IN this dusty field filled with experimental watermelons off Highway 174, there is but one sound that matters.
It’s a deep, soft pop, like a cork slipping free from a wine bottle. You hear it when a pocket knife cracks the green rind on a watermelon so full of wet fruit that the outside can barely contan the inside.
Terry Kirkpatrick, a professor of plant pathology at the University of Arkansas, spends a lot of time here popping open watermelons. He’s searching for deeply colored flesh that is crisp but not crunchy and so juicy that pools fill the divots left by a spoon.
The taste has to be exceptionally sweet but just slightly vegetal, so you know it came from the earth and not the candy counter.
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