Redstone - Anyway to automate farming melon blocks in vanilla?

I got bored after a while and set myself these following goals:

-Build a large house on lava in the nether

-Build a huge train system powered and automated (use redstone)

-Build a huge metropolis (First on the overworld and then the netherworld) that farms food for you automatically (Farms crops), protects itself (fill dispensers with arrows and make them activated by pressure plates when enemies step near your metropolis),
have a zoo (With every kind of passive mob) and build an army of wolves to protect your metropolis.

I've done the first two and in progress of building a metropolis on the overworld (I've made an automated farm but need to build dispensers and a zoo and wolves.

Good Luck!

Building in a taiga biome is really easy with a shovel and a bucket. Just farm snow balls, make several stacks of snow blocks, build the house walls. Outline the windows and place dirt blocks where the side of windows will be. Pour water in, let it turn
to ice then remove the dirt. Repeat for all windows and finish roof with snow blocks. The windows will melt with normal torches and require Redstone torches to keep it lit.

Yes, with 3 pistons, 3 sticky pistons, 8 redstone repeaters, 20 redstone, 6 blocks of stone, 6 blocks of sand, 1 lever and 1 redstone torch, you can build a device that actually makes sand. Very cool I thought.

I located a few more notable places in this seed over the weekend:



More Dungeons: 153, 32, -111 and 213, 24 and -161

Abandoned Mine: 177, 23, -145 (not sure if this is connected somewhere to an earlier-posted mine)

Cave Spider Spawner: 214, 24, -105

Chest with Pumpkin Seeds: 215, 29, -156



As I assume most people probably know, once you find Pumpkin seeds and Melon seeds, you don't need to find more to populate an entire farm. Melon farms are the easiest, since you can take a melon slice and craft seeds from it at a crafting table. Pumpkin
farms are a little more challenging. You have to break the stem once it is mature. Breaking the stem can result in anywhere between 0 and 3 seeds. This means that, over time, if you continually plant and break stems at maturity, you will obtain more and
more seeds. I learned this over the weekend building a massive pumpkin farm (in an underwater world, a renewable source of underwater lighting,
i.e., Jack-O-Lanterns, is very useful).

Is anyone having problems with lines of redstone that just stop in the middle then when you break the line and reset the redstone it continues on like it should? Including 2 blocks away from a repeater. Also pistons that glitch out constantly either not
working or sticky ones that sometimes pull the block back and other times not. the redstone is realy unreliable.