The Melon-Growing King Wei Xiaoming's Melon-Growing Story

    It's once again the peak season for watermelons hitting the market. Today we'll take you to a fruit and melon planting base in Dongxihu, Wuhan. The watermelons there are quite unusual - most people's melon seedlings grow sprawled on the ground, but theirs climb up trees. What's even more special is that the owner of these watermelons is a university graduate.

Wei Xiaoming inspecting the growth of melon seedlings inside a greenhouse. (File photo, source: Changjiang Daily)

    Yesterday, the reporter arrived at Baiquan Farm in Dongxihu, Wuhan, and saw an endless agricultural park with neat greenhouses and a production base of considerable scale. The owner here is Wei Xiaoming, a graduate of Jilin Agricultural University.

  Wei Xiaoming: "(As a child) I watched my parents toil away facing the yellow earth with their backs to the sky, growing a little grain with very low yields. After graduating, I wanted to put what I learned to use in agriculture."

Walking into the greenhouse, the reporter saw that the watermelon vines were not crawling on the ground but "climbing up poles." What looked like grapes were purple tomatoes, and what looked like muskmelons were Hami melons. More than a dozen new varieties were a feast for the eyes.

Reporter Xie Wei: "These dozen or so varieties don't look big, but after one bite you find they're much sweeter than ordinary melons."

A few years ago, freshly graduated Wei Xiaoming worked at a seed company in Jilin and was sent to Wuhan to handle sales. Over several years he traveled all over the suburbs. Last August, Wei Xiaoming took a fancy to Dongxihu in Wuhan, contracted a 300-mu planting base, and became a genuine "farmer."

Wei Xiaoming: "Wuhan is a thoroughfare to nine provinces, with particularly developed transportation. Wuhan's climate conditions are also relatively good, and water sources are convenient. In Wuhan we average two cropping seasons."

Planning to grow melons and fruits in spring and summer and tomatoes in autumn and winter, he wanted to make his "little plot of land" thrive. Having engaged in seed research for many years, Wei Xiaoming knew that the most important thing was to continuously develop new varieties.

Wei Xiaoming: "Whether a melon is good or not mainly depends on the seed. I put a lot of effort into the seeds. (Crossbreeding) is very complex - ultimately combining the flavor, sugar content, melon rind and everything else to create this current 'Golden Jade Full Hall' milk-flavored watermelon."

Being a melon farmer is hard work: land preparation, building greenhouses, fertilizing, raising seedlings, transplanting, management - from start to finished product, not a single step is easy. After finally cultivating new varieties, sales became the next challenge. The clever Wei Xiaoming came up with a new approach.

Wei Xiaoming: "I set up Central China's first field supermarket, letting more consumers come out to the fields and experience the joy of shopping in the field. Gradually, word spread from one to ten and ten to a hundred, and it caught on."

Now, Wei Xiaoming's park has introduced many varieties including premium gift watermelons, sweet melons, purple tomatoes and fruit cucumbers, and has also brought in advanced techniques such as vertical cultivation and soilless culture, achieving results beyond his expectations.

Wei Xiaoming: "An ordinary farmer growing one mu of land normally gets a yield of three thousand to four thousand jin, with an output value of two to three thousand yuan. But my yield can reach seven or eight thousand or even over ten thousand jin, with an output value of about forty to fifty thousand yuan. Ten greenhouses yield seventy or eighty thousand jin, all sold out in less than a month."

However, Wei Xiaoming said his real goal is to use his demonstration to expand Baiquan Farm's premium melon, fruit and vegetable production base to 5,000 mu, leading all local farmers to prosperity together.