Red-N-Sweet Heirloom Watermelon Seeds (12-14 count)

The Red-N-Sweet watermelon was released in 1987 by the Louisiana State University Agricultural Experiment Station in Calhoun Louisiana (Breeding officially credited to Dr. John Chester Taylor and Dr. C.E. Johnson at The Station). Opened in 1888, The Station would breed and develop five Calhoun watermelons, the Calhoun Sweet, the Summit, the Calhoun Gray, the Louisiana Queen and finally the Red-N-Sweet. With the closing of The Station in 2011, the rise in seedless watermelon popularity and the Red-N-Sweet's thin rind making for poor shipping, it was nearly lost.

However, a serendipitous moment happened in February 2020 when horticulturalist Kerry Heafner gave a presentation about heirloom apples at the Marion Garden Club in Union Parish, Louisiana. At the end of the presentation, a woman named Lula Shurtleff told him that she was given some watermelon seeds she thought might have been from the Calhoun Experiment Station. Luck would have it that those seeds turned out to be the Red-N-Sweet watermelon, as Heafner that year would grow out the seeds and trial them.

In 2021, Heafner enlisted local farms, Indian Village Harvest Farm, Belle Haven Kids Farm and Compton Farms of LA to assist in the Red-N-Sweet effort. Also in 2021, Southern Grit Magazine's Heirloom Hunters, founder Joshua Fitzwater and Managing Editor Debra Freeman, drove from Richmond, Virginia to Calhoun, Louisiana to taste the Red-N-Sweet and meet with Heafner. Blown away by the taste, Fitzwater was gifted a Red-N-Sweet watermelon and saved the seeds. In 2022, with the help of his father Anthony Fitzwater, the father and son team did a large grow of the Red-N-Sweet watermelons in Halifax, Virginia to secure seeds for other heirloom growers and farmers.

The Red-N-Sweet is as advertised, very sweet, with brix counts (sugar measurement) routinely between 11-14%. Often featuring a deep vermilion / scarlet red flesh, the fruits average 18-22 pounds, and are round to oblong with light to medium green skin and accompanying dark green stripes. Along with the vermilion red flesh, another unique characteristic is a slightly indented blossom end when the melon is mature.

From seed in soil to harvest, around 90 days.