Ilene,

I think George is growing Moon and Stars, and someone else may be as well.

When I have grown Moon and Stars, I've gotten large (20-30 lb) melons with a very dark green rind with the bright yellow moons and stars (many more stars than moons). The flesh has been a fairly bright red (not pink) in the case of original M&S or bright yellow that is almost a golden organgey-yellow when growing Yellow-Fleshed M&S. The flavor of the red-fleshed one is very much a true, strong watermelony taste that is sweet but not overly sweet. The flavor of the yellow-fleshed one is a bit more mild. When I grew the yellow-fleshed one, I am almost positive it had white seed.

So, I am not sure if you have a different strain, or crossed seed or what, but your watermelon sounds different from the ones I've grown.

The blue rind question baffles me. Every M&S I've ever seen has the rind that is a dark blackish-green with the gold spots. I have heard some people describe the dark green rind as 'purple' and I don't see that either, but assume the rind is so dark that they are seeing it as a purplish-black.

One problem with knowing what to expect with M&S is that there are many strains of it around. Unless they've changed in recent years, the one offered by Seeds of Change is very small compared to other strains, and is round like a bowling ball. The one from SSE is most like the one my dad grew. Southern Exposure Seed Exchange sells several strains that are different from the original, including Amish Moon & Stars and Long Milky Way Moon and Stars which is very oblong in shape and has tons of stars and no moons, or very few moons. I believe Long Milky Way was bred by Sandhill Preservation Center's Glenn Drowns. There's also a Cherokee Moon and Stars but I don't think it is markely different from the original M&S except its flesh is pink or pinky-red.

In addition to the aforementioned strains, there are some other strains available to members via the SSE yearbook, and that used to include M&S Moons of Jupiter and M&S Early. I didn't take the time to drag out the old yearbooks and look for descriptions of those two.

However, I did pull out Amy Goldman's melon book to check and see what she lists for brix (measure of sweetness) for M&S and she shows a brix of 10. Here's the brix numbers for a few of the other melons she lists for comparison's sake: Carolina Cross 9, Sugar Baby 9, Fairfax 11, Blacktail Mountain 10.5, Chris Cross 8, Tom Watson 12, Orange-fleshed Honeydew (which I find very sweet indeed) 13, Old-Time Tennessee 12.5, and Santa Claus (aka Christmas) 9.

Moon and Stars is a wonderful melon when picked fully ripe and I think you have either an odd strain or crossed seeds or something.

Dawn

Thanks Dawn. I suppose anything is possible as I got the seed on the GW Seed Exchange board by sending a SASBE to a man who said he was cleaning out the previous year's seed. He had the words "Seed to Seed Gardens" printed on each packet, but they weren't professionally printed packets so I assumed he had a small business. He sent me about 8 or 10 different kinds of seed, but since he didn't say what he had and nobody got to choose, most of what I got was not something I wanted to grow, so traded most of it away.

It certainly sounds like the melon should have been nice and sweet, and much bigger. Maybe it just wasn't ripe enough yet. The vine rotted off because of the wound on the melon, I'm sure, rather than because the melon was ripe. There are four more out there. They are all small and they don't look any bigger today than they looked several days ago. Some of the leaves look OK and the vines don't look dried up so maybe there's hope. They're growing in good composted, improved soil. If not I'll just try again next year with our Yellow-Belly Black Diamonds!

I've grown white seeded Moon & Stars, off and on since aboui 1985. Dawn's description of flavor fits mine. It's not the absolute sweetest I've tried. But it has GOOD flavor. I harvested a 26 lb Moon & Stars this summer.

It certainly sounds like you have sow bugs... or rodents of some kind. That's a problem alright.

The strain I'm growing has green rind. I got it from an Indiana member of the Seed Savers Exchange. Back then, I think they only had a couple strains.

George
Tahlequah, OK

I wouldn't be too quick to make assumptions about the melon based on a damaged one. With a damaged melon, the plant rushes ripening of the seeds out of proportion to the flesh. I've seen this in a few pumpkins I had too. When the vine was killed by SVB, the pumpkin fruit would turn yellow and orange very quickly, even though the fruit was still smaller than the usual mature size. When I cut them open later, the flesh was porous and poor quality, but the seeds were basically mature.

For the melons, I had one the coyotes mauled that stayed on the vine and struggled to mature until it finally started rotting throughout and I removed it. I noticed that it had light pink flesh at that point (it was a Criss Cross that I've been told is supposed to be red), but lots of fully dark, mature-looking seeds. I picked a couple this last week that were small melons on dying vines. The melons felt a bit punky so I got rid of them, but I looked in them before tossing. They had smaller than normal seeds (the melons looked to be Black Diamonds, but they were grapefruit sized), but a few of the seeds were dark. It's way too early for a Black Diamond to have dark seeds at that size.

I think that when the plant senses it's under so much stress it can't ripen the whole fruit that it puts all its effort into ripening just the seeds. So even if the seeds are dark on a stressed melon, don't judge the quality of the flesh.

I'm sorry you're having bad luck with them. I've had a number of melons (like 5 or 6) turn up with what looked like strips taken out of the outer rind. I assumed it was a rat since I first saw it near a known nest of a big rat. I need to try to trap that thing! But I've also seen it out in the middle of the field, so I'm not sure what it is. I haven't lost any melons to it so I haven't been very motivated to deal with it. It's just a cosmetic problem for me.

Maybe you could try putting your melons in a box or crate? I've heard that melons are shaped by putting them in a plastic box while they're still young and malleable, so growing in a plastic box shouldn't cause moisture issues.

In my garden, it is pill bugs and sow bugs that chew on melons. I keep them away by scattering Slug-go Plus, which has two active ingredients (iron phosphate and spinosad), both of which are organic.

In Japan, they grow square watermelons in tempered glass boxes that force the enlarging melon to assume the shape of the box. The advantage is that the square melons fit easily into a refrigerator and don't roll around. I am not sure why the greenhouse effect doesn't scald the melons. Maybe melons are strong enough to take it, or maybe they grow them under some degree of shade cloth.

I'll find and link a photo below.

The average person probably couldn't afford these melons---they run at least $80 each. I have seen the glass boxes for sale on the internet, Ilene.....

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Square Watermelons