Long skinny musk melons?

[templeton]

Came home from holidays to find my 'Continental' cucumbers (C.melo flexuosus) doing quite well, and my musk melons (Farthest North) surviving. With a bit of water over the past fw weeks they are looking good. So I started to wonder - is there a long, sweet fragrant dessert melon?
I'm thinking a cantaloupe flavoured melon that could be cut into sections for serving...
Anyway, I have no idea of the genetics of melons, so just got out the fine brush and tickled a few flowers this morning.
Anyone have experience with long skinny melons, or melon breeding? I'm sort of taking inspiration from joseph's great results with his locally adapted landrace breeding melon project, and hoping this isn't a decade long project.
T

[rowan]

As you might remember I grow a lot of melons but I have never come across a long skinny sweet one that looks like the Armenian cucumbers but 'Banana' comes closest. I would guess that it would not be too hard to breed one by crossing a sweet with Armenian, particularly as the cucumbers do gain some sweetness as they age.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

In my short season garden creating a long-skinny sweet muskmelon would take about 4 growing seasons... I had some banana melons and Armenian cucumbers to start with, but I didn't actively select for them, so they are not with me any more.

• Year 1: Make the cross
• Year 2: Grow it out and save seeds without selection.
• Year 3: Grow out enough seeds to find at least a few plants with the long-skinny shape and sweet flavor... I don't know how many recessive genes are involved, but I suspect odds of finding the right combination would be 1 in 16 or less. If possible, I'd cull the non-conforming plants as early as possible. Someone that pays more attention to their garden could self-pollinate by hand any fruits that showed long-skinny fruits before the flower opens. People with longer growing seasons could cull non-conforming plants early in the season, and allow promiscuous pollination among plants with long skinny fruits later in the season.
• Year 4: Continue selecting for shape and sweetness.

Banana Muskmelon in the front/left. This was the second year of my muskmelon breeding project. The melons were picked green after the first fall frost, because they were too long season for my garden. But some of them produced viable seeds.

[steev]

Old-Fashioned Tennessee is somewhat long and cantaloupish. There are a bunch of Central Asian melons that are longish, though maybe not enough cantaloupish, for your taste.

[blueadzuki]

agreeing with Steev, a lot of asian melons are long thin and yellow but not all that cantlopish (they tend to be white inside and sort of mild).

One other warning, if you see something that LOOKS like a long cantaloupe it probably isn't a melon. Quite a few Asian cucumbers have a cantaloupe like crackly skin.

[templeton]

Game on!
Thanks for comments.
As usual, I haven't been a great parent selector. My musk melon patch is, I think, from my original seed from Farthest North, at least there is quite a bit of diversity in it, more than i would expect from my 3 years of selection for musk-ness, so it appears i didn't use my own seed. Record keeping got a bit weird early in the season. But they are survivors, and were quite early. I'm sort of hoping that i can get two generations a season.
I've been selecting for earliness, muskness, slipping, non-splitting, and small size. They haven't had a lot of water, either. The last couple of weeks I've done small sowings of a couple of seed batches from my selections, so if we have a long season ,I might get another crop. And if the Flexuosus - which is a white skinned one from a commercial packet i got from Turkey 4 or 5 years ago - keeps flowering, i might get a better parental line. That said, i just went out and brushed another flower, so with yesterday's and today's, if they take, I now have an each way cross.

[darrenabbey]

I like the idea of an elongated-desert melon, but I don't currently have room to add that to my projects. (I'm currently selecting for single-serve-size desert melons.)

[templeton]

Mar 25, 2016 19:52:43 GMT -5 darrenabbey said:

I like the idea of an elongated-desert melon, but I don't currently have room to add that to my projects. (I'm currently selecting for single-serve-size desert melons.)

