Hugo Morvan

Artichokes and Cardoons are bastards to get out. Unless you let them outside. The heart will rot. Some seeds will sprout. That's when you know you can start pulling hairs out of the flower. Then dry everything in a carton and retrieve the seeds. It's much easier that way.

Good to hear that you make use of what does want to grow locally. Totally sensible. I've heard insect pressure in the tropics can be off the charts. They're like superhappy with all the sun, totally energized to eat whatever and multiply, multiply. Hard to battle and heartwrenching to see them in action i'd think. I mostly have snails to beat, but they come in waves eating weak plants, i just resow in between waves. Saving seeds gives me that luxury to do that for free and bit by bit my plants seem to adapt to them. I saw one on top of a newly salad, he was "sniffing" it out and decided to move on. That was a good day. I don't know if coming year will be similar. Nature can be so eratic and hard to pin down.
That's why i'm grateful to be part of this community where we can freely exchange information and together creep forward at our own pace to hopefully obtain sustainability and a new balance and way of life with the land. A copyable template for future generations to build on where ever we live. It's where my energy lies anyway, sorry to bother you with it. Haha.
I respect you've moved away from growing melons if it's so difficult and you don't want to be part of a system using pesticides. In the adaptation gardening community we're trying to do similar, using as little inputs as possible by trying different genetics and not being afraid of hybridizing siblings. Breeding the fittest/tastiest/most resistant varieties we can in differing settings like mountains, marshes,high up north to islands and forests or the opposite deserts like situations.
Leaving you with some pics of watermelon seeds and what people grew this year.

Hmmm so it's best to eat the early leaves in spring to get used to some of the unusual bitters. Maybe very shortly cook it with a bit of water. Aren't we supposed to eat something new 7 times to get to get used to  the quirkiness of new plants?
I'm going to give it my best shot this spring. Keep cutting it back until i found a way. It looks like a lump of comfrey strengthwise. It looks like something that will be very hard to kill if i don't uproot it. I've only discovered i have it growing last year, i mistook it for some weird mexican herb for 5 years that i had tasted and didn't like much, but was waiting for some use to miraculously appear. Glad i did, it's a monster now. Saddens me people don't like it.
I totally agree with somebody up here saying we're probably 'spoiled'. But that fact hasn't enticed me to try a lot of dandelion except for when it was bleached accidently with a bucket or plantpot laying about on top of it. I guess i'm spoiled rotten.

Maybe that's another idea we could try. Bury it and eat the white leaves that try to look for light or place a bucket on top or something. Make it less strong tasting that way.

I'm looking for fruit fly resistant African varieties with AI. They come up with landraces which are mostly grown for seeds and have bitter flesh. Further looking came up with this which is kind of interesting...

2. Winter Melon (Wax Gourd, Benincasa hispida)
This large Asian cucurbit develops an extremely thick, hard, waxy rind as it matures, providing excellent protection against insect penetration (including fruit flies). The waxy coating adds an extra layer of resistance. It's often stored for months due to this durable skin.

This is a link to the wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_gourd

Also i found that the yellow melon i spoke is the Canary

Grok has this to say about it:

Fruit Fly Resistance in Canary Melon
The melon fruit fly (Bactrocera cucurbitae, now often called Zeugodacus cucurbitae) is a major pest of cucurbits, including various melons. It prefers softer-skinned hosts like cucumbers, muskmelons/cantaloupes, and watermelons, where females can easily pierce the rind with their ovipositor to lay eggs.
Canary melon falls into the moderately susceptible category — not as heavily attacked as softer varieties, but still vulnerable, especially in areas with high fruit fly pressure. Here's why:

Rind characteristics: The rind is relatively thick and hard compared to many muskmelons, which offers some mechanical resistance (antixenosis) by making oviposition more difficult. Research on related Cucumis melo types shows that thicker, harder rinds (along with traits like pubescence or biochemical compounds) correlate with lower infestation rates.
However, it is not considered truly resistant or immune. Standard sweet melons in the inodorus group (like Canary and honeydew) are listed as hosts for B. cucurbitae, and infestation can occur, particularly on ripening or mature fruits. In tropical/subtropical regions, losses can still happen without management.

This is my (Hugo's) conclusion: So wax gourd, not sweet but most fruit fly resistant. Canary Melon, some resistance, but sweet. They're not in the same genus so crossing is very unlikely. Otherwise hybrids could be expected who have more waxy fruit fly resistant skin and sweeter. Not so lucky.

Same goes for the African landraces which are in the Citrullus type, it won't work. They have to be landraces from in the same Melo genus as Canary melon to stand a chance of hybridizing into a good tasting fruit fly resistant variety.
But i wouldn't know where to get those Melo landrace seeds in Africa. Where do you get your seeds from usually Nathanael?

I can't know for sure. But I got a foodhedge which I have been chopping and dropping for quite some years. The soil there has changed a lot in structure.

