5 Tips to Pick a Watermelon Perfectly Every Time!

hey everybody welcome back to another episode of Nature's always right today is an awesome episode we're going to be harvesting watermelons and I'll be teaching you my three tips on how to pick a watermelon when it's ripe and I'll even give you two bonus tips for a total of five tips on deciding when is the right time to harvest your watermelons let's go do it let's check out this melon looking at the vine here okay it was attached right here you're going to go up to the first node where it br anches out and look for the tendril and here it is it's completely dried out this is our biggest tip to tell us that this thing is either ripe or going to become ripe very soon typically from my experience once this dries out within about 7 days it should be picked let's look at the other factors it's also going to have that nice yellow bottom white to yellowish bottom that's also a good sign called the field spot and wherever your watermelon is growing you want to make sure that you have some straw or grass or something that's keeping the watermelon up off of the soil and wet ground otherwise it can cause it to rot it's got the dried out tendril it's got a nice field spot and then the third and final way that most of us know how to pick a watermelon is by the sound you know everybody's kind of got their way that they do it and definitely this is a thing that comes from experience and and picking melons is not easy for sure I'll try to describe the sound the best that I can and we'll also hit it here as well I think this one sounds really nice you don't want to hear a thud if you hear a solid thud that would mean that it's overripe that you let it sit here too long so it makes more of a thuy sounding this is having a nice resonance sound though more like a drum and then so it's got that sound so you don't want it to be a thud where it's not resonating that's overripe under rpe would be more of a higher pitched pinging resonance but this has a lower tone to it so I guess if I had to describe it you're listening for like a midtone resonant sound and depending on the size and shape of the watermelon that's also going to change the sound of course even by variety some Farmers you know they grow the same variety every year and it's got that specific sound that they know every time it's going to be perfect so just keep in mind that experience is a huge thing with this and I am definitely not an expert at it you know I've gotten pretty good where I get it right most of the time so now I'm just going to take this thing to the fridge and get it super cool and next weekend we're going to do a gigantic barbecue with a bunch of friends and have a bunch of these watermelons it's going to be a really fun time all right just waited and let's see here it's at about 9 almost 9 92 lb okay let's go check out another watermelon the big boy okay here's the big watermelon of the Season actually grown in my neighbor's yard and it's kind of interesting the growing right down there in that little trough and then it stretched out to here and so okay guys let's check out our three factors that are most important to figuring out if this thing's ripe so number one that tendril it's the first thing it it should not ever be ripe before this tendril dries out so we got a dried out tendril number one I spin this a little bit there's the field spot okay and then the third is the sound now this has much longer shape and it's bigger so it'll be slightly different than the other watermelon we're listening for the resonant almost drum like sound and this one almost has a little more thud in it it doesn't like vibrate as much throughout which is a little concerning but we'll find out once we cut into it there's a really happy medium you know it gets a little bit sweeter the closer it goes to overripe right so so it sounds pretty good I definitely want to get it out of here today so I'm going to give you two more tips in addition to the three determining factors to help you figure out if it's ready to pick or not another big thing to remember is when you planted these I planted these I planted these in I can't remember right now I planted them so that they'd be ready about in August and they'll basically grow until it gets so hot that they just Peter out and die and until they've produced one or two fruits depending on the variety um they produce different amounts and these jubilees I've grown this is the second year I've grown them and I grew these these jubilees from seeds that I saved last year for my Jubilee watermelon um this is the only variety that I grew on the property so I wasn't worried about cross pollination on the seed I'm excited to try out the ones that I Grew From the seed that I saved from my original heirloom watermelon I planted them I think whatever in May and then you know they grow for the summer season the plant you'll notice that the plant will start to die out that is another kind of factor the leaves will get yellow brown may even die so the time of the year so we're in the second week of August so I know that almost all my watermelons are going to be ready around this time because of the time that I planted them the next thing would be the summer heat and if you're exper expc ing a hotter week or a hot spell that's going to cause your melons to ripen much much faster than if you had a cooler summer or a couple weeks of cool weather say in August right now we've had consistent 90° temperatures today it's going to be 95 that has really sped up the process of the ripening and when you see that really warm temperatures are coming and you know the watermelon is close uh the tendril will actually start to yellow and you'll you can watch it start dying and then at at that time that's when you want to check the watermelon you know every day or every other day to check on its progress listen to the sound of it when the tendril still green and you tap it you're going to hear more of a higher