Watermelons Trending In Central Florida

Watermelons are a way of life for Joe Willis of Wimauma, FL. He started growing them on the family farm with his father and grandfather as a pre-teen, then produced, harvested, and marketed melons on his own as a teenager, selling them to produce stands from Tampa to Sarasota.

Photo by Debbie Clayton

Photo by Debbie Clayton

Now 39, Willis is the sole proprietor of JFKW Farms, growing 150 acres of watermelons and 65 acres of tomatoes. “At one time, I was the only commercial watermelon producer in Hillsborough County,” says Willis, who left the farm briefly after high school for a stint in the nursery business, but returned to farming in the mid-1990s. “Now, I’m one of the smaller growers in the area.”

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Watermelons tend to be more consistent and less expensive to grow than other specialty crops, he continues. But success depends largely on proper inputs and planning. “A good plant is the key to a good crop,” adds Willis. He grew three varieties this past season — Revolution, Fascination, and Exclamation — purchasing transplants from LaBelle and planting them in early February into black plastic.

“A lot of folks are getting into smaller melons these days,” he notes, but as a grower, we make our money based on tonnage. Revolution is an oblong, seedless watermelon with good color and decent yields, since it’s a little bigger. But Fascination and Exclamation round out the crop, so to speak, providing variety.”

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Willis irrigates with both seep and drip irrigation, running water through man-made ditches in the row middles early in the season, then switching to drip tape mid-season. At that point, drip irrigation helps conserve water by keeping moisture at the base of the plant, where it’s needed.

Plant Feeding And Protecting Pollinators

“I’m a little ‘old school’ since I believe in putting dry fertilizer right in the bed and giving the plants what they need from the start,” Willis says. “Some people are big on liquid fertilizer, but we put a starter mix right in the bed, giving the crop about 70% of what it needs when we lay the plastic. We change to liquid fertilization after we rotate to drip irrigation, adding micronutrients based on tissue samples.”
Because pollination is so important to his watermelon crop, Willis contracts with beekeepers each year to bring in hives in early March during the critical pollination period. In past years, he’s also pollinated the crop with bumblebees, purchasing from a Michigan supplier who ships bees to him in pallets.

“They come in boxes with portholes so they can fly in and out,” he says. “We set the boxes up in the fields with lean-tos to provide shade. It’s a great symbiotic relationship.”

To protect the bees — and the environment in general — Willis tries to use as few harsh chemicals as possible. He favors applying biopesticides wherever possible. Willis has experimented with his watermelon disease-prevention program where he applied Double Nickel LC (Certis USA) on a 35-acre block of Fascination watermelons at the rate of one quart per acre in the set water at transplanting and again 30 days later.

A broad-spectrum preventive biofungicide, Double Nickel controls or suppresses fungal and bacterial plant diseases. Its active ingredient is a naturally occurring strain of the beneficial bacterium Bascillus amyloliquefacien D747.

Tomato Trials

Willis also tested Double Nickel on his tomato crop this past fall. He hadn’t grown tomatoes since 2010, but decided to get back into the crop since the market was in an upswing.

“We planted late and had bad weather for tomatoes, too, with 18 inches of rain in two weeks,” he adds. “But we had very little disease pressure.”

While tomatoes have a place in his operation, watermelons are Willis’ first love. He markets his melons through Melon 1 Inc., a Brooklyn, NY, firm that harvests, packs, ships, and sells the crop for him. Harvest winds up by Memorial Day most years and the majority of his melons are marketed in the northeastern U.S.

“The big watermelon holidays are Memorial Day, July 4th, and Labor Day,” he adds. “You can’t get more All-American than that.”

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