Watermelons weigh a ton. If you decide to buy a watermelon, you have to think carefully about how you will transport it back to your home. Another consideration is how to buy a good watermelon. If you don't see it open... you have absolutely no indication that it will be good.
Watermelon is now selling at about 0.65 eurocents a kilo. I bought a watermelon half weighing in at over 8kgs yesterday.
In Greece's relatively recent pre-crisis past, watermelon was rarely sold in halves. It was always sold whole. Since watermelons are sold by the kilo and they are relatively heavy, you were really wasting your money if you bought a whole watermelon that turned out to be not so tasty, which basically means that it was underripe, the flesh is soft rather than firm and it tastes rather like a sweet cucumber than a juicy watermelon.
Nowadays, it is practically unheard of to buy a whole watermelon. Even the supermarket sells halves (but not slices, as I recall seeing abroad). If you don't see it from the inside, you won't believe iwhat any seller tells you. Not everyone can afford to buy a large whole watermelon these days - they can be as heavy as 20kg each.
We buy watermelon from one seller, a husband and wife team who open their little shop as soon as the watermelon season starts in Hania. They originally started up business about three years ago, and have now become a permanent fixture in the same spot every summer. They stock watermelon from only one producer, a relative who grows them in an area of Akrotiri, well known for its watermelon cultivation. This year the watermelon season started very early due to the hot weather: the couple opened their store - a corner yard on a main street, with some storage facilities behind another business - on May 8. They sell watermelons, and very little else. So all summer long, they sit in this shaded yard, slicing open large oval watermelons (that's very important to know - this is the classic shape of the Akrotiri watermelon, which is said to be the best due to the soil in the location where it is grown), which they cover with plastic wrap, then they place them in the fridge or sell them directly to the customer.
The couple have established a name for themselves in Kissamou St because they were one of the first watermelon sellers to sell icy-cold refrigerated watermelon halves. It may sound boring to do just this job for five consecutive months of the year ('we never stay open in October', the woman told me, 'because watermelons start to lose their flavour after that'), but they told me that they were happy because they weren't unemployed, and business is brisk at this time, because everyone needs to buy some watermelon on a regular basis during the summer.
Watermelon is now selling at about 0.65 eurocents a kilo. I bought a watermelon half weighing in at over 8kgs yesterday.
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I love watermelon! There is a disturbing trend here in the US. They are now selling seedless watermelons and have been for about 5 years? I don't know exactly how many years. Anyway, they are not as delicious as watermelons with seeds. Every summer I search for a good old fashioned one with seeds but so far this year I have not found even one! I wonder how they propagate a seedless watermelon, with magic or worse?
ReplyDeleteI agree about seedless watermelon. Very hard to find seeds these days in California. I was at Farmers Market last Sunday and found one vendor selling seeded watermelon and I jumped at buying one. I wanted the seeds to plant myself. So rare to find. Besides seeded watermelon brought back childhood days when we used to spit them out at our friends. But this was expensive. 99 center per pound. I paid $7 for a whole watermelon that wasn't very big. It was pretty good. Not fantastic.
ReplyDeleteevery time we have watermelon, we chuck the seeds into the garden, and they always grow back - we do it for fun, so we dont let all the watermelon plants grow, but they lie dormant over the winter, and we are always fascinated to watch them grow
ReplyDeleteonce, my father managed to grow them in this way on a tiny balcony and we ate two baby watermelons; we also managed to do the same one year in the garden - now we notice that a melon plant is growing and it has tiny melons on it!
altho i have seen seedless watermelon being sold in hania, it isnt as tasty as the classic oval shaped akrotiri watermelon grown and sold in hania - it really doesnt taste the saem
DeleteI prefer πεπόνι any day. No doubt they're more expensive?
ReplyDeletePeponi (green melon) is really popular, and definitely more expensive; they are still sold as wholes, not halves
ReplyDelete