Watermelon – sketched in colored pencil by Janice Green in art class last week. This sketch provided the inspiration for this article.

Summertime is the right time for sweet, juicy, yummy watermelon. It tastes so good, and it brings back memories of summers past to young and old alike.

Watermelon is one of the healthiest snacks you can give your child in the summertime. Low in calories and high in moisture content, it’s a rare child who would turn down an offer for a slice of melon.

Watermelons offer an opportunity to discuss pollination with your child. Encourage your child to watch you cut the melon open. Before tasting the melon, discus whether this particular melon will be juicy and sweet, or whether it will be one of the less tasty melons we sometimes bring home from the grocery store.

Are you aware that there are clues to tell you if a watermelon will be sweet, once you have cut it open? The secret is in the seeds. If the seeds are mostly black, the melon will be sweet while if there are more white seeds than black seeds, the melon will not taste sweet at all. The black seeds are the pollinated seeds, while the white seeds are not pollinated. Of course, some varieties of watermelon are seedless so you have to taste the melon to know how ripe it will be.

Discuss the importance of pollination with your child. Help him/her to understand that without the pollinators visiting the blossoms, the fruit would never develop or ripen. One third of the foods we eat require bee pollination to produce fruit.

For the scientific minded nature lovers who enjoy documentation and record keeping, you could keep records on the quality of the watermelons you eat. Collect the seeds and separate them into two groups, brown seeds and white seeds. Then chart the ratio of pollinated seeds along with with a sweetness score you assign to each melon. By the end of the summer you can observe for yourselves the importance of pollination for getting great tasting melons.

In addition to the fact that watermelons taste good and they can teach us about pollination, they also provide other simple recreational benefits as well. How many of you can remember seed spitting contests while eating watermelons? The challenge is to see who can spit the seeds the farthest. This is obviously a sport for outdoors, another benefit of eating watermelon – the motivation to get outside and enjoy the fresh air and sunshine. And with all that watermelon seed spitting, who knows, you might get a pleasant surprise next summer with a volunteer watermelon plant growing in your yard.