Black Diamond is a regular size watermelon and Sugar Baby is icebox size.

Thanks Carol! Of note, they are similar colors. Makes me wonder if they're have similar patronage.

http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/heirloom-watermelon-varieties-zewz1310zpit.aspx

Bon, This question made me giggle. Black Diamond would eat Sugar Baby for lunch. Thinking of that makes me picture a Pac-Man game with Black Diamond racing around snapping up Sugar Babies in one bite. (grin)

My dad's favorite watermelon always was Black Diamond, particularly Black Diamond Yellow Belly and Black Diamond Yellow Flesh. The drawback to growing Black Diamond is that it takes up a whole lot of space and you wait forever and forever and forever for the melons to finally mature. Fred always grew Black Diamond when he still had a several-acre garden at the old Home Place near the river, but I don't think he grows them any more now that his smaller veggie garden is growing out there in his side yard at his house here in our neighborhood. I'd know Fred had come by to see me when I'm come home from being gone somewhere on a summer day, and would find a big old Black Diamond watermelon sitting in a chair in my garden. What a calling card to leave!

Black Diamonds grown in halfway decent conditions can easily reach 35-50 lbs. and can get much larger with lots of rainfall or irrigation. Sugar Baby runs about 6-10 lbs in average weather, but I've had some hit maybe 12 lbs. in really good rainfall years.

Mike, I don't grow the big ones any more either, preferring the perfect size and quicker DTMs of icebox melons. And, of course, they have such excellent flavor and crisp, sweet flesh! However, I don't restrict myself to only Sugar Baby. I generally grow Sugar Baby, Bush Sugar Baby, Yellow Baby, Tiger Baby, Yellow Doll, New Orchid, and Blacktail Mountain, and of all those, it is hard to pick one over another, but I do think Blacktail Mountain has the best flavor of all. Yellow Doll is probably a close second, and then Sugar Baby. I generally trellis all of them on a trellis made of green metal t-posts and woven wire fencing, which keeps the melons off the ground and away from the critters that like to nibble on them. We're happy with any summer watermelons we get----none of them have poor flavor, and all are yummy.

This year I've added Sugar Pot to the mix, as it was bred to be grown in containers and the plants are supposed to have a spread of 12-18", which I find hard to imagine. I'm going to grow it in both the ground and in a large container to see how it performs. Honestly, in good weather, I've never grown a watermelon that we didn't like. Of course, in very rainy years, the flavor of melons can be watered down just like the flavor of tomatoes, but even in last year's incredible rainfall, we got melons with great flavor because the rain inexplicably failed to fall in most of July and all of August, just when the melons were ripening. I suppose that was a good thing because we wouldn't have had good watermelons if we'd had heavy rain in July and August.

Last year, I must have failed to harvest a Sugar Baby in the front garden and it must have survived long enough to mature seeds because there was a sudden explosion of watermelon plants erupting all over the raised bed where I have my most favorite tomatoes. This was about a month ago. I did have Sugar Baby in that bed last year. Well, I hated to look a gift horse in the mouth, so I dug up and transplanted about 20 Sugar Baby volunteers to other spots in the garden. I don't even have my regular watermelons seeded into the back garden yet (too much rain lately) but I've got Sugar Baby plants all over the front garden, and new ones continue to pop up in the tomato bed. While volunteers can be considered a "weed" when they pop up in a place intended for something else, I consider these particular weeds to be worth transplanting somewhere else.

Dawn

New to the forum so this kind of just a test post. I'm also new to gardening, although not the idea of gardening as I've planted hundreds of plants in my life (just never for myself, my dad owns a nursery and landscaping business).

One of my roommates brought home a jalapeño and a bell pepper plant one day and I just decided to go to my dad's nursery and pick up all sorts of tomatoes, peppers, squash, herbs, eggplant, zucchini, and watermelon. The peppers, tomatoes, and herbs (oregano, cilantro, thyme, rosemary, basil, and mint) have been going for a while now and are all doing great but I just picked up the other plants this past weekend.

