how to pick watermelon, a guide from reddit

"Some watermelon brands aren't as sweet as others. Crimsons do not last as long, but are sweeter. Starbrights are better quality with a stronger outer shell, but do not taste as good. On the watermelon plant, there is a really small vine that turns brown when a watermelon is near ripe or ripe. However, I have picked enough watermelons to the point where I can tap on it and listen to see if it is ripe or not. If it reverberates a lot, it isn't ripe. However, if it sounds more "dead" it is usually ripe. It's really hard to explain through type. I also think when you refrigerate a watermelon it changes the sound so it is even harder to tell.


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I have my own way of picking watermelon, and I've never gotten a bad watermelon with it. I usually (70% of the time ish) get good ones, and the rest of the time, I get fine ones. Watermelon is my favorite food, and I usually go through one big one every day or two in the summer, and I've picked watermelons this way in both China and the US, so my method has been seriously tested.

...The method is:

1) Only buy watermelon in season (which is summer, basically -- google it). There are no good watermelons out of season. This is the great tragedy of life that we all must learn to bear.

2) As most people will recommend, knock/pat on the watermelons until you find one that sounds distinctly hollow. This will weed out all the underripe watermelons. However, what most people don't seem to know is that, while ripe watermelons do sound hollow, so do overripe watermelons. And overripe watermelons don't taste good; you want perfectly ripe.

3) To determine whether your hollow-sounding watermelon is ripe or overripe, press as hard as you can on BOTH ends (where the stripes meet) of the watermelon. If BOTH ends have no give whatsoever, then you have yourself a perfectly ripe watermelon. Watermelons with give are over the hill (overripe).

That's it. Oh, and, if the watermelon are on sale, they're probably all overripe. If you feel like picking through the whole batch, you might find one decent one, but if you aren't patient/flush with time, just skip sale watermelons altogether."


another one:


"Qn: Why do watermelons have stripes? Is this camouflage? Who are they hiding from??


Ans: It is so they can hide from the people who come in and steal the watermelons without paying for them.

Funny story actually. before I started working my boss told me there was a group of kids who would come every night and steal a lot of melons. Our boss figured it out by tire tracks and by the plethora of missing watermelons. He hid out in the field one night with a shotgun and shot it up into the air when they walked right past him. The kids were screaming please don't kill me while they ran back to their truck. Needless to say, they never stole another watermelon.

I caught this short redhead kid from my high school stealing a watermelon during the day one time. I didn't do anything about it, just thought it was funny watching him run across the field as fast as he could with his stumpy legs."