This Melon Used To Sell For $2. A Slice. Should It Make A Comeback. It’s been a lousy growing season for Ken Taylor’s cantaloupes. The weather has been terrible — cool and wet, when it should have been hot and dry — and the leaves on the vines are browning and riddled with small holes from fungal disease. Standing on his 7. It’s late July, and there’s not much to see. Finally he spots a tiny cantaloupe. They’re specimens of the Montreal melon — a large and particularly hard- to- grow cantaloupe that Taylor saved from extinction. In the late 1. 9th and early 2. Montreal melon was considered a delicacy. It’s been a lousy growing season for Ken Taylor’s cantaloupes. The weather has been terrible — cool and wet, when it should have been hot and dry — and the. One hundred years ago this week, a secret deal was signed between the British and French that has defined Middle East politics ever since. Annabelle Quince explains. Sweet and juicy with hints of nutmeg, it has green flesh like a honeydew, but its exterior is netted, rather than smooth. According to Taylor, it’s probably Canada’s most famous heritage food.“There wasn’t a Vancouver kiwi or a Halifax oyster,” he later said. He had something else in mind: that in a world where industrial farming has reduced us to eating a tiny fraction of the fruit and vegetable varieties we used to, genes from the past might be more important to our future than anyone realizes. Ken Taylor is seen in his greenhouse, Nov. Arthur Gauthier for Buzz. Feed News. The Montreal melon would have remained lost to history if not for a simple but gnawing question that popped into food journalist Barry Lazar’s mind in 1. Orchards had once thrived on the west side of Montreal, and he learned that his neighborhood, Notre- Dame- de- Gr. The melons, which took a whole summer to mature, were huge, often weighing between 1. Butterball turkey. They were either pumpkin- or football- shaped, depending on the strain, and grown mostly by two prosperous NDG farming families, the D. Lawrence River, where there was good sun exposure and protection from harsh northwest winds. The Montreal melon in a Burpee’s catalog, 1. Mertz Library of The New York Botanical Garden. After Burpee Seeds founder Washington Atlee Burpee encountered the melons at a Montreal market in August 1. North America through his popular seed catalogue. Burpee’s catalogue described the melon as “remarkably thick . By the early 1. 90. New England and New York, where upscale restaurants and hotels put them on dessert menus and sold them for up to a dollar a slice — the equivalent of about $2. Because the melons were so large and thin- skinned, the flesh bruised easily. A woven- basket industry sprang up to protect them during transport, and they were packed in short, fine- stemmed hay. The city took pride in its namesake fruit, and Lazar says that one was sent every year as a gift to the British throne.
The Canadian Pacific Railway offered the melon in its formal dining cars, instructing staff to serve it “on cracked ice in a bread tray,” accompanied by a finger bowl. Montreal’s famous crop was so profitable that at least one farmer hired an armed guard to protect his fields at night. By 1. 90. 7 the melons could earn the farmers a couple thousand dollars per acre each season, around $4. In a 1. 90. 8 report, the USDA took note of the “melon of unusual excellence,” its “fancy prices,” and the fact that “even at such prices, the Canadian growers are not able to supply the American demand.”A menu from 1. Montreal melon. Courtesy New York Public Library. American seed companies started growing their own varieties of the melon, giving them names like Mammoth Montreal, Montreal Market, and Perfect Montreal. According to William Woys Weaver, author of Heirloom Vegetable Gardening, the Montreal melon was more widely grown in New England, Canada, and the Upper Midwest than honeydew, cantaloupes, or any other muskmelon, “not only because of its large size but because it yielded the best- flavored melons for short- season gardens.”But the melon’s heyday wouldn’t last. Like hundreds of fruit and vegetable varieties that thrived during the early 2. It wasn’t an easy melon. It required a fair amount of coddling: watering, syringing, ventilating, lifting with a flat stone or shingle to prevent cracking or rot, and turning every few days to ensure uniformity of shape, color, netting, and ripening. But perhaps its biggest enemy was urban development. Between 1. 91. 4 and 1. NDG’s population increased tenfold (from 5,0. Residential blocks, schools, and churches were built to accommodate the growth. Cars began replacing horses on the streets, and all but one of the racetracks gave way to development. Gone was the easy access to natural fertilizer for the melon fields, and the Montreal melon, Lazar says, “required a lot of fertilizer.”The area’s urbanization continued through the postwar period, and the farmers eventually sold their melon land to developers. By the early 1. 