I have a tiny bed that gets a decent amount of sun later in the day that I decided to put all the watermelon, squash, and eggplants in just to see if it would even work, but I had sat them in the driveway to get some more sun while I was prepping the bed. I thought my roommates were our of town, so I was very surprised when one of them came barreling in and ran over the flat that contained all the new plants.

It looked like a disaster at first because he drove right over the middle of the flat, but so far all but 1 of the 10 plants has shown signs of recovery.

This is the one that took it the second worst, it's a Crimson Sweet (which I know nothing about, just trying it out). Both of these plants looked identical before the accident took place. Both of the leaves were sagging after the incident, though one has shot towards the sky now while the other is definitely dead, so I'm still holding out hope for recovery.

This is the one that took the brunt of the car, it is a Charleston Gray and has shown no sign of recovery yet, and I'm not hopeful it ever will.

This is zucchini which I thought wasn't going to make it, but now two of the leaves have corrected themselves and are pointing towards the sun again.

This is one of the sugar babies and I'm 50/50 on whether it will make it. It seems to be okay at this point, but the pot it was in was completely smashed and I think I did more damage trying to get it out to plant it in the ground, but it hasn't shown any signs of deterioration yet. The other sugar baby has had a flower bud since it went in the ground and I think it will be fine.

This is a sweet banana pepper that had the top and all the leaves ran over, but I topped it and some new leaves are sprouting out so it's showing signs of recovery. I know it's hard to believe, but those were the best two leaves left after the incident, the rest were basically mush. I'll clip those leaves off once it gets going again.

This is another zucchini that got ran over, but had much less damage than some of the other plants and I believe it will have a full recovery.

There are a couple more plants that took some damage, but this post is long enough as it is. Maybe one day I'll post some photos of my plants that are actually doing well! All of my peppers and tomatoes are currently fruiting except for the few peppers that I topped this weekend.

Dawn. Black tail mountain sounds great. I'll have to try and find some seeds.

ak_ok, Your poor plants have been through so much. I've had plants run over by a neighbor who was backing down our driveway, but the plants were already in the ground, and the pumpkin plants survived and the poor corn plants he flattened did not. That wouldn't happen nowadays because the garden is fenced, but I've never forgotten how horrified I was when I saw the tire tracks running through the garden. He also hit our driveway gate, and left pieces of a tail light and reflector in the driveway. We weren't home at the time, but as soon as we arrived home and saw the garden damage, we figured it out and guessed that it was him....and we were right. He owned up to having done it, but otherwise didn't want to discuss it. At the time he did it he already was in his 80s and really needed to give up driving but he didn't....and he drove like a bat out of hell all the time. I did my best to keep him away from my garden after that. He used to drive in reverse from our driveway to his road, a distance of 3/4s of a mile....and not for any special reason.....just because he could do it, and he did it at a high rate of speed. The man was a menace on the roadways by that point in his life, and I was relieved when his kids finally made him quit driving.

Mike, You'll probably have to order the seeds online. They're available from anyplace that sells heirloom seeds. Blacktail Mountain was bred by Glenn Drowns, so I'm sure he has seed of it available at Sand Hill Preservation Center. I usually just order the seeds from Baker Creek, Victory Seeds, SSE or SESE when I'm ordering heirloom tomato seeds back in the winter.

I still haven't sown any melon seeds in the ground as I've been waiting for the cold spell and rain to pass.

Dawn

Welcome to the forum ak-ok. Your post was enjoyable. Honestly, I giggled as life can be so funny as I imagined your poor plants getting squashed under tires. And they're so resilient, aren't they? good soil, adequate water, some air and a puny leaf is all they need, sometimes. And patience. yeah.

Dawn

Then, I giggled at your post. Reminds me of a local mail carrier who was a hazard. Wasn't our carrier, but he bumped into my car when I was driving down his route. ha I was driving an old beat up Lincoln Town Car, so it was no skin off my nose. But wow. Right? Tickles my funny bone until it gets serious.

