15 ms·

Watermelons

133 points by eliotpeper 5y ago

Physkal 5y ago
>endured a six-week journey on which watermelons were his sole source of water. The writer, Major Edward Keith-Roach, complained about being unable to shave during that trip but couldn’t praise watermelons enough for saving his life and making the trek possible. Was this ever common to do, using watermelons as a potable water supply?
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  They used to be (and still are for some groups) a primary water source for certain kalahari foragers during the dry season. It's a pretty unusual cultural adaptation to an extreme environment.
ars 5y ago
This article makes me want to try drinking only watermelon for a week.
- andrewflnr 5y ago
  Watermelons definitely make more sense now as a water substitute than as actual fruit. It makes me want to grow watermelons for that purpose and juice them.
  - lupire 5y ago
    why? if you want water, collect the rain directly.
  - eru 5y ago
    You can just make them into a smoothie, no need to juice them. Or just use your teeth? In any case, if you do want to have them juiced, I suggest you add a bit of mint and salt.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
aaron695 5y ago
No, Dry farming needs to be wiped out. It takes more land. If you care about the ecosystem, this is bad. If you care about cost, this is bad. The only mantra Dry farming works for is terraforming the Earth to less/no native environment and more communal farming. That's a legitimate ideal, but most people value the ecosystems.
r0m4n0 5y ago
The article hinted to this toward the end but less water makes for better tasting watermelons. I moved from CA to NY and noticed that the watermelons were sourced from Florida when I moved. Watermelons from Florida taste so much worse than CA. Hit or miss on good ones, I’d literally throw out 90% of them (or blend for juice). Something else I’ve noticed is that you basically can’t find normal seeded watermelons anymore. Do stores and growers not produce them anymore because they don’t sell? I miss how much better those tasted as well, and their shape. It’s interesting how the demand for certain types of produce in areas can make it basically impossible to get a variety. Most grocery stores now carry the same types of produce in the US, it makes for rather boring cooking (ignoring specialty stores and co-ops that are hard to find outside of cities)
- mgerdts 5y ago
  Seeded watermelons have gone extinct in the mass market grocers in my area. They are available (when in season locally) at the co-op I shop at, as well as at farmers markets. I'm not sure if it is the fact that they are seeded or that they may be a variety that doesn't need to travel 1000 miles that makes them taste better.
- snarfy 5y ago
  Oranges are in a similar situation. All I can find are navals, which are gross.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Cara cara oranges in Dec to Feb months are nice.
- da_chicken 5y ago
  That's not the amount of water, or FL vs CA. It's because you now live 1,000 miles away from where they were grown. Fruit that needs to survive that much travel isn't going to taste very good because it needs to be harvested early and it needs to not be bruised when it finally gets to the store. Nearly all your fresh fruit is going to suck compared to what you got in CA. The exceptions are going to be apples and cherries.
ehmish 5y ago
Hmm, I am not a botanist, but since watermelons have seeds, and botanically speaking seeds are in the fruit, aren't watermelon fruit botanically speaking?
- jarenmf 5y ago
  It is the fruit we eat. However, the fruit/vegetable distinction does not make a lot of sense botanically.
  - AlbertCory 5y ago
    I always tease vegetarians by saying "Evolutionarily, fruits want to be eaten and that's why they taste good (so animals will spread their seeds around). Vegetables don't want to be eaten, and that's why they taste bad."
    - lupire 5y ago
      why would that tease a vegetarian? It would tease a healthy food activist. anyway, modern popular fruits are genetically engineered to have far more sugar than pre-human-cultivated fruit.
    - eru 5y ago
      Well, many wild fruits don't taste that great either. Most of what we are eating today comes after a long line of artificial selection.
      - AlbertCory 5y ago
        True, but maybe the animals are less picky than we are.
        CRConrad 5y ago
        Or just as picky, but simply have different taste. Perhaps that, too, co-evolves with the fruits.
gerdesj 5y ago
