Watermelon Jam
I recently pulled the plug on my melon garden. The melons were ready, and the plants were exhausted from their efforts. It didn’t help that this was one of the most windswept garden beds with sightlines to the ocean through the front gate. I have a stable door style gate with windbreak on the top half, although it isn’t often closed and the wind can kind of creep up on you, especially in the sunny season when it isn’t supposed to get stormy. So, I called it a day and cleared the beds and sowed a mustard cover crop to thank the soil for its efforts.
You can actually watch the process in this short 5 min video.
At the end of the day, I counted my blessings – my bountiful harvest of melons, but made a terrible mistake… I didn’t completely finish the job. I left the melons out on the garden deck. The next day I was busy with life things from beyond the garden and forgot completely about the melons. It wasn’t until the following day they popped up in a memory, however, after the efforts of the previous day I was too exhausted to move from my comfy spot on the sofa. Besides, it was pouring with rain and howling a hoolie. Surely they wouldn’t rot overnight?!
It turned out rotting was the least of their worries. There was a horrible attack. Melons were lost. I’d forgotten about the imminent threat from the brazen rodents and voracious possums. As they settle down for the cool season they will only get bolder so action plans will need to be put in place. But it was too late for several of my melons as they bore the battle scars of an encounter with these vile creatures. The worst affected fruit went straight to the chickens, who got to work straight away and got on with the job of turning watermelon into eggs.
The unaffected melons got moved to a secure place in my garden office. The ones with minor damage ended up in the kitchen. After waiting months for the melons to ripen, I wasn’t about to waste them! After pondering my options, I settled on a ‘hmmm… I wonder…’ approach that hasn’t really let me down before.
If I’m going to go to the effort of processing them it has to be in a form we’ll actually eat and not just sit on the shelf and viewed with suspicion and eventually thrown out after several years when no one remembers what it actually was. Sadly, this is the way of many experimental recipes – but not all. Many become firm favourites and are gobble up faster than I can make them.
One of the two most common ways I use fruit successfully is as something to flavour water. I know we’re supposed to drink litres a day, but I just don’t like the taste – never have and so anything that will make water more palatable is a good thing. Ordinarily I would make sugary sweet cordial syrups which go wonderfully with the soda stream. However, this summer I have found shrubs, (You can read about that >HERE<) that have less sugar so don’t have that sticky sweet lolly water flavour and balanced out with vinegar makes them a refreshing grown up feeling drink. I’d just finished the last of my plum shrub and so it seemed like watermelon was the likely replacement.
I did a bit of research because watermelon isn’t quite the same as most fruit with its high-water content. It turns out there were a couple of differences to ordinary shrubs, so it was just as well I looked. Due to its delicate flavour instead of the ratio of 1 part fruit : 1 part sugar : 1 part vinegar, you need 2 parts fruit : 1 part sugar : 1 part vinegar. You also can’t rely on the raw sugar to break down the fruit like you would strawberries so blitz to puree is recommended. (Straining out at the end is optional but the bits at the bottom are drinkable if you like that sort of thing).
The sugar was also treated differently and heated into a sugar syrup with 1 part sugar : part water to be added to the mix once it had cooled down. For the vinegar I used what I had – some red wine vinegar and a dash of lime juice to freshen it up. Then it was bottled into a sterile bottle and popped in the fridge ready and waiting for the lingering days of warm weather when I come back in from the garden gasping for a refreshing drink.
the Watermelon Jam and the Watermelon Shrub gives off in the light.
That took care of one watermelon and on to the next. I found myself with 1kg of perfectly ripe and unblemished fruit. I did a bit of a look about online to see if watermelon jam was actually a thing. It turns out it was so that was all I needed to know. I just followed the normal jam practice and added the same amount of sugar and to help set things I added the juice of a lemon and apple peeled and sliced. I did have to go in halfway through with a blender as the chunks didn’t seem to want to break down and were a bit too big to work with jam. It turns out watermelon is stronger than expected when heat is applied. After that it jammed up nicely and passed the saucer test with a nice clean finger swipe through the middle of it.
There was a bit of discussion around whether or not cooking alters the flavour and while it isn’t like that sweet juicy crunch into a fresh slice, but is recognisably watermelon, but not as you would expect. But a big dollop on a slice of hot toast with melted butter is a delicious treat.
Come again soon – there is more seasonal tidying up to do.
Sarah the Gardener : o)
Looks like a good result, yum! Love the brazen rodents and voracious pumpkins!! Trying to picture how a pumpkin can attack a melon, no matter how voracious it ts! 😉😆😆😆
Oh no… can I blame it on auto correct? My pumpkins are quite friendly. It was the horrible possums! : o)
My learning from this years garden – is ripening peaches off tree. Got husband and son(s) to harvest the majority of peach harvest so we didn’t succumb to more horrible brown rot. Bottled 5 kg successfully but about 10 kg were still quite green so I popped them in a brown paper bag with an apple to slowly ripen with plans to bottle in a week or so.
Can’t quite remember if it was one or two weeks later, I checked bags to find a complete bag of brown fuzzy balls :(. My bad but the food recycling centre will no doubt make good use of them.
Turns out storing in the fridge would have been the way to go.
Oh no, how disappointing. At least you managed to get some into bottles.
I have high hopes for the peach tree I planted during the winter and recently espaliered. I miss having fruit available in the garden. I hope next season you get to enjoy all of the harvest. : o)
Possums are scary! I looked them up a while ago because their name sounds like opossums (which are commonly known as ‘possums anyway), but I did not know that opossums lived there.
Our possums are nothing like opossums and they are a pest here in NZ because they destroy our native flora and fauna and are very unwelcome. And they are quite ugly. : o)
How did they even get there?!
Some believe that opossums are beneficial because they eat grubs, snails and small rodents. The problem is that they also eat fruit and some vegetables. Besides, they are creepy. I always thought that a preponderance of opossums implied that rats were common. They are overly common in the Los Angeles region, where they are commonly hit by cars.
They were introduced to start a failed fur trade in 1837. They are nothing like your opossums and do so much damage to the wildlife here – damage to my garden is incidental… it is heartbreaking the damage done to our native bush and birds. : o)
That is how the nutria got to Louisiana and Texas.