- Do you know where I am?

No, it's not heaven.

I am in a field of watermelon.

And today we are gonna learn all about picking the perfect melon, which is a reality check for me, or maybe an anxiety check because I never know when to pick that perfect watermelon.

But we have Matt Peterson here with Ogden Bay Produce, and he is the expert of all experts of when to choose that perfect watermelon.

So before we get into it, make sure you hit that subscribe button because we have a lot to learn about when to pick that perfect juicy watermelon.

Thank you so much, Matt, for bringing us out to your beautiful field.

I know that you're amazing at picking the right watermelon, but tell us a little bit about Ogden Bay Produce.

- Yeah, well thank you for coming today.

We've been in business for a long time.

I'm fifth generation.

We grow 170 acres of fruits and vegetables.

We wholesale all over the state of Utah and surrounding area, grow watermelons, cantaloupes, tomatoes, and then in the fall we have pumpkins and squash and all of your fall decoration needs.

- Matt, give me an idea, how many watermelon do you grow in a season?

- We grow a lot of watermelons.

We have four different fields this year.

This is a 10 acre field that we're in, and we grow about a million pounds of watermelons every year.

We're known for our Black Diamond watermelons, which I'm gonna show you here today.

They're the black rind watermelons.

They're super sweet and super good.

- So Matt, I'm gonna take a little moment and brag about myself.

So I grew an award-winning watermelon once.

- [Both] Once.

- And it was more on size.

I struggle, I still struggle with trying to pick the perfect watermelon as far as taste goes.

And I tend to go a little too late.

I've gone a little too early.

Every once in a while, I hit the mark.

So I'm really excited to come with you and talk about this melon and know what I have been doing wrong this whole time.

So Matt, let's first start just talking about seeds.

I mean, obviously we wanna be here for picking, but we gotta start with when we first put that seed in the ground.

So tell me from the beginning how you know and what to do.

- So you can go to your nurseries or wherever you're buying your seeds or your plants and you can either buy a seed or a transplant.

For us on our farm, we do everything as a transplant.

- And a general rule of thumb is gonna be Mother's Day.

Don't get too excited and go out too early because you can always get that frost.

And any type of melon's gonna die with frost.

If you plant from a seed, you can maybe go around the 1st of May, and on that seed packet, it'll tell you how many days from germination until that seed is gonna be ready and ripe for it to eat a melon.

And it's generally gonna be about 80 days, but you need to remember that's from emergence, not from when you plant the seed.

So when the seed comes up and starts growing, that's when you can start counting the days.

- All right, so once we got the melon, once we have that melon growing and it's like on that verge of that date, that magical date that it says on the seed packet, then what are we looking for?

- So some of the indicators that we look for, one of the first things that I'm gonna go off of is just looking for a nice sized melon that's gonna have uniform size.

It's not gonna have ribbing like a pumpkin.

And then I'm gonna gently roll it over.

Now on the melon, you have the stem that comes out of the vine.

The vine comes and goes from the stem into the melon.

You always wanna roll the melon against that.

So roll it up this way.

This is the blossom end.

If you try to roll it the other way, it's gonna pick itself.

So roll it up like this.

Always check for black widows.

If you put your hand underneath, you could get bit.

So that's what I tell my guys that are out here picking, always roll it up, check for black widows.

Give it a little spot like that.

You're looking for this.

This is called the ground spot.

It's where it's in contact with the soil.

That will go from a green to a yellow to what I call a caramel.

So you're getting that deep yellow caramelly color, and that's one of the first indicators we're gonna look for Other than size is gonna be that ground spot.

- So Matt, tell me about like the vine and how you're getting multiple melons and the different stages.

- Yeah, good question.

So this is our third pick through here.

So we've already gone through this field twice and picked.

Typically what a melon will set is what we call a crown set.

This is the crown of the plant, and that's where the plant enters the soil and grows.

Your first usual ripe melons are gonna be near that crown because if you think as the vine grows, the first blossoms are usually close to where the plant comes out of the ground.

And then as it continues to grow and the vines get longer and longer, those blossoms will emerge, get pollinated, and start to become a watermelon.

So you've gotta typically work from the top and then down.

This being the third picking, we're now in this area of the plant.

And also going back to size, your first picking, your first sets are always gonna be your biggest melons.

And they size down every time, just the plant's getting older, it's getting harder.

It's maybe dealing with some stresses with heat, maybe some drought stress, some pest stress.

So you typically will see a decrease in size.

See this melon right here is a little bit smaller.

It was maybe a little later of a set.

- Now what about pruning your vines?

Do you recommend that?

What do you think about that as far as like disease or pests or?

- I don't do any pruning, not to say that it can't be done.

Generally, if you prune, you're gonna be cutting off some vines, which will eliminate some potential melon growth, which then will kind of trigger the plant to maybe make your melons bigger.