We seeded our our icebox melons on Saturday. I'm betting they're black diamonds. Hopefully, the seeds won't rot. I have plenty of seeds to try again. Still lots of time.

I'll try to get some pics today of a few of my plants that had a section of roof laying on them. As you can see, it isn't a small section!

Oh my gosh, Bruce. I hope ya'll have everything you need to recover and repair. I'm still so sad about it all.

Bon, Why do you think your Blacktail Mountain watermelons are Black Diamonds? Both are stabilized OP varieties so ought to come true from seed unless you had insect-induced crossing. One reason I grow icebox melons is that full-sized watermelons take up tons and tons of space and guzzle lots of water and then you have to wait forever for one to mature, and you don't get many melons per plant. I haven't grown full-sized melons in ages now because the icebox melons are just so much more productive and give us so many more melons per square foot of gardening space. So, in that sense, I hope your melons are Blacktail Mountain. Everyone to whom we've ever given a Blacktail Mountain watermelon has promptly declared it the best melon they've ever eaten. I'm not sure it is the absolute best watermelon I've ever eaten, but it is very, very good.

For a long time when the bridge was out (it seems like it took them many months or maybe even longer than a year to rebuild it), we had almost no traffic as there were just a small handful of homes on our side of the bridge. I believe that elderly gentleman got used to having no competition on the roadways and stopped exercising due caution (if he ever drove with caution). Our son and niece and nephew were horrified by his driving. They'd stand in the road (back then it was just dirt/gravel, and lots more dirt than gravel) and watch him drive backwards from our house to his road...in a cloud of dust. I really think that they were watching to see if he'd hit anything. (They were young and life here was too boring for them, so having him driving gave them something to watch.) Eventually he fell off his tractor while driving it, and it seems like his kids then made him give up driving entirely, making our neighborhood a safer place. He came here to Love County with his parents several years before statehood, so had lots of stories to tell. His stories were a lot better than his driving.

Bruce, If there's anything worse than having someone run over a person's plants, it's got to be having Mother Nature drop a roof on your plants. Every time I think about what happened to y'all, I'm just so grateful you weren't physically harmed.

We rarely get the really damaging storms here that are so common in central OK, but I did see Lone Grove (west of Ardmore in Carter County) after it got hit by an EF-4 tornado a few years ago, and the level of destruction just leaves a person speechless. Months after the storm, there still was debris hanging in trees. The recovery process can be awfully slow. I hope your recovery process is fast and smooth.

Dawn

Dawn, my seed packets aren't labeled well. Just "icebox" on one. I forget what the other reads. I think they're both the same. We'll find out what it is when it comes in. Whatever it is, we'll be sure to eat it!

The kids were feeling a bit enterprising, so we decided to plant an extra hill for them to sell this summer for some spending money. I'm please as they are super motivated to help in the garden!

bon

I don't normally plant watermelon, but thought I would plant a few this year....well that is if we ever stop having nights in the 50's like we are now. I planted okra and while it is about an inch high, it is just staying an inch high. LOL It has had plenty of rainfall, now if we could just get a little heat maybe it would grow. I planted about 10 okra plants of Heavy Hitter and I'm thinking when it warms up I may plant a few seeds of another kind as well.

I need to go through my watermelon seeds and see what my choices are. I love Black Diamond, but I have a garden, not a field, so I will probably stick with a small type.

Carol, I cannot get over the cold. Shivering right now! As Dawn wrote, we're gong to be miserable when the cloud cover floats away. Ugh

I'm ready to get over the cold and clouds (and I know I'll regret that as soon as we have sunshine and humidity). They changed our "heavy rain" forecast to "showers" so I don't think we're going to get the kind of rain they originally forecast. Texas is getting it instead. I don't mind putting up with cloudy, cool, gray skies if we are going to get meaningful rain but if all we're going to get is piddly little drizzle, I'd rather have heat and sunshine for the plants. I have cucumber plants heavily loaded with blooms but the bees aren't out pollinating them in this pathetic weather.