A Seedy Slice of History: Here’s Where Watermelons Actually Came From [Hint: The POC Continent]

https://scitechdaily.com ^ | 28 MAY 2021 | By WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS

[Red Badger]

Up until now, many thought watermelons originated in Brazil.....................

[srmanuel]

I don’t know where watermelons came from but I do know I grew up in a farming town where the biggest crop was watermelons and I pitched , picked and otherwise loaded watermelons for all of my youth, I was told it character building back then all I know it was hot and tiring work

[Red Badger]

I picked cucumbers.

They weigh less.....................

[srmanuel]

After watermelons it was picking tobacco followed by bailing hay to finish out the summer

[Red Badger]

I chopped cotton one spring.....................

[blam]

Many years ago, my dad grew watermellons and he won the Grand Bay Watermellon Festival for the largest watermelon in the region.
Anyway, our senator then, Frank Boykin presented the watermelon to then president, Harry Truman.

I told this story, no-one else had ever heard it, at our family reunion and was amazed when one of the younger people found reference to it in the Dothan Eagle newspaper from the fifties on her phone.

[steve8714]

Carthage...MO.

[blam]

"I chopped cotton one spring....................."

I did too for one day at my granddad's farm.

I quit the next day and went home.

I had a high-tech career in chip-making.

[Red Badger]

My favorite watermelon is the yellow flesh kind, but you never see them any more.

When I was a kid growing up in rural Mississippi, every summer a man would come around in his Ford pick-up selling peaches, one month, then watermelons the next month. I remember a BIG striped long melon was 50 cents!......................................

[Jane Long]

Would he cut out slices and offer it as a sample, to all the neighborhood kids?

Can you imagine moms letting their kids do that, today?

[teeman8r]

i never picked cotton.

but my mother did, and my sister did, and my brother did, and my daddy died young, working in the coal mines.

[blam]

"I remember a BIG striped long melon was 50 cents!......................................"

We used to sell the big Black Diamond watermelon at the farmer's nmarket for ten cents each.

[Red Badger]

No, our nearest neighbor was a mile away, and the nearest kids were two miles...................

[Red Badger]

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=yellow+flesh+watermelon&t=brave&iax=images&ia=images

[DUMBGRUNT]

Fried chicken and watermelon, Gods gift on a summer afternoon.

And TITTSWORTH melons grown near Barry, Il, among the very best to be had.

[Red Badger]

[Red Badger]

.... And Corn on the cob!..................

[Vaduz]

Many women agree

[PROCON]

I picked-up girls, more fun.

[Red Badger]

But they measured our picking by the bushel basket, and they wanted the small pickle sized gherkins.

I’d take my basket up to the truck to be counted and the man would take it and shake it down, and say more.................