eek exploding melons from growth hormones

on the news this morning they showed photos of watermelons that had exploded from the inside out before they were ripe from over use of GROWTH HORMONES !!

sheesh...like that had any smarts involved

Melons splitting, not exploding, no melony shrapnel flying. It happens with undoped fruit too, we have just bred it out of them. From the few english articles I read it seems that they used too much of it and at exactly the wrong time (right before a prolonged heavy rain). I'd say that this is about as bad of an accident as putting too much hot chicken manure on your plants and burning their roots; It sucks for the farmers, but it's nothing freakish or unprecedented.

I can't feel sorry for the farmers.  Their greed enticed them to violate Mother Nature's rules!

it's like they cloned Gallagher...

brett watson wrote:
it's like they cloned Gallagher...

So full of win. 

well the news may have made a mistake I did hear on another forum that they said it was not growth hormones but just too much rain..i can see that happening..

apologize if this was incorrect and maybe it should be removed?

Brenda,

Do you have a link to some video?

I think it is entirely possible to have melons grow too fast and split from all sorts of organic things too.  This is where edge, in permaculture, is awesome.  You have a thousand flavors of edge and 40 melon plants growing higgledy-piggledy everywhere, so each melon plant is growing in a different edge spot.  So the odds are that some melon plants will do poorly and some will do very well.  Some will be found by Gallagher and some won't.

Here's a link to a video - sorry can't remember how to embed...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLW7JUGfn9I

It seemed to be related to using growth enhancers at the same time as unexpected rain, both of which can make fruit split.  I guess if you grow identical plants in identical conditions, then when one fails they pretty well all fail.