Customer Reviews

Melons for the Passionate Grower: With Practical Advice on Growing, Pollinating, Picking, and Preparing an Extraordinary Harvest

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

if your into melons this book is well worth the money,the pictures or beautiful and the information is very informative but
to the point.

This book is great for anyone wanting greater knowledge of the variety of melons one can grow. It's full of beautiful photos of extraordinary melons. The pictures are so sensuous you can almost feel, smell and taste the melons.

There is a little bit on growing, seed saving as well as a little history about the one hundred melons covered by this book. Also, seed sources are given.

The reason I give this book three stars is because its subtitle suggests that there is more than a cursory explanation about growing these luscious fruits. The info on growing them gives no more detail than a quick internet search would turn up, or the kind of description you might get in the home and garden section of a newspaper. Surely the author who has a passion for researching and growing these melons for so many years must have a little more information about cultivation, pest management, fertilizers, etc. that would be useful to those of us with less than perfect climates and conditions in our home gardens. In my opinion this is not a book for the passionate grower but for the passionate reader/looker!

I bought the book in hopes of learning about various hard to find melons. This book has an amazing variety of melons but I fond it to be rather light on the amount of information provided to the inexperienced new grower.
You get several pages of tips on growing and harvesting (I don't think it's quite detailed enough for the novice), a page on saving seeds, two on hand pollination (these were interesting), and a couple of pages of recipes to use your harvest in.
The main part of the book is sort of art book like to me with a few pages of type histries and several pages of artistic photos of various melons. Each of the melon pictures is identified as figure#1-100, you'll find a corresponding section in the back of the book giving info on size, weight and so on. At the end of the book there's a source listing for places to get the seeds of some, not all, of what is shown in the book.

The melons covered in the book range from the true cantaloupe to muskmelons (what Americans call cantaloupe) to casabas to Asian melons (not sweet like those to which Americans are accustomed) to those that aren't tasty (but are valued for other reasons) to every color flesh and seed, size and shape of watermelon under the sun!

How about a melon to scent a person or a room, a melon to stand in for a cucumber in a salad (bitterfree, crisper, and will set fruit all summer long), a melon that looks for all the world like a winter squash, a bi-colored-flesh watermelon, or a watermelon whose skin turns a bright yellow when it is ripe?

These are the Queen Anne's pocket melon or the D'Alger melon, the Snake melons, the Prescott Fond Blanc melon, the Colorado Striped Tarahumara watermelon, and the Golden Midget watermelon.

Don't have room to grow your own melons? Then the pages about how to select a melon, even at market, will be invaluable--already I have been able to improve my chances of coming home with a riper melon from the store.

I have one tiny complaint about the content of the book: there are several varieties that are listed with "Seed Source: None". I assume these melons that are not available from commercial seed sources are available among the Seed Savers Exchange organization members, but that is never mentioned.

My other complaint about the book is technical: it's not what most of us would consider a "hardback". It has a firm cover, but it's not a hardback in the traditional textbook sense.

All in all, a very lovely book, one that makes you wish you had 10 acres in which to just grow melons. It has been an engrossing read and re-read, an indispensable book in planning our future forays into melon-growing.

This is truly a lovely book! It's unusual to see so many various, gorgeous, beautiful, and downright weird melons. Although I'm not a grower, I appreciate this guide to melon varieties. This is not a cookbook, but a guide, and anyone who loves melon and fruit should have this book. In addition, whoever foraged for all these melons for the photographs and whoever designed this book did an amazing job.

I agonized over the five star dilemma for awhile; does one small nagging problem warrant deleting down to four stars? In the end, the charm of this book won me over completely.

This is a book for someone who has a basic knowledge of gardening. Indeed, the title hints at this but most of us would expect a gardening book to cater to beginners, which it doesn't. In fact, I would say that it would be best if the reader had at least tried growing melons once before. Apparently, melons are a little more high-maintenance than tomatoes and beans -- but the author only spares a small cursory section on melon culture, the better to get down to the real reason to own this treasure: a thoroughly engaging and informative tribute to each known variety of heirloom melon still surviving today.

Each melon variety is comprehensively detailed with a photograph and a short history and description. Amy Goldman makes a very good case for the growing of heirloom (Open Pollinated)varieties, by the way. I won't get into the details, but if superior flavor is your reason for growing your own produce, heirlooms will blow all those mealy, watery grocery store hybrids right off their shelves. By the time you get two pages into the gorgeously photographed catalog of her melons you will be salivating and wishing you had gotten the jump on the summer planting season a little earlier. Before you finish this book you will decide that nothing else but your very own Charentais cantaloupes (12 and 1/4 on the Brix sweetnes scale) and Cream of Saskatchewan watermelons (10 degrees Brix) will do.

Bottom line is, this book will light a fire under you to develop a genuine passion about your home garden and the types of fruits you grow in it. So I can recommend this book even though I have yet to apply its advice to the actual growing. After all, you need the inspiration before you can get off your duff to apply the perspiration!