stayed at. Best melon I ever ate for flavor. Never saw Charentais for sale again however. That memory is burned into my brain.
Savor charentais is a really good variety. I need to figure out how to make them earlier and more productive. I saved a bunch of seeds last year, but then I discovered it was a hybrid…so those will be going in the trash. I have more seeds on the way though!
I put charentais back on my to-grow list.
I did the same, but I’m going to grow the seeds out just as a trial and see what happens.
Tuscan canraloupes seem to be the sweetest and most flavorful.
The best Cantaloupes I’ve grown are Sugar Cube and Sugar Rush, both are basically the same melon but Sugar Rush is a bigger size and was released a few years ago. If you want a non cantaloupe type, meaning no netting look for a Canary melon called Tweety or Brilliant, they have bright yellow skin and very sweet white flesh, the down side for them is telling when they are ripe, another melon I’ve grown is called Sensation and its in a class all by itself, it has netting like a cantaloupe but the sweet flavor is sort of similar to a cantaloupe. These are all hybrids and most have good disease resistance and always produce sweet melons. I will not plant any non hybrid melon because most will not be nearly as sweet and disease usually kills them .
Sweetness in cantaloupes is genetic and environmental. As others mentioned, they need some hot dry weather to really sweeten up. Of the cantaloupes I’ve grown over the years, all have flaws in one way or another. Some have outstanding flavor but are not sweet enough. Others are super sweet but relatively flavorless. Here are a few that would be good possibilities with decent flavor and sweetness.
Greely Wonder
Hollybrook Luscious
Honey Rock
Sugar Salmon
Susan Healy
Wapsi Wonder
I had some seeds from a seed company. I am not sure I still have any seeds left. I have an odd place I am trying to grow them. I have never had any success growing them. I need an actual garden area not some raised bed type troughs that i am using now. That may make a huge difference.
Savor is delightful but it tends to crack. I grew Escorial from Johnny’s, a hybrid with more crack resistance.
I read that was common with some of the charentais cantaloupes.
I’ve grown a few different varieties, and Savor is worst for cracking, best for flavor.
I grew them last year and they didn’t crack they split wide open. The flavor was really good but unless you are out west with low humidity and rainfall forget about growing them.
My raised bed was perfect. charentais only grow to be about five inched wide!
Yeah, not only do they split wide open, they do it in about 3 seconds flat.
Remind me sometime to tell you about the explosive gene in watermelons…
This is as good a time as any. We don’t hear about it much these days, but 100 years ago, it was very common for watermelons to carry a gene that caused turgor pressure (water hydraulic pressure) to build up so high that they would crack at the least jostle or pin-prick. Under some conditions, they could explode so violently that pieces of watermelon would be blasted 20 to 30 feet away. These watermelons do NOT ship well! Watermelon land mines anyone?
I was given seed by a guy I worked with back about 1995 and grew them at my dad’s place. You have to set the stage by understanding that my dad thought the only good watermelon was a red watermelon and by that standard, a yellow flesh watermelon was never going to measure up. I grew these Whitley’s Yellow watermelons and picked the first ripe melon sometime in late July. When I cut the melon, it popped pretty loudly but not really that much of a deal. The guy who gave me the seed cautioned about this so I expected to see them do a bit of jinking when I poked a knife in the end. I gave my dad a piece of this yellowish/orange interior watermelon. The surprise on his face was priceless as it was one of the best flavored watermelons either of us had ever eaten. A day or two later, he found another ripe melon and brought it out of the patch and proceeded to cut it. There was a loud boom and pieces of watermelon blew at least 20 feet from the (fortunately outdoor) picnic table. I stood there laughing at my dad with watermelon juice dripping off his eyebrows. That watermelon was also superb, but we only had about half of it to eat.
I have some Edisto 47 (older variety with supposedly high disease resistance) and Orange Sherbert (a hi brix hybrid) seeds for lopes this year. Past years growing other varieties the vines have died before the melons ripened, so I’m hoping to get these started earlier. Anyone tried either of these before?
