How to Pick a Watermelon? Learn the Methods to Test if a Watermelon Is Ripe
Watermelon is the most common and popular fruit in summer, but some people do not know how to pick a watermelon, which leads to buying watermelons that are not sweet. In fact, there are tricks to picking a watermelon. Today, the editor will introduce to you how to pick a watermelon.
Pictured: watermelon
How to pick a watermelon
Look at the navel ring. Recently, reports on the internet and even on television have said that the smaller the navel ring, the better, but this is actually wrong. This is because watermelon is a crop of the Cucurbitaceae family, and the fruit it produces is a pepo, a fleshy fruit unique to Cucurbitaceae gourds, a false fruit developed from an inferior ovary with 3 carpels and parietal placentation. Pepos all grow from the fruit stalk toward the navel ring. A small navel ring indicates that the watermelon has not grown long enough and is not yet full, and the navel ring has not been pushed round. A watermelon with a large, round, and slightly sunken navel ring generally has grown for a sufficient time, and the fruit will be sweeter.
Listen to the sound. Hold the watermelon in your hand and tap it gently with your fingers. If it makes a crisp "dong, dong" sound and the hand holding the melon feels a vibration, it is a fully ripe melon, and generally the melon will also taste relatively sweet. If the sound seems relatively dull and there is no vibration, then generally this kind of watermelon is not yet ripe and is not suitable for purchase.
Look at the melon stem. From the degree of curvature at the stem end, you can generally judge whether it is a first-crop melon or a second-crop melon. The stem of a first-crop melon is curved, its nutrient absorption is relatively sufficient, its photosynthesis is stronger, its sugar content is high, and its taste is good. The stem of a second-crop melon is relatively straighter, its taste is not as good as that of a first-crop melon, and its size is not as large as that of a first-crop melon. However, watermelons grown on trellises in protected cultivation are the exception.
Compare the weight. Judging by eye, for two watermelons of the same variety and the same size, the one that feels lighter when lifted is the one with a higher degree of ripeness; conversely, the heavier the melon, the lower the degree of ripeness. This is because as the watermelon grows, in the later stage a fairly large portion of water is consumed through transpiration, thereby accumulating more sugar (mealy flesh), so a ripe watermelon weighs slightly less than a watermelon of the same variety and the same size.
Observe the fruit shape. When buying a melon, if you come across a deformed melon, with an appearance like a "gourd", flat melons, flat-headed melons, pointed-mouth melons, big-bellied melons, and so on all belong to deformed fruits. The narrow part of the watermelon does not taste good. Deformed fruits are mostly caused by abortion or poor pollination or other reasons, so when you come across a deformed melon, you definitely must not buy it.
⟦NL> The size of a watermelon and its degree of ripeness are related to a certain extent. A huge watermelon is not the earliest to ripen, but it is definitely not the latest to ripen; it is usually in the middle period of watermelon ripening. Therefore, before most watermelons are on the market, if you want to buy a small-to-medium-sized melon, the probability of it being ripe is a bit greater, while the probability of a large watermelon being ripe is a bit lower. By the same reasoning, when watermelons are on the market on a large scale, it is not suitable to buy small melons; you should buy large melons. Small watermelons may be poorly developing vines among early-maturing varieties (early-planted watermelons).
There are three methods to test whether a watermelon is ripe. The first is the plant observation method. Looking from the vine where the melon stem is located upward and downward, if it has naturally dried up, it indicates that the growth of the watermelon has naturally ended and the watermelon is ripe. The second is the sound method. A ripe watermelon has a certain loss of water, so when tapped with a finger, the sound is chaotic, while a less ripe or raw watermelon has a relatively crisp sound. The third is a clumsy method. Place more than half a basin of water in a bucket. If the watermelon easily floats on the water, then the watermelon is ripe; otherwise, it is raw.