Hami melon harvest at Sandstone Marketing's fields in Huron, on the… (David Karp / For The Times )
In California, melons are a highlight of the summer breakfast table. In Central Asia, they are a cultural obsession. And that has made for some interesting cross-pollination.
In Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and China's Xinjiang region, hundreds of varieties ripen to perfection in the region's hot, dry summers, producing ultra-sweet, luscious fruits with unexpected flavors such as gardenia and vanilla. Melons overflow the bazaars and are piled by the roadsides. They are celebrated with special holidays; consumed for their medicinal properties; cooked, dried and even stored for the winter in special melon houses.
The inland California climate is fairly similar to Central Asia's, and even before the breakup of the Soviet Union, immigrants arrived in the U.S. with melon seeds from their homelands, in hopes of propagating familiar varieties and flavors, both for nostalgia and profit. They soon found, however, that along with the superb qualities of Central Asian melons come formidable challenges. Sometimes it has seemed that a curse has shadowed aspiring growers.
One of the first and most persistent farmers was Mohammed Saleh, an ethnic Tajik born in 1941 to a family of melon growers in Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan. He joined the Afghan army, then the mujahedin fighting the Soviets in the 1970s. He was wounded and sent to India for treatment of an injury. In 1982, he ended up in San Jose.
He brought with him melon seeds from Kunduz, which he planted in his yard. They produced large, elliptical fruits with striped, netted rinds and sweet, crunchy, juicy white flesh.
Over the next decade, he selected the most promising types. He eventually focused on the celebrated Asqalan variety, considered his country's best, but only succeeded in producing a high-quality crop when he relocated his Kunduzi Farm to a hotter area on the northwestern edge of the San Joaquin Valley, in Vernalis, west of Modesto.
Even there, it wasn't easy. He found that his plants, like many Central Asian melons, are much more susceptible than standard American varieties to fungal diseases such as powdery mildew.
The melons sometimes arrived too ripe to sell to stores, said Dennis Weiss, Saleh's former wholesaler at the Los Angeles produce market. The huge size of the fruits — 10 pounds is typical, but some weigh up to 50 pounds, too large for shopping carts and refrigerators — was also a problem for retailers, he added.
Saleh formed a partnership with a local farmer, Bill Alderson, and planted as many as 100 acres, but this proved too much for the limited market.
"We had melons coming out our ears," Alderson recalls.
Four years ago, Saleh returned to Afghanistan to visit family and friends, Alderson stopped farming, and the Afghan melon deal seemed defunct.
But recently Saleh returned to California, where his love for the melons of his homeland drove him, at age 69, to grow them again. "A lot of people were calling him, asking when the next shipment would be, so he finally gave in," says his son Mallik, who is helping him with the farm.
Saleh obtained a fresh supply of seed, made a deal with another farmer in Vernalis to plant 20 acres, and last week his Afghan melons were back in the market, going out to ethnic stores such as Jons Marketplace and Super King.
The Uzbek melon
The melons of Uzbekistan are as diverse and highly reputed among fruit lovers as the cheeses of France, but one type, typically sold in California just as "Uzbek melon," has created the greatest sensation, in more ways than one. Oval in shape, it's supremely sweet, aromatic and delicious. It has a greenish or tan netted rind and creamy, melting white flesh that turns to orange at the center.
"In our taste tests, the Uzbek was No. 1, hands down," says Richard Molinar, a Fresno County farm advisor who has compared several dozen melon varieties in test plantings since 2005. "I became infatuated with its floral aroma, but its shelf life was poor."
The melons started arriving here in 1993, when investors who had emigrated from the former Soviet Union put in experimental plantings of Uzbek melons in the Fresno area, which grew by 1998 to some 200 acres. They hoped to make their fortunes selling to fellow expatriates, but pests, overplanting and inadequate marketing led to financial fiasco, disputes between the investors and allegations of embezzlement.
As recounted in a 1998 Fresno Bee article headlined "Melons & Murder," near the end of a disastrous season in which many of the Uzbek melons were left to rot in the fields, an intruder shot and killed one of the investors, Raisa Altman, 67, just inside the front door of her home in Pacific Palisades. Though the murder remains unsolved, police believed the killing was connected to the troubled business.
Cultivation of Uzbek melons in the area faded away after that, Molinar says. "People got scared."
