- Watermelon is Oklahoma’s official state vegetable (yep, vegetable).
Is watermelon a fruit or a vegetable?
Watermelon has seeds (the usual signifier of a fruit) and is juicy, so it’s the fruit of the watermelon vine says one faction. No, no, it’s related to squash and pumpkin, so it’s a vegetable, says another. (Technically, this group might be right.) Oh, just call it a “fregetable” and enjoy it says a third contingent. Let’s hereby declare watermelon a fregetable, folks!
- The world record for watermelon-seed spitting is 75 feet and 2 inches—about four times as far as a giraffe’s height. Jason Schayot set the record in De Leon, Texas, back in 1995.
- True to its name, watermelon is about 90% water.
- Four states—Georgia, Florida, Texas and California—are the largest producers of watermelon in the United States.
- Some cities call them ring roads. Others call them beltways. But Atlanta calls the I-285 bypass that encircles it “The Watermelon 500.” (Given that Atlanta sometimes calls itself “The Big Peach,” a traffic crash might well be the beginnings of a fruit salad.)
Is there a way to tell if a watermelon is ripe?
Conventional advice says the way to tell if a watermelon is ripe is to thump it, using the thumb and forefinger. In general, an unripe melon makes a ringing sound when thumped; a ripe melon makes a dull, somewhat muffled sound. It helps to have three or four watermelons to thump for comparison. The problem, of course, is that it takes a good many years of watermelon thumping to learn the necessary subtle distinctions between a “not-quite, but-almost” sound and a “ripe-and-ready” sound. A blind piano tuner’s advice: A watermelon’s at its peak when it thumps B-flat.
A more consistently reliable and ascertainable sign of ripeness is to check a watermelon’s underside where it sat while growing. As a watermelon ripens, this white, smooth “ground spot” begins turning yellow and gets a rougher texture. So, to pick a good melon, roll several over and pick the ripest by its slightly yellowish underbelly.
- Every New Year’s Eve at midnight, Vincennes, Indiana, celebrates the new year with a Watermelon Drop. Numerous watermelons are dropped from a height onto a “splatform” far below; fireworks follow.
- A street named Via del Cocomero (Watermelon Street) in Florence is mentioned in Giovanni Boccaccio’s, Decameron, which he started writing in 1348. According to translator Wayne A. Rebhorn, the street still exists as the present via Ricasoli. Additionally, a doctor in one of the Decameron stories is said to have set up his practice “at the sign of the Melon,” meaning he identified his location by a sign that had a melon painted on it. Would-be patients who couldn’t read easily could find him just by looking for the melon.
- Watermelon originated in Africa. (See the “History” page for the circuitous, juicy details.)
- August 3 is National Watermelon Day in the United States; July is National Watermelon Month.
- Square watermelons are grown in Japan by placing a tempered-glass cube over a melon as it grows.
- Sandia (SAN-dee-uh) means watermelon in Spanish. So how did New Mexico’s Sandia Mountains – meaning “Watermelon Mountains” — get their name? Legend has it that as the sun sets the glow created paints the granite peaks a pinkish red; meanwhile, the crest of treetops below resembles watermelon rind.
- In 1722, Russian Czar Peter the Great came ashore from the Volga at Kamyshin (then called Dmitrievsk). Served a tasty local watermelon, he was said to exclaim enthusiastically, “Great fruit!” Indeed, Peter the Great was so pleased with the melon and its sweetness that he had a copper copy of a watermelon created and placed atop the spire of the townhall. As it oxidized over time, the copper would turn an appropriate watermelon green. These days, the copper watermelon has disappeared (a melon mystery to be solved!), but Kamyshin has dubbed itself the country’s watermelon capital, and the city’s watermelon festival draws thousands each year. The festival is always officially opened by “Peter the Great.”
- Watermelon is high in fiber and vitamins A and C, and a source of potassium.
Why is watermelon healthier than a tomato?
It’s thanks to lycopene, which occurs naturally in red-fleshed fruits and vegetables—including watermelon—and gives them their red color. Lycopene has well-known health benefits, as it’s an antioxidant (which counter the overactive byproducts of digestion), and antioxidants are associated with a decreased risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease. The good-health news: Watermelon is especially high in lycopene. “[By weight], on average, watermelon has about 40% more lycopene than raw tomatoes,” according to reporting by the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture).
- The insides of watermelon come in a range of colors: red, yellow, pink, orange, even white. The variety called Golden Midget is red on the inside; its green rind (the outside) turns yellow when it’s ripe.
- There are more than 1,200 varieties of watermelon in the world.
Is it possible to eat too much watermelon?
- In 1471, Pope Paul II “gorged on melons one sultry night . . . and promptly died of apoplexy,” according to Sylvia Lovegren in Melon: A Global History.
- A tombstone in the U. K.’s Chigwell Cemetery is said to read:
This disease you ne’er heard tell on
I died from eating too much mellon,
Be careful then all you that feed, I
Suffered because I was too greedy.
(But maybe not. When the Chigwell Parish Council was queried recently about the inscription, a representative responded, “I would like to be able to confirm what you have heard, but unfortunately as far as I am aware, there is no gravestone with such an inscription….) - Meanwhile, in the U.S., somewhere in New Jersey, there’s said to be a tombstone that reads:
She was not smart, she was not fair,
But hearts with grief for her are swellin’,
All empty stands her little chair,
She died of eatin’ water melon. - While we’re on gravestones, someone who didn’t die from eating too much watermelon was the Virginia folk artist Miles Carpenter. Instead, he was known for his watermelon-slice wood carvings. He was so identified with them—they usually featured a bite already eaten—that when he died in 1985 his family had a watermelon slice with a bite taken out carved on his gravestone in Waverly, Virginia.
- And then there’s the kids’ camp song about a gravestone planting, complete with slurpy sound effects:
You can plant a watermelon up above my grave,
And let the juice (slurrrrrp!) through;
You can plant a watermelon up above my grave,
That’s all I ask of you;
Now chocolate-chip cookies, they taste might fine,
But nothing’s quite as good as a watermelon vine;
You can plant a watermelon up above my grave,
And let the juice (slurrrrrp!) through.
- Watermelon seeds were found in King Tut’s tomb.
- China is the world’s largest producer of watermelon.
- Suikawari or suika-wari (literally “watermelon-splitting”) is a Japanese game that has similarities to breaking open a piñata. In Japan, it’s a game traditionally played at the beach or summer events. One by one, people are blindfolded, spun around, handed a stick, and then try to break open a watermelon sitting on the ground. Technically, the winner is the person who breaks it open, but as everyone shares the melon pieces, really everybody wins.
- The heaviest watermelon ever recorded—weighing in at 350.5 pounds—was grown in 2013 by Chris Kent of Sevierville, Tennessee, according to Guinness World Records.
- Watermelon is grown in 96 countries.
- Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Greece, Korea, Russia, Senegal, Tanzania, the United States, and Vietnam have issued postage stamps featuring watermelon.
