Seedless citron watermelons; pie filling

[Shule]

Does anyone know a seedless citron watermelon source? Or else a tetraploid citron watermelon, so you could make your own? I've never heard of either. However, they would be extremely useful, and ought to be just as easy to make as regular seedless watermelons.

Anyway, if you want to go into the pie filling business, here's what I recommend:

Develop a tetraploid Citron wateremelon. Periodically cross it with the regular diploid to get seeds for seedless triploids.

Then, because all the seeds are gone, you can process them much easier. They'd still be tough to cut up, but you'd be saving yourself most of the labor.

Use the following ingredients for your pie filling (you can figure out the proportions yourself, probably):

- Citron watermelon flesh, cut into pices
- Brown sugar
- Citric acid
- Nutmeg
- Cinnamon

This ends up tasting something like apple pie filling, but some people prefer it. Everyone I gave it to (in the form of a crisp rather than a pie) liked it and was intrigued by it. It has firmer texture, and it has a nice flavor. It's really good.

Then, can zillions of cans of this (either pressure can it or make sure the acidity is high enough to be safe). Market it with a trendy name, and sell it.

Anyway, Citron watermelon is a high-yield crop that can grow in adverse conditions. It's actually a wild crop that is very resilient. You can get like 30+ fruits per plant^, which equates to something like 120+ cans of pie filling per plant. The fruits keep in storage for several months to over a year, unrefrigerated. Unlike regular watermelons, the unripe ones will ripen in storage (it takes a while, but they eventually turn yellowish when ripe).

^: I'm not sure how they yield in other climates.

The seeded fruits have a lot of seeds, and they're hard to remove. So, removing this obstacle could be great for food security, as well as for people aspiring to enter the pie filling industry profitably.

And if we compare it to apples, they would be a lot less expensive to grow, and could be grown more places, with fewer requirements. They're annuals, grown from seed; so, it's not like you need to buy and regularly prune zillions of expensive trees (let alone in the same ground year after year).

I'm not particularly planning to go into the pie filling industry, but if you like the idea, I would encourage you to think about it!