How to Know When to Pick Your Sugar Baby Watermelons...

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you hey everyone good morning good morning Stephanie and Buddy Denman from the Denman Homestead here and today I think we're ready to harvest our very first sugar baby watermelon watermelon time yeah and I want to show you the telltale signs of what to look for when your watermelons are ready because they're different from cantaloupes cantaloupes they basically you can just tug on them and they'll pop right off the vine and kind of have like they smell sweet but watermelons they don't do that so I'm going to show you what to look for when you're ready to harvest your sugar babies let's do it okay come on [Applause] now I will warn you it has been so hot for so many days the garden is fried we can barely be out here for very long because it's too hot to work so we come out really early in the morning and late in the evenings yeah Prime gardening time in Texas right now or just Prime outside time in general is about 9 00 pm to 9 A.M right all night long yes okay okay I was like wait a minute it took me a second um but yeah if we turn you around everything is kind of like just bad news it's not pretty yeah but guess what things are still growing even though everything's overgrown we will clean this up eventually but uh even our cantaloupes that we had pretty much pulled up there's still cantaloupes growing here and there you want to show them something yeah I came out here the other day to get some onions and I saw I almost tripped on some cantaloupe yeah if you've got some still hanging on uh they're uh they're wanting to grow through all this mess we've got Peppers still okra still tomatoes are toast tomatoes are done for cucumbers are done for um that the Tabasco peppers are doing really well right now but uh we are here and we're focusing on our sugar baby so let's go over here to the Sugar Babies probably should have brought my pruning shears so I can get this one off okay so let's look at the different stages of watermelons because we've got a few of them a few good examples everywhere um so we've got one that's just starting out we've got some teenager ones here um and uh there's Caden down the street going to Papa's hi Kayden hi Kaden bye Luna don't follow Peyton okay so come down here I'm going to show you something foreign babies are kind of known for like being a personal watermelon like a like a smaller watermelon personal size this one's kind of like a volleyball size right now and it's heavy but when you know that these are ready you can kind of count I am from when you planted them or if you have starts it's a little bit more difficult to know exactly when you started them from seed but a good Telltale sign of when one is ready is if you follow this Vine down here you're going to come to your first curly q Vine this right here when this dries up and becomes Brown and brittle and dry you know that this is ready to harvest sometimes these will fall off and if they fall off you're kind of risking it to be a little overdone but when they're dried up and brown that's when you know this is ready to pick so this is your visual sign to go ahead and pick this so this one is not ready because it's green right so let's go back over to the other one that I believe is going to be ready to pick all right so this one's a bit bigger it's got a good yellow under belly here so it's been sitting in one spot for a while so this is a good sign here but here if you follow this Vine the first curly cue you come to it's brown and dried okay the other day it had a little bit of green still up here halfway so I knew we were getting close but it wasn't completely brown but I believe that this one could be picked now and it would be great to eat so you ready to pick it let's do it okay see if I can I might need to get my shears nope okay let's take it inside you know it's not going to be fun okay it won't be much grass to grow or grass to mow after any more of this heat it's all starting to die all righty let's cut her open you could do some more pickled watermelon right okay the real life it's a real knife for this oh my goodness and you're playing around with our old kitchen knives oh good grief you're such a man such a manly man oh right open weight you smell it instantly yes I do smells like summertime um all right let's try it okay let me just cut some slices or yeah or I got a melon ball or whatever you want to do the melon ball first okay thank you wow juicy so juicy cheers that's pretty good yeah that's pretty good lots of seeds to save I'll be saving these seeds I want to get me a an actual slice thoughts on your on our first sugar baby Harvest I'm pretty happy with it yeah [Music] is it any different than a traditional long watermelon that you you see um I don't know I mean the first thing that I taste the first thing I thought when I tasted it was that I got the watermelon flavor and not a whole lot of sweetness I mean there's there's sweetness to it but not overly sweet right you know the one that the watermelon that we did the pickled watermelon rhymes with that one was like super sweet yeah this one has the watermelon flavor and a like a mild sweetness but you know what I like about this watermelons are super grainy and Sandy oh yeah it's not that it's not Sandy or grainy I think that might have to do with how ripe you let them get or like the picking like process or how long they sit um but this is Super Fresh and firm and not too too sweet um I think it's a perfect I do too because sometimes the the two sweet watermelons I can't do that they're too sweet for me and then these are these are a really good like balance [Music] and there are a lot very seedy but these are these are heirloom heirloom sugar baby watermelons so yeah we've got our first one and we've got lots more coming after very cool each plant will probably give you two to five watermelons that you plant uh depending so we planted I think like 30 so we should have quite a bit of watermelon to start sharing with people here coming up and I think you know that'd be good yeah and we're gonna have to start figuring out some stuff to do with watermelons um one of my favorite drinks is that watermelon agua fresca you made the cantaloupe one this would be a good one to make agua fresca that is true so uh Beth our viewer from Down Under from Australia oh she sent us a video of a lady that was turning her watermelon rinds into almost like it was almost like a gel candy it was very interesting and um I wonder if that's what G was referring to the other day maybe so yeah because she said hers was kind of like that she remembered growing up it was like gelled yeah like in a syrup yeah because so um it was like we have to figure it out and try it because I just saw that she put some like baking soda and water in the in the um pot watermelon rinds and like let them soak and heat up I guess and then shoot through a bunch of like cinnamon and cloves and some lemon peel like into this pot and I cooked it and when she was pulling it out it was like gelatin versions of the watermelon rice interesting yeah we could try that yeah I'd like to try it and if you have any recipes for watermelon please put them in the comments or tag us or email us at thedenmenhomestead gmail.com with your recipes because we're gonna have lots of watermelon we'll share a bunch of it of course but you know us we always like to try cool things and make everyone else try them too so I always get a kick out of it yeah that's it's awesome making the things and trying something new but it's even cooler forcing people to try them yeah all right well um that's going to wrap up this one for today so thanks for hanging out with us today on a gardening episode picking our sugar baby watermelons and if you grow some now you know how to look to when to harvest them so cheers cheers bye everyone [Applause] [Music]

Channel: The Denman Homestead

Views: 7,368

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Id: amiy9cL78S8

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 25 2023