Forget about what this or that author says. Most anything you ever will want to grow will do fantastic at a neutral pH. Get yourself a soil test at a lab and check out the calcium and magnesium levels. If they are low then you can certainly add some lime to add them and lower pH at the same time, but a neutral pH is just fine for most things.

if you have lots of organic matter in the soil the ph does not matter. the ph is more important only with hydroponic. you are not growing hydro so forget it. get more compost into the soil. organic matter is what counts not ph.

The local microscopic level ph will vary with the decompositon of the organic matter. it will vary with the moisture level. the only important thing for ph is that all the elements are available to the plant. elements are available over a broad range of ph.

hydro ph is different than soil ph. you do not want to grow in soil at the best hydro ph. it is apples and oranges.

Maybe the link below will help.

Here is a link that might be useful: Soil PH for Vegetables

Concur with Justaguy and Dangold. Melons (c.melo) cantaloupes, Crenshaws, Honey Dews and Spanish melons)are are not especially choosy about pH. They grow well from pH 5.5 to 7, maybe even higher, but the highest pH that I have encountered in the east is 7.
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The water in our well tests at about pH 9. Our orange honeydew melon is growing like a weed with more melons than we can count, let alone find.

Kind of strange, pulling out a 14 year old thread to comment on this, but yes, people take pH recommendations like they're from the hand of God. Most plants really just don't care that much. It is true that nutrient availability can be compromised to some extent at high or low pH levels, but that's a fertilization issue, and can be remediated with simple soil tests.

BTW, soil naturally buffers the pH, so pH of irrigation water doesn't really pertain to what the plants see. My soil pH is 7.9, and my irrigation water is 9.2.