I've grown all kinds of the so-called winter storage melons, including varieties of casaba, honeydew, crenshaw, Santa Claus, Christmas, Frogskin and Persian melons. Different ones have performed well in various years and some of them stored a month or two. However, I didn't really find their quality/flavor/texture to be so high after prolonged storage that it was worth our time to store them a long time on purpose.

Honestly, once you've eaten vine-ripened, utterly splendid muskmelons all summer long, then the winter storage melons come in a very distant second place. I'm not overly fond of storing anything for a couple of months only to find its flavor and texture were only marginally worth eating.

I'd just as soon eat great melons, fully ripened, juicy and utterly delicious in season and not try to prolong the season too very long into the cool weather. Having said that, I do grow a lot of very hard-shelled icebox type watermelons, like Blacktail Mountain and Yellow Doll, for example, that will hold their quality for a month or two while merely sitting on the kitchen counter and we do always sort of ration out the least 6 or 8 watermelons harvested, eating about 1 per week until they are all gone. This year we harvested the last 3 watermelons in November, but we've already eaten all of them. If we had kept one on the counter, it might still have been flavorful and had decent texture as late as Christmas, but I didn't want to take a chance on holding it too long and having the texture really degrade in storage.

Despite the fact that I can a lot of fruit, tomatoes and peppers, we otherwise try to eat each crop when it is in season, much the way folks ate long ago before we had grocery stores that can give you almost anything you seek, produce-wise, any time of the year. Eating in season does, I think, give us a fuller appreciation of what crops are in season at what times. Obviously root crops store an exceptionally long time (we still have garlic, onions and potatoes from this year's harvest) so their eating season is prolonged naturally by the fact they hold their quality a long time in plain old root cellar storage conditions, and winter squash is much the same, We eat tomatoes until we are tired of them in spring, summer and fall, but then after a winter with nothing but canned, frozen or dried tomatoes, we're thrilled to have fresh tomatoes again in April. I don't know if we'd love fresh tomatoes as much if they were available every month of the year (I'm talking about home-grown ones, not the junk sold in grocery stores). Part of what makes them so wonderful is that we know they don't last forever, so we treasure them while we have them.

I kinda feel that same way about melons. Some years, we have had so many melons ripen at one time that I preserved them either by making/freezing melon balls or by dehydrating them (which intensifies the flavor so much that they are almost sickeningly sweet), but at a certain point I just stopped spending that time preserving the excess. Instead, when we have more than we can eat, I feed them to the chickens. It very hot and dry weather, melons are like Gatorade for chickens and keep them happy and healthy even in horrible conditions.

I've been working really hard to adjust the quantities of everything we grow so that we get enough to eat it fresh in season but not so much that dealing with the huge excess harvest is a pain-in-the-neck. That's one of the reason I don't grow many winter melons any more--while it might be nice to have a couple sitting on the counter until late fall or early winter, any more than that just becomes a burden that you know you need to use up within X number of weeks before they start to go bad.

When I grew them I especially liked Navajo and Boule d' Orr.

Sadly this was the only melon that survived out of several types started. This tastes as good as store bought, though texture now is a little soft.

Most melons grown, harvested and eaten in season will taste at least 10 times better than store-bought. That's why we grow them! In excessively rainy years, the flavor can be watered down, but that didn't even happen here in this extraordinarily wet year since drought returned in July/August and held on until about October, as did the heat. I am so used to superbly-flavored home-grown melons that I don't even buy them at the grocery store because their flavor and texture just doesn't compare to that of home-grown melons. Having a garden spoils you that way, and it is one reason I buy very little produce at the grocery store in a good garden year. The deeper you go into autumn, the less heat and less intense sunlight the plants get, and the quality of the melons drops. By late autumn, we've generally harvested and eaten the last of them and, while we miss them in winter, I'd rather only eat melons when fresh ones are in season locally than buy them at a grocery store and suffer through eating something that is so much lower in quality than the ones we grow. That also explains why we eat more in-season that we once did. Just because we can buy virtually any produce in a grocery store even in winter doesn't necessarily mean that the produce is worth eating----winter hothouse tomatoes are a perfect example of that.