Melon Grown Mellow

You’re dining outdoors, shaded from the summer sun. Strains of Piaf or Aznavour float in the air. You’re nibbling on sweet, silky apricot-colored melon slices stippled with lavender blossoms. Their mingled perfumes and flavors are so sensuous, you reach for your glass of Kir to stay you.

Are you in Aix-en-Provence? Avignon? Agen? Perhaps. But you may also be in Pomona, Arcadia or Ojai. The melon is a Charentais, harvested moments before from your garden. A 16th-Century Spanish epicure wrote, “If a melon is good, it’s the best fruit that exists, and none other is preferable to it.” Most who cherish melons agree that a perfectly grown Charentais is the best that exists.

Botanically, Charentais are true cantaloupes. These are not what Americans call cantaloupes. Botanically, our cantaloupes are muskmelons: Their beige skin is pliant and embossed with netting, the fruit is sometimes lightly ribbed and the melons can grow as large as volleyballs. True cantaloupes have a hard, netless, pistachio-to-gray shell with distinct ribbing, and they’re usually small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.

Although they’re coming into season now, don’t rush to the market for a Charentais. Though they’re the most commercially grown melon in France, Charentaises are as rare as hen’s teeth in this country.

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Why? Charentaises are as ephemeral as a smile. The melons don’t ripen off the vine. Once they’ve ripened, their come-hither perfume, mouth-filling flavor and silky-smooth flesh dulls in a day or two. And though their shells are hard, they can bruise in travel. When I think of the transportation system in this country--boxcars, cargo planes and trucks laden with produce from all over the world--I pine because none of them are bringing us Charentaises.

If you’re not growing Charentais this year, ask gardening friends and melon people at the farmers’ market if you can cadge one. Then next year, grow some yourself. In the low desert, you can start seeds now. Elsewhere, mark your new calender so that you start seeds when the soil is warm and there are at least three sunny months ahead. If you’ll have less than three months of warm weather, start the seeds indoors a month before all danger of frost has past. Be careful not to disturb the roots in transplanting.

And, don’t sow Charentais if you aren’t sure you’ll be home to harvest the melons.

Heritage Charentaises like heat, but not too much. In fact, they’ll ripen even where summers are cooler than what’s considered ideal melon weather. In southern Vermont, Ellen and Shepherd Ogden, of the Cook’s Garden seed company, grow only heritage Charentais for their market garden customers. In cool climates, a couple of weeks before sowing or planting, warm the soil with black paper mulch. Then make a big X in the paper, fold the corners back and sow the seeds or set the seedlings in the holes. Leave the paper in place all summer. (I punch drainage holes in the paper to let water through.) In addition, if you can let the vines ramble over stones--brick or cement--there’s more heat.

Hybrid melons, called Charentais-types, have old-fashioned Charentais parentage, but seedsmen have fiddled with their genes to accentuate now this characteristic, now that. If your summers are suffocatingly hot, Alienor is heat-tolerant and also one of the quickest Charentais-types to ripen. Savor is possibly the sweetest hybrid and Charmel is extremely vigorous and productive. If you’ve had powdery mildew problems with melons, cucumbers or squashes, best grow Savor or Charmel. If you’ve had fusarium wilt, grow Savor or Alienor. All have gloriously rich flavor.

Melon vines grow exuberantly. The leaves on a plant are solar collectors. Sunshine absorbed by the plant marvelously becomes flavor in the fruit. The more leaves there are, the finer the flavor. At the same time, if you let a plant pour all its energy into making leaves, there will be fewer fruits.

So here’s the plan for the tastiest possible melons. In the beginning, when healthy shoots are about one foot long, restrict each plant to four evenly spaced vines--snip the extras off at their base. As blossoms are pollinated, restrict each vine to one fruit. Choose the most robust melon around the size of a small walnut, count two leaves toward the vine’s tip, then snip off the rest of the vine at that point. Snip off the tips of any non-fruiting vines at three to four feet. To keep the plant’s bottom dry, set a thick flat stone (excellent heat-gathering device) or plank or bundle of straw (watch for slugs and snails) beneath each fruit.

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If you’re pressed for space or sunshine, you can grow melons vertically, either from the ground or grow a single plant in a 7 1/2- to eight-gallon container. Train the vines up a sunny wall, fence or trellis, and prune the vines as you would if they were lying on the ground. Small Charentaises never weigh more than 2 1/2 pounds, so support the fruit with slings of soft cotton--netting is ideal. Be sure all leaves and fruits have ample circulation of air.

Melons are first cousins to cucumbers, West Indian cucumbers and jelly melons (also known as African horned cucumbers). It’s an incestuous family, cousins and siblings crossing like crazy. When a bee pollinates a melon blossom with pollen from a cucumber flower, the resulting melon will be bitter. It’s wise to raise a stand of tall corn between these two crops, or something else the bees won’t bother flying through or over.

For companions in the landscape, mingle melons with plants that, once established, don’t need a lot of water. Coreopsis, with its bright gold buttons, for example.

There’s a trick to extracting maximum sweetness from melons. In the beginning, keep the soil around the plants moist but not soggy (always water before noon, and irrigate rather than sprinkle leaves overhead to prevent disease). Gradually water less and less until the plants dry out between waterings.

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About two weeks before the calendar says the melons should be ripe, start withholding water. Use judgment: Don’t let the plants crisp and die, but make them struggle (soothing and apologizing the while). This is called water stress, and the frantic vines will pour sugars into the fruit to sustain them. Even gardeners can be Machiavellian.

A true cantaloupe is ripe when the first leaf on the stem turns pale. To harvest, cut or snip off the melon.

Now it seems some voices have been overheard murmuring that the flavor of Charentaises isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Could hundreds of thousands of French palates be wrong? It’s true that, over time, some aspects of some strains of heritage cultivars can run thin. It can happen with every sort of plant. One seedsman’s Charentais is not another’s.

But if you select seeds that have proven to be delectable quite recently, and if you give the plants their every need, be assured you won’t be disappointed in the melon’s flavor. I have, I did and I wasn’t.

Sources

Fresh: From farmers markets.

Seeds: Heirloom Charentais, hybrids Alienor and Savor and black paper mulch from Cook’s Garden, P.O. Box 535, Londonderry, Vt. 05148.

Charmel hybrid from Shepherd’s Garden Seeds, 6116 Highway 9, Felton, Calif. 95018.

Thompson can be reached via TimesLink e-mail at bubq86e. For information on TimesLink, call (800) 792-LINK, Ext. 274.

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