Watermelons

Cornell's webpage on crop varieties has about 450 varieties of melon. Since there are at least 2000 of them I have been helping them track down more, particularly watermelons. It really is a neat page, but it rather lacks in pictures of varieties it lists. This makes it difficult to figure out what is interesting, and what is like everything else.

While chasing down rare seeds I found this page on watermelon varieties. They actually grew over 100 watermelon varieties side by side! They then posted the yield for the variety in Washington State. That makes for a much more impressive way to see just how many types of watermelon there are. It also allows me to know that it would be really interesting to grow:

Desert King:



Petite Perfection:


Golden Midget


Yellow Bird:





Orange Sweet:



Japanese Cream Fleshed Suika:

Unfortunately no one on the internet sells seeds for this last variety!

And the two that are the size of gumballs in my garden.

Blacktail Mountain:

Which is among the best cold weather melons

And Cream of Saskatchewan

A variety that originally was from Russia before it was grown in Canada.


They also did similar for some other crops such as beans. I found these pages less impressive however.