I gave up on non green cabbage types. They need more lime/clay. Perennial kale for me. Don't know if it will ferment nicely. Doubt it will be like sauerkraut. Lacks rubbery texture, but who knows.
Zucchini I never managed to grow until I got a lot of varieties send to me in the seed box of GoingToSeed. They were much bigger than normal zuchinni seeds.. I grew them in unmatured cowdung.
There is so much variety in varieties that it really pays off exchanging them, whatever problem you're facing with veggies. Growing genetically diverse veggies selects those that love your specific conditions. All survivors that contribute pollen go into next years seed. Growing those out will be descendants of the winners. If those keep crossing over a good few generations you'll get a super adapted strain. That's how heirlooms got developed traditionally. But because they are frrom the past heirlooms are I'll fitted to our modern diseases.
Another advantage is today's climate is not stable, late frosts can kill off crops, sudden heat waves and unprecedented droughts. Growing diverse varieeties takes care of weather weirding. And in good years all plants survive you can select biggest/most interesting looking plants. I some fruit early, others late, you stretch your season that way.
And differing colors looks great and is even more nutritious.
Seed savers sticking to mono varietal growing are missing out big time.

No, do nothing, aphids are good food for predator insects. They will come, i've observed waves of lady bugs, parasitic wasps other bugs and more waves on the peach trees. Plant more diversity in the garden and they'll find refuge closeby and be on top coming years, making an outbreak less likely. You could see it as investment against future outbreaks.

@Steve Clausen I don't know if insects eat eleagnus species. The birds sure do, so somehow it will profit the local flora by droppings and soil building. There didn't grow much in these dunes traditionally but a grass that did so poorly the government had to come in and replant it every so often or wind erosion would blow away so many sand that the dunes disappeared, creating a weak spot. The high tide and storm combined used to create sea breakthroughs creating small brakkish lakes land inwards. Precious habitat that now is disappearing. Human activity and natural disturbance create real chances for niche creating. Conservatists try to keep a naturally dynamic system stable. I'm old enough to know that once endangered species can make a huge comeback, Storks and Cormorants and foxes come to mind. Many species find their way into cities now. They overcome some fear and profit of a once unobtainable rich habitat and thrive.

I agree pesticides do a lot of damage. I suspect it's killing of soil life and bacteria so there simply is no food for life up the foodchain which is them. I try to eat as little of them as possible and i am actively creating a habitat that is biodiverse and have observed how planting biodivese creates a stabalizing insect influx and i eat eat of that landscape. But the general insect decline there is not a lot i can do to influence that. People are poorer every day and want cheap food, they want to keep unaware that spray load is getting absolutely ridiculous.

I live on very poor granite soils and hope to find inside this diverse rewilded Eleagnus population some genetic diversity that would cost thousands of dollars/euro's to obtain. The crosses nature decided to drop in the dunes would take years to achieve.

I visited a website and know that government is fully aware of this infestation, they don't move a finger. Maybe they like the soil building qualities and are the anti-erosion qualities of this plague and are studying this situation. Maybe they're lacking the resources to do so, they're not open about the plan and if there even is a plan. I'm nothing but a passionate permaculturist who's interested in the forest building dynamic these infestations seem to bring along. I see Elder popping up where there was none, i see annuals that grow in winter, i see some oaks species appearing i see other local berry carrying shrubs appearing. I'm far from convinved that this evolution is a net negative for insect populations in general in the long run. And even less convinced that fighting it by removing them is an effective way to change the situation, which it has proven many times over they're not capable of effectively removing them once established. They've poisoned whole areas in a fight against the Rosa Rugosa and mechanically removed soil and sived through it for seeds, they've spend millions and still lose that fight that maybe shouldn't have been fought in the first place.

Nitrogen fixing qualities are mostly seen as a negative while it's proven to be forest forming which is nothing but a net carbon sink which we try to create artificially. It doesn't make sense to me at all. Why do conservationist feel we can't  create forestlike situations by making use of invasive shrubs?

Wojciech great to have you on staff. Same for Nathanael!

Hi Nathanael, i know this is an old post, maybe you're growing lots of great tasting melons by now. But if not it could be of help to try to grow a mix of diverse varieties. I used to be very bad at growing melons but this year i've had succes by growing out diverse varieites from the GoingToSeed group i'm a member of. Not many in Africa are on board the Adaptation Gardening train yet, which is a great shame, because it's such a great tool to share seeds amongst varying growers at the cost of a few poststamps surpassing the industry mostly interested in scalability and selling chemicals through the backdoor to help their weak plants.
I've had one very tough melon , very yellow, snails couldn't penetrate the skin, so i guess fruit flies couldn't either. Some genetics like that could really be the difference you need. They were very late and didn't become very sweet. I suspect somebody from Mallorca had put this variety in the mix, so i'll be trying it in the greenhouse coming summer. They might have crossed with other melons at this point... Most melons looked more like the ones in your photo though and snails got a hold of them. As well they didn't like the 40+degrees celcius heatwave we had and collapsed quite a bit. Later they bounced back and gave some lovely tasting fruit.