Breeding extra sweet melons

[reed]

Regarding both Cucumis melo and Citrullus lanatus without regard for any sub varieties. 

Do they, as I assume they do have specific genes for sweetness and these genes can be homo or heterozygous like with anything else?

Is it reasonable to assume that an extra sweet one is likely homozygous for being sweet?

Is it also reasonable to assume that two extra sweet ones, no matter how wildly different they are for other traits, would yield extra sweet offspring? 

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I'd guess that sweetness in melons is dependent on the interaction of a whole host of genes... It's easy enough to breed for sweetness: Taste the fruits!

It seems to me that getting rid of bitter components in a fruit is more important to sweet taste than the amount of sugar that it has.

[reed]

I didn't encounter any bitterness in any of my melons this year. Some small early ones had what I thought was a perfume like taste that I didn't like at all. Other people thought they were fine but I culled them anyway. Around here it isn't uncommon to see a beautiful water melon that tastes like, water.

I think overall I lucked into some pretty spectacular stuff. Next year I'm gonna plant a few of the smallest water melons and later smallest muskmelons which are pretty darn good themselves with much larger numbers of the truly outstanding ones. Hopefully someday I'll hit on a baseball sized musk melon that tastes like the bigger rock types. And a softball sized watermelon that that tastes like the 15 - 20 pounders.

Personal sized, super sweet melons, I think that would be sweet, sweet, sweet and I bet they would sell good too.

[rowan]

I personally need more than just sweetness to find a melon acceptable to my taste. I would choose a sweet melon with a good depth of flavour to one that was just extra sweet. Maybe that is why I can't stand supermarket watermelons.

[castanea]

Aug 29, 2016 23:15:57 GMT -5 rowan said:

I personally need more than just sweetness to find a melon acceptable to my taste. I would choose a sweet melon with a good depth of flavour to one that was just extra sweet. Maybe that is why I can't stand supermarket watermelons.

The best melons I have ever had were not melons with high brix readings. Lower levels of sugar often enhance other flavors while high levels of sugar can wipe out other flavors. If a cookie recipe calls for one cup of sugar and you change it to two cups of sugar, the quality of the cookie often goes straight downhill.

[reed]

I don't think I'v ever experienced a melon that was too sweet or just sweet. To me watermelon flavor and sweet go together, you can't have one without the other. I'v had plenty of watermelon that just tasted like water. In Cucumis melo there is often plenty of flavor but it doesn't appeal much to me if sweetness is lacking. My favorite Cucumis melo that arrived in the patch had extra flavor, extra sweet, extra dark green skin and extra dark orange color. Even the seeds are orange compared to the others. I'm wondering if those things are all related some how. The word extra in all cases refers just to what I'm used too.

I had a couple other Cucumis melo show up that were sweet enough but I didn't like as well, particularly the ones with green flesh but I didn't have any who's flavor was ruined by being too sweet. I suspect my use of the word extra might have been a bad choice.

[prairiegardens]

Have seed coming from the Ukraine and one of them is for a watermelon  ( Tsilnolystyy) said to be lower in sugar ( diabetic watermelon?) but still good tasting, and specifically for poorer soil, they say that rich soil results in poor fruit set. It's from out an outfit called nikitovka seed, someone from another group said they'd had good luck with seed from them so trying out a bunch of stuff.

[caledonian]

I wonder whether small size might be an advantage. Constant breeding for maximum size would result in the melon being composed mostly of water, but if the same productivity were concentrated in a fruit a fraction of the size, it'd be perceived as much sweeter even if the total amount of sugar were the same. If I understand the way melons are commonly measured in Brix, it's about the concentration of the sugar rather than its total amount.

Perhaps if you found melons that produced lots of total sugar, then bred for fewer and smaller fruits in which that sugar would be more concentrated...