95. Burpee’s seed catalog no longer offered its seeds. He knew about a stick insect, long thought to be extinct, that had been found clinging to a rock on an island in the South Pacific; a fish that had been known only from its fossil record until 1. Indian Ocean by an angler; and a bird that was thought to have vanished from Bermuda shortly after British sailors arrived in the 1. Saving the Montreal melon from extinction might have been a long shot, but Abley figured that if anyone could do it, it was Ken Taylor. At the time, Taylor sold organic heirloom vegetables at his farm on Saturdays. Abley had shopped there on occasion and had been struck by the variety of items on display. He remembers being particularly impressed by the Cream of Saskatchewan melon, because he’d grown up in Saskatchewan and had never heard of it. It was obvious, says Abley, that Taylor had “an unusual interest in plants.”Taylor is a rare breed: a farmer with a Ph. D. At 7. 0, he’s well over 6 feet tall, with a prominent chin and white stubble. His land looks nothing like a typical farm — no wide- open fields or neat rows of crops. It’s chaotic, shady in parts and overgrown with tall weeds and wildflowers. The crops blend into their surroundings. They’re easy to miss. Taylor bought the first acre of what he now calls Green Barn Farm in 1. At the time, he’d just become a professor at John Abbott College in the West Island of Montreal — a job he’d go on to hold for 3. He’d grown up on a farm in southeastern Quebec, and he missed growing his own food. The land was all swamp and scrub weed, with a few open wells on it. A dilapidated barn more than a century old sat on the property and was used by the town’s mayor as a place to store his boats. Taylor planted hundreds of fruit and nut trees, and over the years he expanded his acreage, started one of Montreal’s first CSAs, and renovated the barn house, where he and his wife, Lorraine, held the Saturday market for more than two decades. Ken Taylor at Green Barn Farm in Montreal. Arthur Gauthier For Buzzfeed News. Taylor raised his four children at the farm and did what he could to keep them away from fast foods or foods with corn byproducts or foods imported from countries with different regulatory standards. To satisfy their desire for sweets, he baked them hemp cookies. He’s eager to share them, and sometimes does so in ways that are pithy and provocative. Nick says a typical conversation with his dad while growing up meant patiently sitting through “fun fact 9,2. And while he found it hard to bear for the first 1. He now has his master’s degree in plant science, works closely with Taylor, and plans to someday take over for him at the farm. Though Taylor took on farming simply because he wanted to grow his own food, it has evolved into a mission. He sells seeds, seedlings, and rootstock on the Green Barn Farm website, urging growers to “protect our Canadian genetic heritage.” He also partners with a Montreal CSA, Lufa Farms, to provide items for its food baskets; offers “eco- education” through workshops and seminars; and gives “Taste- n- Talk” tours of the farm. On the farm these days you can see wandering chickens, edible flowers, a grape vineyard, a pawpaw orchard, sunflowers, and tree after tree, some 6. Depending on the season, they bear black walnuts, chestnuts, mulberries, apricots, plums, peaches, and highbush cranberries, along with more exotic offerings like quince. A shady dirt path leads to a three- acre plot where overgrown weeds obscure rows of low- lying vine crops like squashes and melons. Items you wouldn’t expect to find in a northern climate thrive on Taylor’s land: bananas, Asian pears, pecans, sumac. And he thinks other Canadian farmers ought to be doing the same.“Planting seeds and pounding the soil and annually preparing it and fertilizing it and watering it and fighting whatever short- term disease you may have so that you can finish everything up in three months is not a very earth- friendly or sustainable food production system,” says Taylor. In 2. 01. 2, Canada became the world’s fifth- largest agricultural exporter — and spent $3. We’re a country of agriculture, but we can’t feed ourselves,” Taylor says. Diversity is important in farming, because planting only one crop, or one variety of a crop, leaves it vulnerable to disease. The Irish Potato Famine is a case in point. The Cavendish banana, which makes up 9. As a food grower, Taylor sees it as his responsibility to restore to his little section of earth the genetic diversity that’s been lost from it. We’ve now got cornfields and soy fields and people, so there’s no natural mixing and changing of the genetics.” That’s important, he says, because “if you take a population and let them inbreed, eventually none of them are very strong.”There’s also a critical need for diversity in how food is grown, he says. While CSAs like Lufa Farms — which grows food hydroponically in rooftop greenhouses year- round — are a step in the right direction, most innovation in farming is happening elsewhere in the world, Taylor says. He points to encouraging models such as the old London Underground bomb shelters that have been converted into subterranean food farms and rely on the Earth’s natural heat, and the food hubs in Vermont that aid sustainable local- food systems. In Canada, only 1.
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