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Preorders and orders of the 016 edition of Southern Grit Magazine are now shipping.

The 016 edition of Southern Grit Magazine features a unique blend of journalism, storytelling, photography and art covering Virginia and the greater South’s historic foodways. Always independent minded, Southern Grit’s most recent magazine weighing in at 100 pages, features leading journalists, authors, historians, photographers and illustrators reporting honestly on food. Features include articles on a century old Virginia barbecue sauce available in Chesapeake, VA, a feature on Emporia, Virginia’s most important chicken muddle family to cook the historic Virginian dish in several decades, the current state of Virginia barbecue, a look at the macaroni and cheese legacy of America’s first Chef de Cuisine, James Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved chef, a feature on one of Virginia’s most important ham houses located in the Shenandoah Valley, the story of one of America’s sweetest heirloom watermelons recently saved in Louisiana and commercially reintroduced in Virginia and so much more.

SEEDS AVAILABLE

The Red-N-Sweet watermelon was released in 1987 by the Louisiana State University Agricultural Experiment Station in Calhoun Louisiana (Breeding officially credited to Dr. John Chester Taylor and Dr. C.E. Johnson at The Station). Opened in 1888, The Station would breed and develop five Calhoun watermelons, the Calhoun Sweet, the Summit, the Calhoun Gray, the Louisiana Queen and finally the Red-N-Sweet. With the closing of The Station in 2011, the rise in seedless watermelon popularity and the Red-N-Sweet’s thin rind making for poor shipping, it was nearly lost.

However, a serendipitous moment happened in February 2020 when horticulturalist Kerry Heafner gave a presentation about heirloom apples at the Marion Garden Club in Union Parish, Louisiana. At the end of the presentation, a woman named Lula Shurtleff told him that she was given some watermelon seeds she thought might have been from the Calhoun Experiment Station. Luck would have it that those seeds turned out to be the Red-N-Sweet watermelon, as Heafner that year would grow out the seeds and trial them.

In 2021, Heafner enlisted local farms, Indian Village Harvest Farm, Belle Haven Kids Farm and Compton Farms of LA to assist in the Red-N-Sweet effort. Also in 2021, Southern Grit Magazine’s Heirloom Hunters, founder Joshua Fitzwater and Managing Editor Debra Freeman, drove from Richmond, Virginia to Calhoun, Louisiana to taste the Red-N-Sweet and meet with Heafner. Blown away by the taste, Fitzwater was gifted a Red-N-Sweet watermelon and saved the seeds. In 2022, with the help of his father Anthony Fitzwater, the father and son team did a large grow of the Red-N-Sweet watermelons in Halifax, Virginia to secure seeds for other heirloom growers and farmers.

The Red-N-Sweet is as advertised, very sweet, with brix counts (sugar measurement) routinely between 11-14%. Often featuring a deep vermilion / scarlet red flesh, the fruits average 18-22 pounds, and are round to oblong with light to medium green skin and accompanying dark green stripes. Along with the vermilion red flesh, another unique characteristic is a slightly indented blossom end when the melon is mature.

From seed in soil to harvest, around 90 days.

COPIES AVAILABLE

Southern Grit Magazine Edition 013 is on sale now! This deluxe edition includes articles on heirloom watermelons, silver queen corn, the baker sweet potato, authentic Virginian barbecue, the Texas inspired barbecue boom in Hampton Roads and greater Virginia, profiles on heirloom farmers Nat Bradford (Bradford Watermelon Company in Sumter, SC), Brad Constable (Crumptown Farm in Farmville, VA), and more!

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The most ambitious print edition of Southern Grit to date, the 015 edition of Southern Grit Magazine features an in depth look at Louisiana’s Calhoun Station watermelons and the passionate people preserving these rare and extremely sweet summer treats | A delicious breakdown of how Texas style smoked sausage has invaded Virginia and the barbecue joints and pitmasters that make them best in the Commonwealth | A look inside Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley barbecue chicken culture including a visit with the family of Dave Shirkey, the creator of Virginia’s beloved style of barbecue chicken | An important follow up look into the work of Pitmasters Justin Wightman and Craig George (1752 Barbecue) as well as Alex Bazemore (Main Dish LLC) who continue to keep alive and expand the tradition of Virginia whole hog pit dug barbecues.