cucurbits

The skin of cucurbits is usually fairly high in cucurbitacins (usually much higher than the flesh).

Native Americans selectively bred other cucurbits, so it's not entirely unreasonable to think they could have created a watermelon-like fruit.

Sure, cucurbits and solanaceous crops and prone to humidity / water induced fungal attacks.

But those pests tend to be specific to cucurbits (or Cucurbitaceae, including melons, etc.).

I just don't see any benefits beyond companion planting with a groundcover crop like cucurbits, which would be far easier to mechanize.

Ragweed is an asterid and has basically no meaningful botanical relationship to any of the plants you listed (outside of all being dicots), which are all cucurbits.

Three things (from my experience at our little market garden farm): Cucurbits (squashes, gourds, pumpkins, zuchinis, etc.) are heavy feeders.

For sure, right now outside it's bee heaven because I have a lot of cucurbits in flower all over the gardens (uh, anybody want cucumbers and pumpkins?

In contrast the acre of food forest might not produce any corn at all, or it may contain four or five or more species of it, as well as fruit and nut trees, bananas and plantain plants, climbing fruiting vines, berry bushes, root crops, flowers, cucurbits, bamboo, etc.

In an interview from the 1980s, Art mentioned that the University of Arizona called his find a “true American Melon” and that he had been told that it was perhaps an ancient cross of different cucurbits native to the U.