Off the Mark by Mark Parisi for August 31, 2023

outsourced

They are artificially exterminated.

I always wondered that as a kid, too. Later when I started gardening on my own I found out. When you purchase “seedless” watermelons you get a packet of seeds and another packet with 5-6 fertilizer seeds.

They are those poor little white seeds.

Now I go one step further and buy rindless pre-squared watermellon. I wonder, who is getting the rind ?

Elsewhere: He just hit the Jackpot!

Seedless watermelon? I though spitting seeds was the point of watermelon in the first place.

A rather seedy enterprise sold that fellow a watermelon. lol, lmao, yuck yuck, etc…

Fruitless attempt at humor?

I don’t think I want to live in “Elsewhere”. Is that in Ohio?

And here I thought seedless watermelons were the result of giving watermelon vines vasectomies.

This comic is pretty seedy.

If watermelons grow from seeds and seedless watermelons have no seeds, shouldn’t seedless watermelons have died out eons ago? It’s like a vasectomy; that’s the end of that tree branch.

Eh? How?

I know they’re supposed to be seeds but my first thought was oh no the ants found the watermelon.

Kinda like seeded and non seeded rye bread.

When I was a kid working at my uncle’s grocery store (they weren’t all chains in those days) the butcher bet us he could slice a watermelon in half so that no seeds showed. …he did it. I’m still amazed.

Should we have similar worries about grapes?

In June this year I planted the four seeds I found in my slice of “seedless watermelon”. Three were white and one was, more hopefully, black) I marked the spot and I’m still waiting for them to germinate. They’d better hurry, our first frost is slated for 55 days from now.