Melon

Melons were introduced in Minecraft 1.8 Pre-Release, the Adventure Update.

Behavior
If destroyed, melons will drop 3-7 (average of 5.2) melon slices; each will heal one food point. This will also happen when a Piston of any kind pushes a melon block.

A melon slice can be crafted into a melon seed to be planted as a new stem.

Crafting
Melon blocks can be crafted out of 9 melon slices.

Farming
Melons will have a central stem that slowly grows until it reaches its maximum size, at which point the melon will randomly spawn a fruit next to it if the block below is Farmland, and if there is air above the stem. Melon stems take around 10 to 30 minutes to fully develop. Melons will revert the farmland to dirt when it grows. Melon stems will only grow a single melon each, and melons that grow adjacent to a fully developed stem will cause that stem to connect to it. Bonemeal will cause a melon stem to produce a melon immediately provided there is an empty farmland block to place the melon in.

For best results the farm should look like this: S S S S S S S S S S S S S S S S S           F F F F F F F F F            F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F            S S S S S S S S S            F F F F F F F F F F F F X F F F F            S S S S X S S S S            S S S S S S S S S S S S W S S S S     OR     F F F F W F F F F     OR     W W W W W W W W...etc S S S S S S S S S           F F F F F F F F F            S S S S S S S S F F F F F F F F F            S S S S S S S S S            F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F            S S S S S S S S S            F F F F F F F F S S S S S S S S S            F F F F F F F F F            S S S S S S S S F= Farmland; S= Melon Seeds; W= Water; X= Any Block All Farmland and seed blocks will become hydrated using the above methods. Wheat could be grown in the spaces marked 'X' to avoid wasting potential hydrated farmland blocks. These methods are equally efficient at 48.61%. The highest efficiency a melon farm could reach is 50%, because it takes two blocks to farm one melon. 50% efficiency could be met by eliminating the row with the water, but the melons would grow much more slowly.

History
Melons were first revealed in an IGN interview with Notch.

On the Getsatisfaction.com complete ideas for the Ideas section, it has stated that Watermelons will be implemented.