Cucumis melo subsp. chate
Origin: Tunisia, via San Pietro Island, South Sardinia, Italy
Improvement status: Landrace
Seeds per packet: ~15
Germination tested 12/2024: 95%
Life cycle: Annual
We're big fans of the cucumber-like melons known as "chate melons" — which are sweet, crunchy, "burpless," and never bitter — but no one is a bigger fan than our original source for this variety, Jay Tracy of The Cucumber Shop, who has amassed an impressive collective of these little-known melons. We first ordered a packet of these Sardinian 'Facussa' seeds simply because we were intrigued by the etymological connection to the Palestinian 'Fakous' chate melon which we have offered for a few years now, and because we wanted to see how similar or different the fruits are. As it turns out, they are quite distinct, but it's also very clear they're cousins — and the historical trajectory that brought this type of Middle Eastern melon (mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as "qishuim") to Italy is fascinating, even if all the details of its journey are hard to discern from where we sit today.
Obviously the name "facussa" is an Italianization of the Arabic "fakous", and oral history from the area holds that this "facussa" came to Sardinia from Tunisia. But based on the fact that this fruit is most popular in one particular town (Carloforte), on one particular island (San Pietro), off Sardinia's southwest coast, we can make some reasonable suppositions about how it got there. Carloforte was founded in 1739 by around 30 families of coral fishers (people who harvest precious red coral from the Mediterranean seafloor for use in jewelry, art and other cultural objects). These families had all originated in the Ligurian town of Pegli, near Genoa, on what's now the Italian mainland to the north of Sardinia and Corsica. But they hadn't lived there since first departing Pegli in 1541, after which they settled on the island of Tabarka, off the northwest coast of Tunisia — a place then known for its rich populations of red coral, and at the time also the site of a recently-established Genovese colony. But after nearly 200 years in Tabarka, where they presumably were exposed to all manner of Tunisian food and agricultural products, including the "facussa", they exhausted the coral supply and began looking elsewhere. An arrangement with the King of Piedmont-Sardinia, Charles Emmanuel III, granted them permission to settle on the formerly uninhabited San Pietro Island, near relatively untouched red coral. To this day, the people of Carloforte speak a Ligurian-descended language known as "tabarchìn", named after the Tunisian island where their "Tabarkini" ancestors once lived. And there is still a Genovese fort located on the island of Tabarka.
As for the differences between this Tabarkini "facussa" and the Palestinian "fakous," those are readily apparent just from looking at them: Facussa is longer, greener, and covered with a pale green-yellow dappling. Facous is much paler, with straight, darker-colored rubbing running its length. Nate started seeds we got from Jay Tracy, then handed over the starts to Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance colleagues who grew them to maturity at Ujamaa's Tayman Field demonstration farm, and then harvested the fruit and processed the seeds. Huge thanks to Ujamaa growers Kathy Anderson and Rick Carter for doing such an amazing job!
GROWING TIPS: Start seeds indoors a week or two before last frost, or direct-sow after all threat of frost has passed. Can be grown without a trellis, but may also benefit from one. Fruit are best harvested while immature for fresh eating.
