Cucamelons: Grow Cute “Mouse Melons”
The Beet: A Podcast For Plant Lovers
Epic Gardening
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 13 August 2019
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s cute. It’s crisp. It’s slightly pungent. It’s the perfect, bite-size snack on a hot, muggy day. What could this garden snack-bite be? If you guessed cucamelon, you’re right!
Affectionately referred to as the “world’s smallest watermelon”, the cucamelon is a vine that bears edible mini-melons about the size of grapes. The cucamelon tastes like a cucumber with a burst of citrusy tartness from the skin. Commonly known as dandita or “little watermelon” in Mexico, Melothria scabra was a domesticated crop in Central America before the Americas were colonized by Europeans.
While they look like they’re a cross between a cucumber and melon, the cucamelons are their own unique plant species within the Curcurbitaceae family…and they’re an exceptionally fun crop to grow in your edible garden…so let’s learn how!
Learn More: Cucamelons: Grow Cute “Mouse Melons”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone welcome back to the epic gardening podcast I know it's been a while but we are actually back with a couple solo episodes and by a couple I mean a lot we're doing two weeks of solo episodes here in the epic gardening podcast |
| 0:12.1 | Harkening back to the beginnings of this podcast, |
| 0:16.0 | back when I was just starting out |
| 0:18.0 | and no one would talk to me and I was talking to myself on here. |
| 0:21.0 | So we're throwing it back to those good old days and you know what |
| 0:24.4 | better plant to start it off with than I would call it 2018's most popular |
| 0:30.1 | vegetable. That would be the cucummelon, also known as the mouse melon and its |
| 0:37.0 | botanical name is Melothria scabra. So it's known as the world's smallest watermelon, the little |
| 0:44.7 | watermelon. How do we actually grow this plant? First of all, what exactly is |
| 0:51.7 | it? It has some interesting tubrous root structure |
| 0:55.8 | and it grows these tiny little, almost grape-sized |
| 0:59.9 | watermelon looking girkens that actually don't taste like watermelons at all. |
| 1:05.2 | They taste a bit like a fresh cucumber, right? |
| 1:08.6 | And so they're a great little snacker, very fun for kids to grow, very fun for really anyone to grow, and they grow in these thin trailing vines. |
| 1:16.3 | So as soon as you hear that, you hear, I need to support that vertically somehow, right? |
| 1:21.2 | So you'll want to start your seeds indoors if you're growing in a |
| 1:26.1 | cooler climate and it's about 70 to 75 days from the seedling, not the seed, |
| 1:31.0 | from seedling to harvest. |
| 1:33.3 | So you're gonna get production from mid summer |
| 1:35.7 | through first frost, and if you're in a warmer zone |
| 1:37.8 | and listening to the podcast right at this very second, |
| 1:39.9 | then you could definitely still put one of these in and try to get some cucumellons out. |
... |
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