I'm convinced. Watermelons have a decently hard outer casing and make a great store for water. Here (South UK) we see quite a lot of rainfall and the climate is fairly gentle. If we could breed these things tolerant of lower temperatures then it could be a goer. That would be something else to see on a farm here: A plot of melons next to your Maris Pipers! The climate is going to be getting wackier and wackier in future. I suspect we'll be seeing some pretty far out ideas becoming fact quite quickly. Large melons grown outdoors in British soil may not be the strangest. If this takes off, then Benny Hill's (RIP) spiritual successor will have material for years. Back in the mid '80s I remember scrumping a few melons from a nearby plot in Cyprus. We lived in the WESBA (near Paphos). Teenage boys are pretty close to the bottom of the list of pests that afflict watermelons, so I don't feel too guilty. A freshly picked melon is a wonderous thing and there is so much water in them. Now I really come to think about it, the more important melons become. The honey dew version must have quite a lot of sugar in it as well as moisture, again another useful trait. We probably need a lot more melons. Ooo-er missis.
- eru 5y ago
  > Watermelons have a decently hard outer casing and make a great store for water. Each water melon only stores a few litres of water. That's not a lot to make a difference.
mastazi 5y ago
> (note: botanically watermelons are vegetables, but culturally we eat them as fruit) Wait a second, I thought it was the other way around, i.e. I thought that "cousins" of watermelons such as cucumber, squash or zucchini were botanically fruits but we ate them as vegetables. Otherwise, how come that we call them "fruiting vegetables"? Can someone with more knowledge than me, explain this?
- KMnO4 5y ago
  That is correct. Vegetable isn’t really a botanical word since you typically refer to the specific parts of the plant (eg root, bulb, leaves, flower, fruit, etc). Vegetable is just a catch-all to cover “parts of the plant we eat”. Fruits have a specific definition: the seed-bearing body of a plant produced by the ovary after flowering. I.e. if you have a flowering plant, the “fruit” is the part that contains the seeds.
  - gumby 5y ago
    ... And the watermelon, like all gourds, is one of them: a plant cultivated only for its fruit. That appears to be a bug in the blog post. Some plants, are eaten both ways (both the fruiting body and leaves or other body parts are consumed). With fungi we eat only the fruiting body, but nobody calls them “fruit” except in the superclass sense (“fruit of the land”)
    - catlikesshrimp 5y ago
      We don't call them fruit, we call them mushroom. And they can't have fruits, as in pear tress or other angiosperm plants, because mushrooms aren't plants. The fruiting body, which is not fruit, doesn't have seeds. They have spores, I think.
- uulu 5y ago
  What does it mean: "to eat something as vegetable"?
  - 5y ago
DantesKite 5y ago
We could also do what Israel does and improve our water infrastructure in California. I understand climate change is a perpetual issue, but that doesn't mean we can't adjust and even thrive.
- eru 5y ago
  It would help to make water more tradable in California and get proper prices. Right now, a lot of agricultural water is of the use-it-or-lose it variety. I'm not sure about the situation in Israel. I know that Australia had some very good experience with water markets that helped them grow their agricultural productivity despite long droughts.
  - baq 5y ago
    To downvoters of the parent, I’m all for equal access to water for people, but we aren’t talking about people, we’re talking about industrial water use, which is amazingly inefficient and a proper market for water would help here in the long run.
    - eru 5y ago
      Industrial and agricultural. The amounts you need for drinking (or even for flushing your toilet) are relatively small by comparison. And, of course, the way to help poor people is not to forbid markets for everyone, but to just give them money.
rmah 5y ago
Fun fact: something like 2/3 of all watermelons grown in the world are grown in China.
- EastOfTruth 5y ago
  Do they like the seedless more then the traditional ones?
Taniwha 5y ago
While traveling in India with our kids they were missing Halloween .... So, not able to find pumpkins in Kerala, we totally carved watermelons .... They work great, have a redder hue when lit .... but do attract a lot of ants
deepsun 5y ago
I got curious, could we make "underground irrigation" to reduce evaporation of water? I mean, water underground is usually contained on a certain level (or levels), e.g. if there's a clay soil layer, then almost always there's water above it, because clay is hardly permeable by water. We could make an artificial clay layer (or plastic or whatever that's hard for water to get through), at a depth of a few feet or meters. That way, water would evaporate way less than with open surface irrigation/watering.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  Are you describing Drip Irrigation? Because THAT IS awesome, but I don't know enough about it to know if it could solve all of our Watermelon Woes.
  - deepsun 5y ago
    With Drip Irrigation water would be allowed to sip deeper into the ground. What I'm thinking of is more like hydroponics, but with regular soil medium in a typical farm environment.

