That gray melon from Charleston

Agricultural Research, Oct, 1994 by Sean Adams

It's one of a continuing string of successes from the U.S. Vegetable Laboratory.

There was a time, a half-century ago, when a good watermelon was hard to find in the local grocery.

In the 1940's, the mainstay of today's summer barbecues and seed-spitting contests was susceptible to disease and breakage during shipping. Melons in those days tasted good, but they often had soft rinds and cracked during the rough ride from farm to market. Watermelons were also round, making them hard to stack.

If you wanted a good watermelon, your best bet was to grow it in your garden.

Then along came C. Fred Andrus, a plant breeder who set out to develop a better watermelon--one that could be stacked and shipped, resist disease, and still taste good. In the late 1940's, Andrus began that task at what is today the U.S. Vegetable Laboratory in Charleston, South Carolina.

In 1954, after years of breeding, Andrus came up with a winner. He released what was then called "that gray melon from Charleston." Formally called Charleston Gray, it dominated the world market for more than two decades, turning up everywhere from Australia to China.

Charleston Gray is one of those classic plant breeding success stories--one of many over the years in ARS. Charleston Gray combined everything in one package. Its oblong shape and hard rind made it easy to stack and ship. Its adaptability meant it could be grown over a much wider geographical area than earlier melons and still produce high yields. It was resistant to the most serious watermelon diseases, anthracnose and fusarium wilt. And it tasted good, being high in what breeders call soluble sugars--the heart of what gives a watermelon its sweet taste.

There's no telling how many Charleston Gray seeds have been planted over the last 40 years. One seed company executive estimated several years ago that his company had sold 450,000 pounds of Charleston Gray seed. At about 4,000 seeds to a pound, that's a possible 1.8 billion watermelon plants! And that's only one seed company's sales. ARS melon breeder Perry E. Nugent estimates that up to 5 million pounds of Charleston Gray seed have been sold since its release 40 years ago.

In the early 1960's, August Kehr, who then headed the USDA Vegetable Research Division at Beltsville, Maryland, estimated that Charleston Gray constituted 95 percent of the domestic watermelon crop. He also said that if profits from the melon had gone directly to ARS, they would have been enough at that time to pay for the Charleston lab's operations for 50 years--until 2023.

Like many fruit and vegetable varieties of yesteryear, Charleston Gray has lost ground to new hybrids. But, as recently as 1991, 47 of 230 seed catalogs still sold it, according to the Garden Seed Inventory, published by the Seed Savers Exchange of Decorah, Iowa. And even if Charleston Gray doesn't dominate the market like it once did, "there is hardly any watermelon variety grown today that doesn't have some Charleston Gray in its lineage," Andrus says.

Andrus, who retired in 1970, also had a hand in developing the cantaloupe Mainstream, in cooperation with Nugent and retired breeder J.C. Hoffman. Nugent recalls the day in 1969 when Andrus gave him 4,000 packets of melon seed. Andrus hadn't had time to evaluate the seed and, since he planned to retire the next year, gave the packets to Nugent, saying that "there might be something here."

Nugent planted the seed and discovered that, indeed, there was something there. That "something" turned out to be Mainstream, which--in the opinion of some melon aficionados--is the best-tasting cantaloupe ever bred. Mainstream's disease resistance and yields were also high. It averaged 37,000 kilograms per hectare (33,000 pounds per acre) in field trials in the South, 26 percent more than top varieties grown at that time.

Perhaps the hottest variety (in popularity and taste) to come out of Charleston in recent years is a cayenne pepper called Charleston Hot [See "New Cayenne Pepper Available," Agricultural Research, February 1993, p. 19].

After its release in 1992 by breeders Richard L. Fery and Philip D. Dukes, the lab was inundated with calls and letters from people asking for seed. Laboratory Director Claude E. Thomas estimates that the lab received 28,000 requests for seed in 1993, before the South Carolina Foundation Seed Association took over answering requests in 1994.

Michael Watkins, executive vice president of the association, says his organization sent out 10,000 packets of seed during the first 5 months of the year. "For some reason, this pepper received more media coverage than any other seed I've ever seen in my life," Watkins says, adding that several companies are also expected to offer Charleston Hot in their catalogs.

Other varieties released from the ARS breeding program at Charleston that have had an impact include:

* Provider (1965) and Contender (1949) snap beans. Contender averaged 198 bushels per acre in 1948 field tests, 25 percent more than a leading variety at that time called Stringless Black Valentine. One of Contender's key qualities was its resistance to common bean mosaic virus, which took its toll on Stringless Black Valentine and many other southern snap beans. Contender also matured earlier and yielded a second crop and better profits than other varieties at that time.