Picking the perfect watermelon is tricky! We've all been there - you're at the Farmer's market and they have a tray of samples out. You take a bite and it's the best watermelon you've ever had! So you buy a giant 10-pound melon, and after lugging it home and safely slicing into it, it proves to be mealy and flavorless. What a disappointment!

But I implore you to not give up on watermelon! Nothing screams summer more than eating a slice out of hand with juice dripping down your chin, and the kids will love having a watermelon seed spitting contest. Plus, there are countless delicious recipes featuring this refreshing summer fruit.

Some Methods for Picking Watermelons That Don't Work

Most of the methods feel more like art than science. I've heard you're supposed to pick ones that smell sweet. Maybe my nose isn't sensitive enough, or maybe it's something about the air in a supermarket, but all uncut watermelons tend to smell more or less the same. This method does work for cantaloupe and honeydew, though, because their skin is thinner.

I've also heard you're supposed to tap or knock on them and choose one with a hollow sound. I've spent several hours of my life over the years rapping my knuckles against melons in the supermarket but they all truly just sound the same to me.

I had to know what I was doing wrong. So I started doing some digging, here's what I found out.

Best Methods for Picking a Watermelon

Checking watermelons with the two-finger rule is a lot easier than rapping on the rinds or sniffing for scents. It's a quick visual that tells you immediately if it's a keeper or if it needs to be tossed back. You simply lay your two (adult) fingers over the dark area on a striped watermelon, and if the stripe is at least big enough to contain your fingers, it's probably ripe!

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the size of the watermelon didn't always correspond to the size of the stripes, either. There were big watermelons with narrower stripes, and there were smaller watermelons with wider stripes. So this wasn't just code for "find a big one."

Not quite big enough!

But I wanted to really reduce my chances of getting a dud. So I also checked up on several other ripe-watermelon-finding methods.

I ended up finding four more easy-to-try methods of telling if a watermelon is ripe, besides the two-finger method. Most of the authoritative sources out there (including The National Watermelon Promotion Board and the University of Georgia's extension service) include at least a couple of these.

They are:

Round watermelons are sweeter and less watery.
Darker, yellower "field spots" indicate more flavor than lighter, whiter field spots.
A larger section of hatches (also known as webbing, this is a group of thin lines or veins that appear on the watermelon's skin, especially around the field spot) indicates more sweetness.
Shinier watermelons are less ripe. Choose darker, duller ones instead.

Combined with the two finger rule, this gave me a lot of ways to make a safer watermelon bet.

Obviously, the easiest way to tell would be to cut it open, but since I didn't think I could just start slicing watermelons open at the store without making a lot of folks mad, I decided to give these a try.

side by side photos of the two finger test and the watermelon's field spot

Putting These Methods to the Test!

Armed with my new knowledge I headed to the store to try these methods out. After looking over the selection, I decided on the watermelon pictured above. It fit the two-finger rule, it was round and not as shiny as some of the others. And while its field spot wasn't the yellowest, it had a lot of hatching on it.

After bringing it home, I sliced it open: