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Joshua Fitzwater with a 30-pound Red-N-Sweet heirloom watermelon at his father’s patch in Halifax, Virginia
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A Red-N-Sweet watermelon
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Inside a Red-N-Sweet
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Louisiana State University Horticulture Extension Agent Kerry Heafner
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The tin Lula Shurtleff's seeds were saved in that she gave to Kerry Heafner
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Red-N-Sweet seeds
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Creations from The Roosevelt featuring the Red-N-Sweet
“The rarer the better, and it doesn’t really get much more rare than this,” Joshua Fitzwater says of the Red-N-Sweet watermelon.
Fitzwater is an heirloom hunter, part of a niche group of produce purists throughout the country who celebrate the rarity of prized fruits and vegetables grown with a particular place in mind. Slightly fanatical, they have an appreciation for agricultural heritage and seeds that represent the soul of their surroundings.
Packing a high sugar level and an unforgettable vermillion flesh, considered to occupy the pinnacle of flavor, the Red-N-Sweet, Fitzwater says, is “potentially the best-tasting watermelon available in America, and it was almost lost.”
Now, the juicy, deeply hued fruit with Louisiana roots that made its first appearance over 30 years ago is being revived in Virginia and finding its way onto local food and beverage menus.
After scoring seeds last year, Fitzwater, along with his father, Anthony — who has been recognized for his green thumb with giant Bradford watermelons — are growing and harvesting the sinfully sweet fruit on a family property in Halifax, ensuring that the once forgotten seeds are available again to heirloom growers and farmers.
“If you would’ve told me I was going be growing hundreds and hundreds of watermelons with my 70-year-old father, I would’ve told you that you were crazy,” Fitzwater says with a chuckle.
Fitzwater, a photographer and food journalist who founded the hyper-local Southern Grit magazine, says that after trying a Moon and Stars yellow-flesh watermelon five years ago, he and his partner, Deb Freeman, managing editor of Southern Grit and host of the podcast “Setting the Table,” have made it their hobby to find and taste as many heirloom varieties as they can. Their list is somewhere between 40 to 50, including everything from the Iraqi Ali Baba to the Arizona Ancient Crookneck grown by Indigenous people.
But it was a Facebook post from Kerry Heafner, a Louisiana horticulturist and heirloom enthusiast, that led to Fitzwater embarking on an almost 2,500-mile round-trip trek from Richmond to Calhoun, Louisiana, to secure the Red-N-Sweet seeds.
On learning of their existence, Fitzwater says, “We had to go down there.”
Following a speech about heirloom apples at the Marion Garden Club in Union Parish, Louisiana, Heafner says, he became acquainted with the seeds after being approached by a woman named Lula Shurtleff.
“This little lady from a little town came up and said she had something I might be interested in,” Heafner recalls.
She was right.
Shurtleff had been stashing seeds for decades in a Puerto Rican cracker tin tucked away in her freezer. The collection included what were thought to be Calhoun Sweet seeds from 2001, 2003 and 2006. After successfully germinating them, however, Heafner discovered that they were, in fact, seeds from the cherished Red-N-Sweet.
“She had gardened and farmed all her life; these older folks know how to take care of seeds,” says Heafner, a horticulture extension agent for Louisiana State University.
Employing the help of Louisiana growers Indian Village Harvest Farm, Belle Haven Kids Farm and Compton Farms, Heafner has been working to bring back the crop since last year.
The Red-N-Sweet watermelon was originally developed in 1987 at the now-closed LSU AgCenter Calhoun Research Station in Ouachita Parish and bred specifically for cultivation in that part of the country. It possesses the genetic makeup of other watermelons grown at the station — the disease-resistant Calhoun Sweet, along with the Calhoun Gray, Louisiana Queen and Summit varieties.
Once the experiment station closed and there was a consumer shift in desire for seedless varieties, the Red-N-Sweet nearly disappeared.
“The center was open from 1888-2011. All this work went on that is going to be lost to time if [we’re] not careful,” Heafner says. “The goal is to not let this stuff slip into oblivion like it had; hopefully we can reintroduce these things and they can catch on.”
Most of the watermelons we know today have traveled thousands of miles, shipped across the country and stripped of their true spirit. Grown with their ability to travel and commercial appeal in mind, profit and production have come to be favored over taste and tradition. Simply put, they don’t make ’em like they used to.
“This watermelon stands as a marvel of what’s possible when real American farmers and doctors come together and breed fruit, and perfect fruit, in a way that is done for taste and that area,” Fitzwater says. “It speaks to the talent and quality and care that was put into growing really great [produce] for that community, and this one is really, truly special in terms of taste.”
Fitzwater has been delivering 20-pound pricey delights to interested chefs and brewers in Richmond. Red-N-Sweets can be found in Jouble Jeuce, a juicy sour beer from Benchtop Brewing, or bruleed with preserved kumquat, snap peas, amba, formosa and sun tea vinaigrette at The Roosevelt.
In Hampton Roads, where Fitzwater and Freeman lived previously, the watermelon has made its way into a cocktail at Norfolk’s Crudo Nudo restaurant, a molasses sauce at the Williamsburg Inn and barbecue at Redwood Smoke Shack.
Selling the seeds online, with hopes of the melon’s resurrection and long-term appreciation, Fitzwater says, “I’m pretty confident if Kerry had not had that woman come up to him … I think it may have been lost in time. More than anything else, it’s telling the stories of people that did great things in the past that people don’t know about. One of the key components is recovering our history and letting people know what’s possible now.”
