Vanilla Minecraft/Vanilla Farming: You break the melon blocks to get melon slices
IC2 Agriculture of Melons: Crops yield melon blocks and slices. The slices are immediately useful, but the blocks need to be placed, broken, and collected.
Suggestion: In trials, it seemed that the melon always dropped 6 slices. Instead of breaking the block, I would advocate a shapeless recipe (so one could use it without a crafting bench) of 1 melon -> 6 melon slices.
Once again, a very minor tweak, but I believe a needed one to interface IC2-Agriculture correctly with all the (pre 1.3) vanilla crops.