Darren,
I'm selecting for early single serves too.
Of the crosses I made, only one took - Acur (=gherkin in turkish) (mum) X one of the Farthest North originals (pollen donor). I'm not sure who the father is - the melons hadn't matured, and there were eventually a mix of greens and oranges, splitters and slippers. I'm hoping the bland greenfleshed not-sweet melon that appeared later isn't the pollen donor. Oh well.
I picked the fruit yesterday, and it has good seed in it so, project on the way. Wonder if i would get a fruit if i grew some over winter in my green house? Hmmmm.
T

[darrenabbey]

Mar 29, 2016 18:39:20 GMT -5 templeton said:

Darren,
I'm selecting for early single serves too.
Of the crosses I made, only one took - Acur (=gherkin in turkish) (mum) X one of the Farthest North originals (pollen donor). I'm not sure who the father is - the melons hadn't matured, and there were eventually a mix of greens and oranges, splitters and slippers. I'm hoping the bland greenfleshed not-sweet melon that appeared later isn't the pollen donor. Oh well.
I picked the fruit yesterday, and it has good seed in it so, project on the way. Wonder if i would get a fruit if i grew some over winter in my green house? Hmmmm.
T

Mine are mostly white-fleshed and very, very sweet. I think I started from a "sprite melon" I found at a grocer one year. It was already small-fruited, so I figured it was a good starting point. I was pleasantly surprised at the diverse (room for selection) plants that grew from it.

I had one plant in the last batch which produced too few non-sweet fruit to let it continue in general. However, it was interesting. Its fruit were fuzzy like a kiwi, extra small, and had a very thin rind. I ate one whole, like one would eat an apple.

[blueadzuki]

I'm not sure if this will help but www.richters.com/Web_store/web_store.cgi?product=X9443

This might be a long muskmelon cantalope. Certainly they say it's inner flesh is orange, which is a very cantaloupish trait (I know watermelons can have orange flesh too) but I am not aware of any other melo melons that do outside of the cantaloupe/muskmelon group.

That being said I honestly can't be sure about this one. In fact having gotten the seed, I'm not really sure what kind of melon it is! When they say it is unusual they probably aren;t kidding, I have NEVER seen melon seeds so small as these (they look like sesame seeds) outside of Meliothera (the sour gherkin). But it COULD be a musk of some sort.

[templeton]

Thanks blueadzuki, interesting. But melon seed is now on the restricted list for Oz.At least it suggests it's possible. And at ~$A8 a packet, i could become a melon millionaire. . I'm quite tempted to try for a couple of winter F1 plants in my greenhouse, might let me check if my cross was real or if the plant selfed, even if i don't get F2 seed.

[raymondo]

Apr 8, 2016 19:35:42 GMT -5 templeton said:

Thanks blueadzuki, interesting. But melon seed is now on the restricted list for Oz.At least it suggests it's possible. And at ~$A8 a packet, i could become a melon millionaire. . I'm quite tempted to try for a couple of winter F1 plants in my greenhouse, might let me check if my cross was real or if the plant selfed, even if i don't get F2 seed.

Some may be the result of crossing, others of selfing.

[templeton]

I bagged the flowers, raymondo, I'm just not sure if I had the mouth of the bag tight enough. I think I kept out bee-sized insects, but litle flies or beetles might have been able to get in. Quite a number of bagged flowers aborted a week earlier, and i didnt want to over manipulate the fragile stems.

[raymondo]

Apr 12, 2016 16:45:14 GMT -5 templeton said:

I bagged the flowers, raymondo, I'm just not sure if I had the mouth of the bag tight enough. I think I kept out bee-sized insects, but litle flies or beetles might have been able to get in. Quite a number of bagged flowers aborted a week earlier, and i didnt want to over manipulate the fragile stems.

I've found that melons often produce male flowers and perfect flowers. The perfect flowers can and will self, given half a chance.

[templeton]

Apr 13, 2016 2:41:53 GMT -5 raymondo said:

Apr 12, 2016 16:45:14 GMT -5 templeton said:

I bagged the flowers, raymondo, I'm just not sure if I had the mouth of the bag tight enough. I think I kept out bee-sized insects, but litle flies or beetles might have been able to get in. Quite a number of bagged flowers aborted a week earlier, and i didnt want to over manipulate the fragile stems.

I've found that melons often produce male flowers and perfect flowers. The perfect flowers can and will self, given half a chance.

Ahhh, I see. Or at least I will next season.