Magnificent melons

melons Nicknamed “little mouse watermelon,” this grape-sized Mexican fruit tastes like a cucumber.

Large, flat-bottomed, with a sweet, slightly spicy flavor, some consider this the king of melons! The striped fruits are small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.

The flesh of a watermelon is a thirst-quenching 92 percent water!

This rare Indian melon has fragrant flesh and stripes like a beach ball.

When ripe, this melon has spiny red skin, yellow flesh, and slimy red seeds.

Melons are the sweeter relatives of gourds, cucumbers, and pumpkins, and they come in all shapes, sizes, tastes, and colors. There are thousands of varieties, but they all grow best where the climate is warm and there is plenty of water.

These juicy fruits originally came from Africa and the Middle East but are enjoyed all over the world today. They grow on vines and have a tough skin, and there are two main types—sweet melons and watermelons. Sweet melons include honeydew, charentais,

Warty, unripe fruits are used in many Asian dishes. Hydroponics is a method of growing plants indoors in a liquid full of nutrients. It can produce more food than crops grown in soil because of the controlled environment, in which temperature, light, and humidity can be regulated. This is a good method for growing melons, which need a lot of water.

The orange flesh is a good source of vitamins.

Sweet, pale green flesh is enclosed within a thick, waxy rind.

This thin-skinned fruit can be eaten whole—rind and all.

Considered a rare treat, just two of these fruits sold for $28,000 (£21,500) in Japan in 2016.

Jellylike flesh tastes like a cross between a banana and a cucumber.

This melon takes its name from the fact that it keeps well, almost until Christmas!

Kajari, Korean, tigger, Santa Claus, Yubari King, and most of the other melons shown above. Even the odd-looking horned melon, an important source of food and water in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia, and the prickly gac from southeast Asia,

are related. The most commonly grown melon is the watermelon. It’s also the heaviest. An average specimen is about 22 lb (10 kg), but the record-breaking biggest weighed in at 350 lb (159 kg)—that’s equal to the weight of an adult male panda!