So if you're really after, you want some like three or four melons on one plant that are really big, then yeah, go ahead and do some pruning.

If you're okay with five or six more medium sized melons, just leave it as it is.

- When I was growing that giant watermelon, that's what I did.

I pruned it down, I had one melon on that vine.

And gave all the energy to that.

So Matt, I know there's something about a spoon and a tendril.

Tell me what this means.

- That's actually a really important indicator.

I don't know why necessarily a plant does this, but as the melon matures and gets ready and ripe to pick, there's a little tiny, it's just a little tiny spindly, we call it a tendril, just a little tiny vine that will grow right at the intersection of the stem and the vine.

And it'll have like a little like pig's tail looking look to it, little corkscrew.

When that goes from a green to a white to just brown and dead, that's a huge indicator that that melon's ready.

There's also a little tiny leaf.

It looks like just the tiniest little teaspoon right there at the intersection of the vine and the stem that will also start to get brown and just dead looking.

So if you're seeing that on your melon, chances are it's ready to go.

- All right.

Matt, now we always hear the thump test.

Can you give me a little bit of a hint or do you use the thump test?

- We rarely use the thump test out here in the field.

It's more of an indicator if the melon's gone too far and too long and it's over ripe.

And there's a lot of technicalities of what's going on inside of that melon.

And it's really a feel to me, it's not only a sound, but the way the melon feels, and it's actually kind of an art form to learn.

But for out here in the field, yeah, you can thump it.

You want a nice high ping sound.

That's gonna tell you that that melon hasn't gone over ripe yet.

You gotta be careful though because if it's a green melon, we call green melons the ones that aren't ripe yet, they're not gonna have that sugar, it's gonna sound the exact same way.

- Oh, okay.

Now let's just talk really quick about picking it off.

There's a little indicator, even if you think it might be ready that this plant's not gonna give.

So tell me a bit about that.

- So a lot of times in the melon family, that's gonna be your cantaloupes, your honeydews, your Crenshaws, your watermelons.

If you're in a tug of war trying to pick that thing, it's not ready to come off.

Just nature will just, as it develops and ripens, that stem's gonna loosen up a little bit.

And it's gonna be just kind of a gentle pull.

And it's gonna come off for you.

If you're really tugging at it, that's maybe an indicator that maybe it's not quite ready for it yet.

If it's not ready, I think it's a good idea for them to kind of cover it back up.

Because like you can see this one.

- It's got sun scalding.

- It's gonna have a sun scald.

So if you go out here and you're playing with this mill and you're like, eh, it's not ready, I wanna leave it a few more days, you might come out, gonna have a big old sunburn.

So I'm thinking this passed all of our indicator tests.

Let's cut it open.

That's our final test.

So let's get it right here.

- I like our table.

- Yeah.

Nice table.

- Oh, look at that color.

I just wanna go like this.

Should we have a water eating melon contest?

- I eat a lot of watermelon.

That's kind of the final taste test to see if it's developed its sugars and it's ready to go.

- It's gorgeous.

- So we call this the heart of the watermelon.

That's where you're gonna have the most concentration of sugars.

You wanna try it?

- Give the kids that side and always take from the middle.

- This is a seedless variety, but you can still see, you'll get occasional seeds growing there.

That's just part of growing watermelons.

Any type of little bit of stress, maybe there was a hot 100 degree day, it's gonna pop one of those seeds out.

- Oh, okay.

What about like the seed cavity?

Does that have any indicator of sweet?

Is that gonna be a sweeter area beyond the heart or?

- Yeah, it's still gonna taste good and it's still gonna be sweet.

Just your highest concentration of sugars is gonna be in the middle, right in the center.

The seed cavity, as the melon matures, that's where you're gonna start getting some of the mushiness.

So when it gets over ripe, you cut it up there, yeah, you're gonna see that here in the seed cavity area.

So I'd say this melon is just right on, not mushy.

- It's beautiful.

- But it's got good color.

You still got good rind around here, the red will go out.

So, I mean, if you get red clear out to the edge of the melon, it's getting a little too red.

If it's white, you know, an inch in, it's maybe not quite ready.

- Awesome.

- Cynthia, if you want to be a watermelon grower out here in the field-- - I want to, Matt, I want to learn all the ways.

- This is how we eat watermelons out in the field.

We just cut that heart out with our knives.

Okay.

Pop that open.

Take it off.

You take it off the knife.

Give that a try.

- Matt.

- Nothing better than a cool-- - I'm dead, this is it.

Bury me in the watermelon field.

Tell my children I love them and I died a happy person.

If you haven't, make sure that you subscribe because although we've talked about how to harvest a melon, in the spring, we have a whole video coming out about how to grow a melon.

I promise you don't wanna miss it.

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