Grafting by vegetables is a practice with many benefits, but also with some unknown influences on the chemical composition of the fruits. Our goal was to assess the effects of grafting and storage on the extracted juice of four orange-fleshed Cantaloupe type (Celestial, Donatello, Centro, Jannet) melons and two green-fleshed Galia types (Aikido, London), using sensory profile analysis and analytical instruments: An electronic tongue (E-tongue) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). Both instruments are known for rapid qualitative and quantitative food analysis. Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) was used to classify melons according to their varieties and storage conditions. Partial least square regression (PLSR) was used to predict sensory and standard analytical parameters. Celestial variety had the highest intensity for sensory attributes in Cantaloupe variety. Both green and orange-fleshed melons were discriminated and predicted in LDA with high accuracies (100%) using the E-tongue and NIRS. Galia and Cantaloupe inter-varietal classification with the E-tongue was 89.9% and 82.33%, respectively. NIRS inter-varietal classification was 100% with Celestial variety being the most discriminated as with the sensory results. Both instruments, classified different storage conditions of melons (grafted and self-rooted) with high accuracies. PLSR showed high accuracy for some standard analytical parameters, where significant differences were found comparing different varieties in ANOVA.

Melon (Cucumis melo L.) is an important and valuable vegetable crop that nowadays has a 550ha cultivation area in Hungary. The use of grafting for cucurbits is a growing technique of interest to the food industry. Nevertheless, for melons the practice of grafting is not widespread, in contrast grafted seedlings are widely used by the watermelon growers. On the other hand, it should be mentioned that the food quality attributes can change, due to the grafting. Globally there are not many scientific articles available in this topic. The goal of our study is to provide a systematic review of literature with emphasis on the influence of grafting on melon fruit quality variations and the major advantages of this technique. Over the last few years, the near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and electronic tongue method became popular to measure food attributes.

The watermelon (Citrullus lanatus, THUNB. Matsum & Nakai.) is an important and valuable vegetable crop that has the 3rd largest cultivated area in open field in Hungary. Our experiment was set up in the largest and most intensive melon growing area in Hungary, at Dombegyháza in Békés County. Our investigations were carried out with the Grizzly watermelon variety and during the experiment 5 different colors of plastic mulch (purple, transparent, green, black, and butter coloured) were used, the control was uncovered. In the field we measured the average weight of the fruits, and during our laboratory measurements we examined the following nutritional characteristics: invert and reducing sugar content, refraction and acidity. Based on the results of the two years of our study we can state that the different color of the plastic mulch did not show significant differences in the examined quantitative and qualitative parameters. Using plastic mulch soil covering between the rows in the watermelon production is likely to continue due to the fact that the fruits remain clean, between the rows the soil remains weed-free, and the problem of labor shortage can be solved with this technology.