When Melons Got Sweet

The Beet: A Podcast For Plant Lovers

Epic Gardening

Home & Garden, Education, Leisure, How To

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2024

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Did you know that melons weren’t the lucious sweet fruit we adore today? The melons of medieval times were more like gherkins. It wasn’t until growers cultivated melons and cross-bred them enough that they ripened to sweetness. This caused a massive melon craze.Epic Gardening Shop Homepage: https://growepic.co/3TCIWAYBotanical Interests Shop Homepage: https://growepic.co/3THggquBook Collection Page: https://growepic.co/3TFvX1jEG Homesteading Book: https://growepic.co/43GyAESLearn More:5 Ancient Gardening Methods That Work in the Modern GardenConnect With Margot Kelley:Margot Kelley is a vegetable gardener of 20+ years based in Maine and the author of A Gardener at the End of the World, a memoir about gardens, seeds, and viruses written during the pandemic. Her other gardening books include Foodtopia: Communities in Pursuit of Peace, Love, & Homegrown Food, The Meadow (with Barbara Bosworth), and A Field Guide to Other People’s Trees. Website Instagram Margot’s new book (publisher site) Margot’s new book (Amazon) Shop the Store As an exclusive for listeners, use code THEBEET for 5% off your entire order on our store, featuring our flagship Birdies Raised Beds. These are the original metal raised beds, lasting up to 5-10x longer than wooden beds, are ethically made in Australia, and have a customizable modular design. Shop now and get 5% off your first order.Get Our BooksLooking for a beginner's guide to growing food in small spaces? Kevin’s book, Field Guide to Urban Gardening, explains the core, essential information that you'll need to grow plants, no matter where you live!He also wrote Grow Bag Gardening to provide you with specialized knowledge that can bring you success when growing in fabric pots.Preorder Kevin’s newest book Epic Homesteading if you are looking to turn your home into a thriving homestead! Order signed copies of Kevin’s books, plus more of his favorite titles in our store.More ResourcesLooking for more information? Follow us:Our... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	We all love melons. I certainly do and I've grown more than my fair share over the last three or four years here in the space that I'm growing in.
0:21.0	We have Margot Kelly back on the show,
0:23.7	Veggie Gardner of 20 plus years based in Maine,
0:26.4	author of a gardener at the end of the world.
0:29.6	Margo yesterday, we talked about kind of the history
0:32.2	of agriculture and how it ties to
0:34.3	humanity and also how we tie to it and also how it ties to the rise of
0:39.4	pandemics and we kind of got a little bit into like the origin of certain species.
0:43.6	Specifically it was cereal grains yesterday, but today we're talking about how
0:48.6	melons got sweet or when melons got sweet and I didn't know they ever weren't sweet so why don't we
0:54.4	start there? So yeah melons weren't always sweet. Prior to just before the
1:01.6	renaissance most of the melons that were grown in in Europe weren't sweet at all they were
1:06.6	sour or more gyrkenny but right around like 1,300 or so, people began to have kind of a mania for melons because
1:18.8	they had developed a kind of melon that could live long enough or could ripen for long enough that it actually got sweet.
1:26.0	And so these melons are, they're a variant called, they're the cantalopes of Europe is basically what they're called.
1:33.0	Interesting. So before that they just were sort of a, I mean if they're not sweet and they're a plant,
1:38.2	they're effectively a vegetable culinary wise, right?
1:40.8	Yeah, they'd be more like the kind of melons that we think of is in ancient foods.
1:45.0	Okay. Yeah. Oh, like a bitter melon or something like that. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. And so what's the like what happened as a result of that?
1:55.4	There's a craze for these melons?
1:57.0	Yeah, there was so much of a craze for it that supposedly one of the popes
2:00.8	died because systemic burst because he ate too many melons at one meal.
	...

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