Are these edible sunberries, or something poisonous?

I found these berries in my mom's California garden.  My mom said she sprinkled some wildflower seeds in this section earlier this year.  Since she's never grown any berries before, I have to rule out self-seeding volunteers.  So I guess these berry plants grew from seeds mixed in with the wildflowers, or they are just part of random weeds in the garden.

When these plants were growing, I thought they kind of looked like something in the solanum family (like peppers), but being a first-year gardener, my botanical knowledge was/is rather limited.  Now they are bearing berries slightly smaller than blueberries.  I remember seeing a post from The Ottawa Gardener where she talked about sunberries, which are edible, and also mentioned (in the comment section) that they are a lot similar to other wild solanum berries which may be poisonous.

Do any of my more experienced readers have an idea on what we may have here?  I'll post a few more pictures.

Here's they are, growing amongst some other random wildflowers.  The tall skinny plant in the middle with narrow leaves is something else, not part of this berry plant.

The tallest part of the berry-bearing plant seems to be no more than 2 feet or so.

This plant is less than a foot tall, but still has berries on them.

By the way, curiosity got the better of me and I ate a few of these berries.  About a dozen, to be exact.  My mom told me not to eat them, since I didn't know if they were poisonous.  So what did I do?  I first squeezed a berry (very easy, since these were slightly softer than a ripe blueberry), and tasted a tiny bit of the juice with the tip of my tongue - as if I would be able to tell what a poisonous berry tastes like.  And it tasted fine.  Not sweet like a super sweet blueberry, but not at all tart like some blueberries can be.  Sort of a mildly sweet berry with no tartness at all.  So I yelled out to my mom "it tastes okay!" and ate the rest in my hand.

That was about 30 minutes ago.  I'll let you know if I'm still alive tomorrow.

Mystery Solved - Velvetleaf

About a month ago, I was babying a plant that I thought was a Hale's Best Jumbo cantaloupe plant.  Not only that, I thought it was a bush-variety of this cantaloupe.  Now I know that I was totally and utterly wrong.  I blame everything on my first-year gardener's ignorance and inexperience.

Then this plant started flowering and setting seed pods and my more experienced readers confirmed that not only was this not a cantaloupe plant, it was most likely a weed of some sort.  Lou Murray, Mr. H. and Anonymous commented here and here that it looked like something in the Indian Mallow family.

Well, I let the plant live out its life and I'm now positive that what I accidentally grew was Velvetleaf in the Mallow family.  I found a few websites that provided lots of information about Velvetleaf.

The scariest piece of information that I learned about Velvetleaf, which is actually a pretty seriously invasive weed, is that its seeds can remain viable in soil for more than 50 years.  FIFTY YEARS!

And I grew it in a five-gallon bucket. With a stake for support.

NOT Hale's Best Jumbo

Remember when I thought last week that I had a strange bush type of Hale's Best Jumbo cantaloupe?  My readers convinced me that not only do I not have a Hale's Best Jumbo cantaloupe, I may actually have some sort of a weed.  The male flowers have opened, and the plant now has some sort of female flowers (I think), too.  I still have no idea what this plant is.  If you can identify this plant from the flowers, please let me know!  If I really spent the last two months babying this plant that turned out to be just a weed, I might as well know what it is.  Thank you for looking!

Open flower.  The flower buds all look orange, but the flowers are actually yellow.  They only opened for a few hours during the day.

Orange flower buds, and these new things that may be some sort of female flower and/or fruit?

More close-ups of these new female flower/fruit things

The whole plant

Hale's Best Jumbo - Bush Type Cantaloupe?

About seven weeks ago, Keith and I met a guy through craigslist who gave us some of his gardening stuff, including some light fixtures, florescent light bulbs, dozens of small plastic pots, and lots of leftover seeds.  He told us that he had an accident several years ago, and he took up vegetable gardening as a part of his head injury rehabilitation process.  He said that vegetable gardening really helped him a lot, but now he wasn't able to continue for various reasons and he wanted to give his garden stuff away to someone who could use it.

Of all the stuff, I was most excited about my windfall of various seeds.  Unfortunately, the germination rate of some of these seeds were terrible, probably because the guy kept them in his storage unit for a couple of years before finally giving them away to us.  Only one out of the seven cantaloupe seeds germinated, and none of the seven watermelon seeds germinated. 

When I sowed these melon seeds, I knew it was probably way too late in the season to have a realistic chance of getting any melons.  But I was curious about whether the seeds would germinate at all, so I had to sow them.  When one seed germinated, I couldn't just toss the seedling away, so I'm growing it.  I will still be sad if/when the first frost kills the vine before I get any melons, but I guess that's the price I'm willing to pay to satisfy my curiosity.

The germinated cantaloupe (technically it's a muskmelon) variety is Hale's Best Jumbo, and the plant is growing more like a small upright tree and less like a typical melon vine.  The seed envelope does not have any indications, but is it possible that this variety is a bush-type?  Do bush-type cantaloupe or muskmelon varieties really exist?  Google search tells me that they do, but I could not fine any images of bush-type muskmelon plants.  Maybe mine will be the first one on the Internet!

Bush-type Cantaloupe Plant on 8/21/10 (Day 49 after the seed was sown)

Cantaloupe flowers on 8/21/10

Update:
Many helpful readers of this blog left comments on this post saying that this is most definitely not a Hale's Best Jumbo cantaloupe plant.  Not only that, it's most likely a weed.  How the seed got into the cantaloupe seed envelope, I'll never know.  It's also possible that a random weed seed just landed right in the middle of this five-gallon bucket at the same time that I sowed the cantaloupe seeds, and this plant started growing.  We're trying to figure out the identity of this plant.  It has been further discussed in another post: NOT Hale's Best Jumbo.