Moon & Stars

An heirloom melon revisits me from long ago

This is the saga of a watermelon that has come in and out of my life since I was a sprout, nothing more than a seedling myself.

The year was 1981. I was 20-something, fresh out of college, working for a magazine called The Mother Earth News. Have you heard of it? It’s still around, in those racks at the grocery store check-out. A slick-looking publication.

In its heyday, though—the era of hippie homesteading—TMEN was a folksy and wildly popular publication. The Bible of back-to-the-landers, with a circulation of 1-million. Every other month we published “Mother” out of a dusty warehouse in Hendersonville, North Carolina.

That was the best job I ever had, probably. One of those situations where your livelihood and your values line up perfectly. You’re living, and working, your dream. My home was a tin-roofed log cabin at the end of a dirt road. My job was writing about how to live close to the Earth.

Meeting the melon

Okay, let’s get to the melon part of this story.

TMEN sent me to Iowa to do an interview. The subjects were a young couple named Kent and Diane Whealy. They had recently started a mail-order business, a seed exchange whereby people traded seeds they saved from their home gardens. The idea was to preserve old varieties of vegetables, herbs, fruits and flowers, the ones your grandmother grew back in the day. Nowadays we call these “heirloom” varieties—a name reportedly coined by Kent himself. Heirloom crops are open-pollinated, genetically diverse, and non-GMO. They’re our home garden heritage.

The Whealys’ enterprise, at that point, was a typewritten catalog they produced on their kitchen table and sent out to subscribers all over the country. People could leaf through the Seed Savers Exchange “yearbook” and find seeds for everything from Mamie Brown’s Pink Tomato to Lina Sisco’s Bird Egg Beans. People found each other in the catalog, then swapped seeds by literally mailing them back and forth in envelopes. The whole operation was so homespun, we can hardly imagine it today.

The highlight of my visit to Iowa that hot summer afternoon was the Moon & Stars watermelon. The Whealys had learned of a neighbor who was growing these old-timey melons, and they knew they’d be a great addition to the SSE seed catalog. We all piled in a car and headed over to the neighbor’s garden.

I snapped a photo of Kent Whealy enthusing over the watermelons. He’s showing off the trademark big yellow splotch on one of them. That’s the moon of Moon & Stars. This photo ran in the January/February 1982 issue of TMEN.

Kent is no longer on this Earth, alas, but I love that this photo memorializes my first acquaintance with the Moon & Stars watermelon—held by a man who passionately cared about preserving our food crop heritage. Kent went on to win a prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” for his lifework of protecting biodiversity among food crops. Seed Savers Exchange grew into a huge operation, with 13,000 subscribers, a demonstration farm, and an international seed bank that’s one of the largest nongovernmental seed banks in the world.

Decades later Diane Whealy tracked me down online. She wrote me to ask if she could use the photo in a book she was writing, Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver. Of course I said yes. She included a description of that day in the book, and—thank you!—mentioned me by name.

My own melon

Fast-forward many years, and many backyard gardens in which I tried to grow watermelons of various varieties. I was, I admit, never successful. Never.

Year after year, I’d head out to the garden on an August afternoon, knife in hand, ready to harvest the fruit of my labor … only to find a melon that looked like a bomb had dropped on it during the night. Not much left, other than the rind. Damn raccoons and squirrels and whoever else enjoyed the buffet. With an unerring sense of time, they always beat me to the prize by mere hours.

Of course, if you’re hanging in here with me, there is a happy ending to this story. My luck finally changed. One day this past spring, my husband and I stopped in at our local feed-n-seed. While he shopped for organic fertilizer, I gravitated to the rack of seed packets. I wanted to grow some hollyhocks and moonflower.

Among those brightly colored packets, something caught my eye. Something from my past. An old, old friend.

My heart started thumping. My mind zoomed back to that hot summer afternoon in Iowa, when I first met Moon & Stars.

You can bet this seed packet went home with me!

We have the perfect sunny hill with lots of open space for a melon vine to crawl all over. I sowed the seed in a little circle and marked it with a stick. I didn’t do anything special to prepare the soil. Because I wasn’t hoping for much, to be honest. My whole checkered history with watermelons, you understand.

To my surprise, within a week or three, our hillside was covered with the attractive foliage of Moon & Stars. The vine looked vigorous, enthusiastic, promising. Full of tiny flowers that I hoped would develop into fruit. I was delighted to see how the leaves were speckled with yellow stars, just like the fruits.

One fine day, I discovered a good-sized melon in the patch. Only one. It had been hiding behind a native azalea so I literally hadn’t seen it. It was gorgeous, exactly like those fruits I met in Iowa long ago. The yellow flecks on that dark green skin are, truly, beautiful.

Within minutes, I had fashioned a very high-tech metal cage to protect my Moon & Stars melon. I used some scraps of garden fencing I found in the garage. I know you’ll be impressed with my technique.

No way was I going to let marauding wildlife steal this prize from me. We have deer and black bears living in our woods. What a find this would be for them! Moon & Stars is no ordinary watermelon, after all. It deserves a better outcome than the sad fate of every other melon I’ve ever grown.

For the next few weeks, I kept a close eye on my baby, visiting it every day. Hoping against hope for a good outcome.

Harvest time

Today, the first of September, turned out to be The Day. The melon made a satisfyingly hollow sound when I tapped its side. The trademark big yellow moon was there on the bottom. Its curled stem had gone brown.

Time to harvest.

Proudly I carried it to the house and instructed Jim to take a picture. Behold, a happy gardener who finally, all these years later, grew a handsome watermelon … a very special variety of one, to boot.

Next we plopped the behemoth onto a scale. Just over 22 pounds? I’m not so sure about that. Because I’m here to testify: That thing felt like an elephant in my arms. When we shoved it into the fridge, it took up a whole shelf.

And now, in the spirit of a happy ending, here’s a little video of me slicing open our prize melon. I am so proud, so happy. So thrilled by how our luck can change, how the past can revisit us and come alive again, literally. How heirloom varieties can thrive in our gardens, connecting us to our heritage one harvest at a time.

Viva Moon & Stars!