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What's Green Outside, Red Inside, Weighs 22 Pounds...
- Bob Benenson
- Aug 13
- 2 min read
... And Sitting in My Kitchen?
It's one of my favorite local food rituals every year. I place a delivery order with Three Sisters Garden in Kankakee in August, and I receive a watermelon of incredible size that has to be power-lifted onto my kitchen counter.
Today (August 13) was my first watermelon day of 2025, and there it is, in all its juicy glory, in the above photo with a big ol' pile of shishito peppers and two pounds of summer squash. (For the record, those little round yellow ones are known as One Ball Squash.)
I have gotten good at guess-timating the size of mega-melons. I don't have a counter scale that goes as high as I need for this, so I have to get on the bathroom scale, get my own weight (none of your business!) and then have Barb hand me the watermelon. When I first picked it up, I had guessed 22 pounds... and I was spot on, right to the tenths of a pound!
If one of those online betting sites ever decides to take wagers on watermelon size, I may just finally get rich.
I will follow up with the ritual watermelon cutting — a daredevil act on our apartment kitchen counter — which will be followed by the ritual distribution of excess watermelon to friends in our apartment building, because a 22-pound watermelon is really big for a two-person household.
I also had a small haul from Green City Market in Lincoln Park, where I helped lead the first-ever Local Food Forum-Naturally Chicago market tour (I have a recap of that on Thursday). On the left are State Fair summer apples and field tomatoes from Nichols Farm and Orchard (Marengo, Illinois). On the right, yellow Saturn peaches (I'm told they taste like mango) and white peaches (which usually are much sweeter than yellow peaches).
Those apples ("sweet and juicy") are on the right, next to the first pears I seen at market this year.
And a shoutout to my friends at Chicago's Daly's Donuts. Their baked-not-fried doughnuts are yummy treats.
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