133 points by eliotpeper 5y ago

>endured a six-week journey on which watermelons were his sole source of water. The writer, Major Edward Keith-Roach, complained about being unable to shave during that trip but couldn’t praise watermelons enough for saving his life and making the trek possible. Was this ever common to do, using watermelons as a potable water supply?

AlotOfReading 5y ago
They used to be (and still are for some groups) a primary water source for certain kalahari foragers during the dry season. It's a pretty unusual cultural adaptation to an extreme environment.

ars 5y ago

This article makes me want to try drinking only watermelon for a week.

andrewflnr 5y ago
Watermelons definitely make more sense now as a water substitute than as actual fruit. It makes me want to grow watermelons for that purpose and juice them.
- lupire 5y ago
  why? if you want water, collect the rain directly.
- eru 5y ago
  You can just make them into a smoothie, no need to juice them. Or just use your teeth? In any case, if you do want to have them juiced, I suggest you add a bit of mint and salt.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

aaron695 5y ago

No, Dry farming needs to be wiped out. It takes more land. If you care about the ecosystem, this is bad. If you care about cost, this is bad. The only mantra Dry farming works for is terraforming the Earth to less/no native environment and more communal farming. That's a legitimate ideal, but most people value the ecosystems.

r0m4n0 5y ago

The article hinted to this toward the end but less water makes for better tasting watermelons. I moved from CA to NY and noticed that the watermelons were sourced from Florida when I moved. Watermelons from Florida taste so much worse than CA. Hit or miss on good ones, I’d literally throw out 90% of them (or blend for juice). Something else I’ve noticed is that you basically can’t find normal seeded watermelons anymore. Do stores and growers not produce them anymore because they don’t sell? I miss how much better those tasted as well, and their shape. It’s interesting how the demand for certain types of produce in areas can make it basically impossible to get a variety. Most grocery stores now carry the same types of produce in the US, it makes for rather boring cooking (ignoring specialty stores and co-ops that are hard to find outside of cities)

mgerdts 5y ago
Seeded watermelons have gone extinct in the mass market grocers in my area. They are available (when in season locally) at the co-op I shop at, as well as at farmers markets. I'm not sure if it is the fact that they are seeded or that they may be a variety that doesn't need to travel 1000 miles that makes them taste better.
snarfy 5y ago
Oranges are in a similar situation. All I can find are navals, which are gross.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Cara cara oranges in Dec to Feb months are nice.
da_chicken 5y ago
That's not the amount of water, or FL vs CA. It's because you now live 1,000 miles away from where they were grown. Fruit that needs to survive that much travel isn't going to taste very good because it needs to be harvested early and it needs to not be bruised when it finally gets to the store. Nearly all your fresh fruit is going to suck compared to what you got in CA. The exceptions are going to be apples and cherries.

ehmish 5y ago

Hmm, I am not a botanist, but since watermelons have seeds, and botanically speaking seeds are in the fruit, aren't watermelon fruit botanically speaking?

jarenmf 5y ago
It is the fruit we eat. However, the fruit/vegetable distinction does not make a lot of sense botanically.
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  I always tease vegetarians by saying "Evolutionarily, fruits want to be eaten and that's why they taste good (so animals will spread their seeds around). Vegetables don't want to be eaten, and that's why they taste bad."
  - lupire 5y ago
    why would that tease a vegetarian? It would tease a healthy food activist. anyway, modern popular fruits are genetically engineered to have far more sugar than pre-human-cultivated fruit.
  - eru 5y ago
    Well, many wild fruits don't taste that great either. Most of what we are eating today comes after a long line of artificial selection.
    - AlbertCory 5y ago
      True, but maybe the animals are less picky than we are.
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        Or just as picky, but simply have different taste. Perhaps that, too, co-evolves with the fruits.

