Slicing into a ripe Piel de Sapo melon this morning, I realized that I was a victim of seduction. As with so many of the plant families here, seeds were spilling out of the incision, the fruits are a mere vessel for the “go forth and multiply” maxim of a plant’s directive for sustainability. Inside each of the plump elongated seeds in its melon heart was a whole encyclopedia of heredity, selection, replicability and future potential.
The thousands of seeds in that single melon represent the story of millennia of choosing. The Piel de Sapo (“skin of the toad” in Spanish) is an international favorite grown throughout the world. It is also known as a Santa Claus Melon, Christmas melon, or Croc melon (in Australia), and has a history that dates to Roman times. These melons were brought into southern Spain as early as 300 BCE and were prevalent in Roman horticultural manuals. Piel de Capos were also brought to Spain by the Arabs and were listed in several documents written by Arab botanist and agronomist Ibn Bassal around 1080. Allegedly, the Spanish would say “he who fills his stomach with melons will be filled with light,” and unsurprisingly, these melons became an important crop in this area.
In addition to their amazing taste, these melons are good for us. They are sources of vitamin C (immune system), vitamin A (growth, vision, and cell function), magnesium (nerve function), potassium (heart health and blood pressure), phosphorus (kidney function), calcium (bones and teeth), and other nutrients. What a nutritional bargain!
Our seduction starts with trials. Each year, Amon (Dru and my eldest son) chooses varieties to plant based on past successes, encouragement from farm partners and customers, and from hours of scouring seed catalogs to find interesting varieties. We may trial as many as 20 varieties here each year to find what best works for us. We are seduced by sweetness, plant vigor, and reliability. We also want resistance to insects and diseases and melon durability. Piel de Sapos are known for their long storage time. They have the name “Christmas melon” for their ability to allegedly last until Christmas. We don’t aim to have them in our cooler that long, but can extend our melon season when all other melons are done for the year.
We use organically grown seed. We want varieties that may be more vigorous and have their own inoculum of good biology and genetic specificity that may be better adapted to our farming practices. Each seed is pre-inoculated and pre-informed with the choices of seed savers over time, but they also reflect the gift of the grower who grew out the seeds that we plant. The biology of each seed is wildly complex. Each seed is a genetic package, but also a pre inoculated biological package where millions of microbes live – both inside of and on the surface of the seed.
The sweet flesh of the melon is also a clever tool for seed dissemination. Birds peck, racoons claw at, and deer stomp on melons to open and enjoy the sweetness, while also doing the work of allowing the seeds to “go forth” in this way. Human propagation is indeed the most recent version of this timeless spread of delicious information.
If you extract seeds from your Piel de Sapo, you could try to grow them out next summer, but these are hybrid seed and you’re unlikely to get melons that are true to the Piel. Between the biology of hybrid seed, and the opportunity for cross-pollination with pollen from other melon plants that grow nearby, you may end up with something inedible or perhaps a new melon that combines the genetics of neighbors and the Piel to make a new expression of melon.
Whatever you choose to do with your melon seeds, know that they represent our best attempt to accumulate the sugars created by the powers of the sun, carbon dioxide, water, soil microbes, plant species, heredity, Roman biologists, Spanish farmers, and our susceptibility to seduction. We truly feel blessed by our relationship to these processes. We are the carriers and propagators of a continuing story. May your day be nourished.
Paul Muller
