Honeydew Season

Honeydew melon is available year-round in Australia, with peak supply shifting by region across the calendar. The best buying window for most of us is late summer through early autumn (January to April) when Queensland and New South Wales growers are at full swing. Through autumn and winter, the Northern Territory and Western Australia carry the load, so there's usually good honeydew on the shelves even when rockmelon supply tightens.

Honeydew is in season across winter and spring in Australia, with peak supply from July to October.

Honeydew (Cucumis melo Inodorus Group) is a smooth-rinded, green-fleshed melon that ripens from greenish-white to creamy yellow. Maturity is harder to judge by smell than rockmelon. Growers rely on rind colour (creamy or yellowish means it's close) and the blossom end giving slightly when pressed. Night harvesting is common in summer to avoid heat stress after picking, per the QLD DAF post-harvest guide. Bee pollination is non-negotiable. Honeydew flowers open for only a few hours each morning. Isolation trials that excluded insects produced little to no fruit, and most growers bring in two to five hives per hectare at flowering, per Bee Aware.

The honeydew name is the American adaptation of the White Antibes cultivar, which has been grown in southern France and Algeria for centuries, per Wikipedia. Melons reached Australia with the First Fleet in 1788 and have been grown commercially here since, according to MADEC Australia (May 2023). Today Queensland leads at 36.9% of national output (Bowen, Bundaberg, Emerald and Chinchilla districts), WA contributes 24.9% (Carnarvon and the Ord Valley near Kununurra), the NT accounts for 17.4% (Katherine and Darwin's rural areas, where the May–October dry season suits melon growing), NSW rounds out 17.2%, and VIC (2.5%) and SA (1.1%) are minor contributors, per the NT Government.