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Off-season watermelon brings smile to farmers

Our Correspondent, Khulna
Watermelons hanging from sheds is now a common sight in villages across Khulna's Dumuria upazila, where over a hundred farmers are earning profit by growing the juicy fruit in the off season.
The villagers are using traditional "gher" fanning to grow the otherwise summer fruit. They dug ponds into fields and create dykes around them, making gher or enclosures for the farming.
Md Alimuzzaman Sheikh of Gonali village started growing watermelons in his two bighas of land in May and has already earned Tk 75,000 by selling his produce.
"I was doing another business where I could not make any profit. 1 was clueless about what to do. 1 dug two ponds for fish farming. Then I came to know about off-season watermelons from the
upazila agricultural office and with its assistance, started watermelon farming," he told The Daily Star recently.
The 35-year-old had to spend Tk 20,000 for fertiliser, preparing land, and for setting up the shed inside an enclosure. He believes that he would earn Tk 50,000 more by selling rest of the fruits in stock.
"I am selling the fruits at Tk 40 per kilogram. Every day I sell 25-30 kilograms of watermelons. One watermelon weighs around four to six kilograms," he told this paper.
Watermelons were never a common fruit in Khulna, but now they are available in the local markets round the year. The varieties include sweet dragon, pakiza, sonia, asian-2, red dragon etc.
Earlier this month, this correspondent visited 10 villages,
including Andulia, Soto Bond, Kulbaria, Baratia, and Gonali, and found farmers growing off-season watermelons in enclosures.
"Watermelon is a high-value crop. It mainly grows in the Rabi season and sometimes in the late Rabi and Kharif-1 seasons as well. The sowing generally starts in May and continues until September. The fruit grows mature within 65-70 days," said Dumuria Upazila Agriculture Officer Md Mosaddek Hossain.
"We had a target to grow the fruit on five hectares in the upazila, but we have already covered seven hectares. Thirty metric tonnes of watermelons grew in each hectare. The total production will be 210 metric tonnes by end of this month."
The farmers were getting trainings on off-season watermelon farming under the National Agricultural Technology Programme (NATP) phase
-2, said the LIAO, adding, "I believe that we will be able to create a new dimension in agricultural patterns of coastal areas through off-season watermelon farming."
“Common varieties of watermelons grow between February and April while the off-season ones grow between May and September. They are more profitable than other crops," said Mirttunjoy Mondal, a farmer of Soto Bond village.
Yunus Fakir, a farmer of Andulia village, said, "Earlier we used to cultivate watermelons only in Rabi season, but now we are cultivating offseason watermelons in Kharif-1 and Kharif-2 seasons too."
An additional advantage of offseason watermelons is that they can be grown on the edge of a gher (enclosure), it can be harvested alongside fish and vegetables, said the agricultural officer and farmers.