Polyculture poser

I'm a true believer in polyculture. I over plant lots of veggies, fruit, herbs, and flowers. Most of the time I have little pets problems. When I do see signs of pest, it isn't long before a predator wipes it out.
This has been a tough year, reasons I won't bore you with.  It's made me do this in a  different way from normal.
Gophers were in my hugelkulture, so I decided to remove the above ground portion. I built raised beds with hardware cloth on the bottom so I still get the benefits of what is under ground, but have a place the gophers couldn't go. ( Maybe they could get in from above ground, but I hope not)  I decided this is a great spot to grow my melons, squash and pumpkin. Because there's room for the vines to run.  
The beds are over loaded, because that's what I do. There's 2 kinds of pumpkin, 2 kinds of watermelon, several kinds of melons, zucchini, 3 peppers, a tomato, petunias, marigolds, oregano, and calendula . Everything has been growing great. I'm super excited.  Last week I started to notice holes in the leaves. I thought oh man what a bummer. It's fate getting me back for telling people I rarely have pets. But then it hits me. For the most part this isn't a polyculture. Most of the plants growing in these beds are in the same family.  I wasn't thinking when I planted it all together. I just thought of it being a great space for them.  
Everything is still doing well. I hope the predictors come and feast on what is eating the leaves. I don't intend to do anything. I figure survival of the fittest.   It will be interesting to see if my polyculture poser can withstand the critters.

Oops, I hope at least some of them make it into your tummy.

At this point I'm not sure it was a bug, or me when I was watering. I noticed some damage the other day when I was watering. Regardless of the cause everything is doing well, the pumpkins are growing extremely well. I had no idea how aggressive and prolific pumpkin is if planted at the right time in a place they're happy.
Part of me is bummed because even though the plants look healthy I don't see hardly any watermelon, or other melons. On the other hand my daughter was out with me and we were finding all the pumpkins, and she was thrilled.  So no matter what the joy it gave us finding pumpkins is totally worth it.

It's the end of August, and the pumpkins have completely taken over. There are melons here and there , unfortunately the critters keep eating them before they are ripe.  I saw a couple of watermelon the other day, I need to make some cages and see if I can get at least one. There's aphids on a lot of the pumpkin leaves, but it doesn't seem to be doing much damage.
The amount of pumpkins is absolutely amazing.  Last year I got one pumpkin on a sad little vine.  What a difference a month makes.  They are all on the small side, but I figure that is because I didn't prune the vine, or thin the pumpkins.
Next year I will plant pumpkins on the outside to give the melons more of a chance.
I'm not unhappy though, it's fun to find so many pumpkins.

How are the gophers doing? I have lots and lots, but they don't seem to bother the plants much.

Thom I can't plant anything unprotected in the ground.  The gophers destroy almost everything I try.  Even though sometimes an entire plant will disappear, I figure they must like the roots best.  I have been experiencing a lot of damage to watermelon and cantaloupe So far I haven't seen any damage to the pumpkins.  It could be gopher, but I strongly suspect it's rats enjoying my melons.
I do have a volunteer watermelon. So far it's surviving.  Maybe I will be lucky, and it will survive long enough to grow the one watermelon.  Time will tell