gerdesj 5y ago

I'm convinced. Watermelons have a decently hard outer casing and make a great store for water. Here (South UK) we see quite a lot of rainfall and the climate is fairly gentle. If we could breed these things tolerant of lower temperatures then it could be a goer. That would be something else to see on a farm here: A plot of melons next to your Maris Pipers! The climate is going to be getting wackier and wackier in future. I suspect we'll be seeing some pretty far out ideas becoming fact quite quickly. Large melons grown outdoors in British soil may not be the strangest. If this takes off, then Benny Hill's (RIP) spiritual successor will have material for years. Back in the mid '80s I remember scrumping a few melons from a nearby plot in Cyprus. We lived in the WESBA (near Paphos). Teenage boys are pretty close to the bottom of the list of pests that afflict watermelons, so I don't feel too guilty. A freshly picked melon is a wonderous thing and there is so much water in them. Now I really come to think about it, the more important melons become. The honey dew version must have quite a lot of sugar in it as well as moisture, again another useful trait. We probably need a lot more melons. Ooo-er missis.

eru 5y ago
> Watermelons have a decently hard outer casing and make a great store for water. Each water melon only stores a few litres of water. That's not a lot to make a difference.

mastazi 5y ago

> (note: botanically watermelons are vegetables, but culturally we eat them as fruit) Wait a second, I thought it was the other way around, i.e. I thought that "cousins" of watermelons such as cucumber, squash or zucchini were botanically fruits but we ate them as vegetables. Otherwise, how come that we call them "fruiting vegetables"? Can someone with more knowledge than me, explain this?

KMnO4 5y ago
That is correct. Vegetable isn’t really a botanical word since you typically refer to the specific parts of the plant (eg root, bulb, leaves, flower, fruit, etc). Vegetable is just a catch-all to cover “parts of the plant we eat”. Fruits have a specific definition: the seed-bearing body of a plant produced by the ovary after flowering. I.e. if you have a flowering plant, the “fruit” is the part that contains the seeds.
- gumby 5y ago
  ... And the watermelon, like all gourds, is one of them: a plant cultivated only for its fruit. That appears to be a bug in the blog post. Some plants, are eaten both ways (both the fruiting body and leaves or other body parts are consumed). With fungi we eat only the fruiting body, but nobody calls them “fruit” except in the superclass sense (“fruit of the land”)
  - catlikesshrimp 5y ago
    We don't call them fruit, we call them mushroom. And they can't have fruits, as in pear tress or other angiosperm plants, because mushrooms aren't plants. The fruiting body, which is not fruit, doesn't have seeds. They have spores, I think.
uulu 5y ago
What does it mean: "to eat something as vegetable"?
- 5y ago

DantesKite 5y ago

We could also do what Israel does and improve our water infrastructure in California. I understand climate change is a perpetual issue, but that doesn't mean we can't adjust and even thrive.

eru 5y ago
It would help to make water more tradable in California and get proper prices. Right now, a lot of agricultural water is of the use-it-or-lose it variety. I'm not sure about the situation in Israel. I know that Australia had some very good experience with water markets that helped them grow their agricultural productivity despite long droughts.
- baq 5y ago
  To downvoters of the parent, I’m all for equal access to water for people, but we aren’t talking about people, we’re talking about industrial water use, which is amazingly inefficient and a proper market for water would help here in the long run.
  - eru 5y ago
    Industrial and agricultural. The amounts you need for drinking (or even for flushing your toilet) are relatively small by comparison. And, of course, the way to help poor people is not to forbid markets for everyone, but to just give them money.

rmah 5y ago

Fun fact: something like 2/3 of all watermelons grown in the world are grown in China.

EastOfTruth 5y ago
Do they like the seedless more then the traditional ones?

Taniwha 5y ago

While traveling in India with our kids they were missing Halloween .... So, not able to find pumpkins in Kerala, we totally carved watermelons .... They work great, have a redder hue when lit .... but do attract a lot of ants

deepsun 5y ago

I got curious, could we make "underground irrigation" to reduce evaporation of water? I mean, water underground is usually contained on a certain level (or levels), e.g. if there's a clay soil layer, then almost always there's water above it, because clay is hardly permeable by water. We could make an artificial clay layer (or plastic or whatever that's hard for water to get through), at a depth of a few feet or meters. That way, water would evaporate way less than with open surface irrigation/watering.

geoduck14 5y ago
Are you describing Drip Irrigation? Because THAT IS awesome, but I don't know enough about it to know if it could solve all of our Watermelon Woes.
- deepsun 5y ago
  With Drip Irrigation water would be allowed to sip deeper into the ground. What I'm thinking of is more like hydroponics, but with regular soil medium in a typical farm environment.