pitched sound when you hit it and as it ripens the the tone of the sound is going to become lower and lower and it goes lower until that thud and the thud is it's too ripe and it's going to be real mushy it'll be sweet but the texture will be very mushy you know you can make a smoothie out of it or something but that's about it so yeah always keep in mind the heat so today's going to be 95 and yesterday I checked this and I thought I felt like it could go another day but now that I know it's going to be 95 today and I'm hearing a very deep resonance close to a thud sound I want to get this out of here and in the fridge to lock in the ripeness all right so that's two tips five tips total on thinking about and looking at the watermelon to try to determine if it's time to harvest it so when you're clipping it just snip it next to the fruit that's it oh my gosh all right let's go get this thing weighed I'm just going to transport it in this all right you guys this thing's zeroed out for this crate super excited how much do you guys think it's going to weigh oh nowhere near as big as last year 18 not bad at all so we'll have a nice 18 lb watermelon I think last year it was like 28 lb almost 10 lb more but you know we didn't have ideal growing space this year for the watermelon and that's going to be fantastic for the party so now it's going to go in the fridge nothing better than ice cold watermelon on a hot day all right so let's check out two more watermelons one of these is ready and one of them is not okay so first thing we're going to check is the tendril it is dried out it's the first time I've noticed that on this one this one has an excellent creamy colored field spot means it's a mature fruit the last thing is the sound yeah it has a nice medium tone resonance I feel pretty confident in pulling this you could if you wanted to try and make it a little sweeter you could let it maybe go another day or two you know the way to get better at picking them is really to to compare them so let's compare this one that I believe is ready to this one so you can see that's a little bit smaller the tendril on this one as you can see is not dried out still some life left in it and the sound it's a little bit higher in frequency and the field spot it's developed could go a little more though and you'll see I need to put some more straw here to help prevent it from rotting because of this it sounds pretty good but still a little too high pitched and the tendle not D out okay so listening to this [Music] one so hopefully you can hear the difference there that this one is higher in tone just more evidence that the lower in tone the more ripe it's going to be there's no thiness in here which is nice so this should be a perfect watermelon watermelon that's almost ready and we go look at the tendril here it is completely dried out and it's been dried out for a few days I've been watching this thing and check on it and listening to the sound starting to get deeper sounds really good really resonant I could Harvest this right now I think but I think I might let it go one more day to see if it'll go a little bit lower so that it'll be a little bit sweeter so we'll check on it again tomorrow and then we'll cut it open together so we can see how it actually tastes how good the prediction was so it's two days later now let's listen to this thing sounds really nice so we're going to go ahead and just clip it off all right looks like this watermelon is at about 12 lb I have to add about 1 and a half because I have it zeroed for a tote cool another really great watermelon okay so let's go ahead and cut the melon know they pop like that it's a good sign oh yeah yeah it looks beautiful yeah let's just go ahead and chop this up kind of like to chop the Ryan just try a couple right now and if you cut it more boxy when you eat it it makes it a little bit easier if I I could have cut it even better I could have cut more of the Rin off I just like to cut it like like that sometimes all right so let's go ahead and try it it looks like it's going to be really firm yeah excellent it's um pretty sweet and the texture is perfect just like I like it not mushy at all super firm kind of that crunchiness that some watermelons have and uh yeah this is an excellent watermelon love growing the Jubilee it's nice and sweet it's probably like a seven or eight out of 10 on the sweetness scale the Jubilee isn't the sweetest of sweet watermelons but it has like that perfect crunchy really nice flavor I really enjoy growing this variety and I'll probably try a new one next year and do the jubilees again as [Music] [Music] [Music] well all right guys thanks again for watching the video please drop a like for me subscribe and hit the notification Bell if you haven't already please share these videos with your friends and I really hope that this video helped you learn how to pick a very nice watermelon and just remember it takes practice and don't be too hard on yourself you're going to get it and just follow my tips and I'm pretty sure that you'll be able to pick a nice watermelon even on your first try so just do your best look for that dried tendril and then over time you'll get really good at picking out the sound that that's correct all right guys have a great day happy gardening and farming and I'll see you guys in the next Nature's always right video

Channel: Nature's Always Right

Views: 52,792

Keywords: organic gardening, urban farmer, nature's always right, market gardening, urban gardening, urban garden, how to pick a ripe watermelon, sweet watermelon, perfect watermelon, how to pick a sweet watermelon, garden, gardening, how to choose a watermelon, ripe watermelon sound, ripe watermelon how to tell, how to pick watermelon, suburban farming, urban agriculture, how to pick ripe watermelon, how to tell ripe watermelon, epic gardening, epic gardening watermelon

Id: jJz7H5WnIVU

Length: 12min 33sec (753 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 30 2018