Dixon Melons
After 21 years of harvesting and selling melons, Harley
Hettick still isn’t sure who’s more hooked on them: the area
livestock or the Montanans who line up in droves at farmers’
markets in the late summer for Hettick’s cantaloupes,
honeydews, and watermelons. Every year in the picking
season, the neighbor’s cows, desperate for free handouts,
come right up to the bed of the pickup truck where the crew
loads the melons. “Those cows are so addicted to the things
that sometimes we have trouble driving the truck out of the
field,” said Hettick when I spoke with him in mid-May at his
farm in Dixon, Montana.
And no one, beast or human, is above a little friendly
jostling for position when Harley starts dishing out free
samples. During our conversation, Hettick laughingly
recalled a time when one of the pickers rolled a melon down
a hill to a solitary, patient cow. Before she’d gotten too
far along on her snack, a horse darted over and bit her in
the hindquarters. The cow bolted and the horse made off with
the melon. Eager shoppers at farmers’ markets across Montana
have been known to act in a similar fashion when one of
Harley’s pickups rolls into town. “Have you ever been to one
of those markets?” Hettick asked. People get to pushing and
shoving.” Who can blame these anxious eaters? By now almost
everyone knows that Hettick’s Dixon melons are one of
zestiest treats to be had in Montana in August and
September.
The secret to harvesting the best melons around? As one
might expect, that’s a little more difficult to get out of
Harley than one of his many stories, but if you listen long
enough it’s no great mystery. The family abides by a
time-tested process and, crazy as it sounds, trusts in
Montana’s weather, which, aside from the occasional early
frost and last year’s inexplicable hail storms, has been
pretty good to them. And, of course, they don’t pick the
melons before they’re ready. “The last 48 hours is when they
really load with flavor and sugar. It’s the hot, dry days
and the cool nights,” Hettick said.
It’s also the expert husbandry of Hettick’s step-sons Faus
and Guy Silvernale. They do nearly all of the heavy work,
which begins in mid-April when they clear 18 acres of field
for planting. All of the seeds come from various experts
throughout the US and are sent to a greenhouse in Florida,
where they take root before they are shipped to Montana.
Each of the small plants, or plugs as they are called, will
produce four or five melons. At the time of our interview,
the plugs had had already begun arriving at the farm. “We’ve
got about 7,500 in the ground already and we expect about
15,000 more to be showing up any day now,” said Guy, 27.
Working together, the brothers can plant about 9,000 plugs
in a day.
 This
year they will plant over 40,000 of them. Most of the plugs,
almost 30,000, will yield the famous musk melons
(cantaloupes), but, as always, there will be other treats
and surprises. They’ll plant 5,000 watermelon plugs and
another 5,000 honeydews, half of which will be what Harley
calls “Sinful” melons. An experiment in last year’s crop,
the “Sinful” is some type of honeydew cross, but when
pressed for details Harley will only say, “They’ll knock
your socks off. Everyone who tries them loves them.” Guy and
Faus will also plant 1,500 Crenshaws and another
experimental melon, an exotic cross that Harley will test
out on his customers this summer.
Harley’s wife Joey, who is unanimously recognized by the
family as the most pugnacious weeder in western Montana, is
the business manager of the operation. According to Harley,
weeds don’t come back “for three or four generations” after
Joey’s been at them with her hoe, and Guy broke out in
uproarious laughter before he could get halfway through a
demonstration of his mom’s technique. Though she’s hell on
invasive plants, she’s sweet as pie when she deals with
produce managers and distributors. Under her leadership,
crate loads of melons find their way to major stores and
small markets in Hamilton, Stevensville, Missoula, Polson,
Charlo, Kalispell, Whitefish, and even Bozeman, to name just
the beginning of the list.
Recently Dixon Melons, Inc. (they incorporated two years
ago) partnered with Associated Food Stores so that they
could ship more melons throughout the state. But this growth
does not mean that the small family company has abandoned
its personal touch or its long-honored standards of
excellence. They still deliver their melons in their pickup
trucks to the nearby merchants, and they still stand by
their original promise. “We’ve always guaranteed our product
100%,” Joey said.
All of us, cows and horses included, can rest easy then.
More great melons are coming soon.
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