also when working with minor scales i tend to just purposely forget that I'm in the natural, harmonic or melodic.
I just treat the 6th, 7th and both of them raised a semi tone as scale tones and use whichever one works best for that note. Kind of like one big minor scale with all 3 minor scales put into it. It gives you a couple more options that won't always work but as long as you're confident in the notes you're picking and have some sort of common music sense, you cant really get it 'wrong'.
There have been lots of cases where I assumed i was just in the natural minor but the raised 6th was working good too, so since then ive just been combining all the minor scales into one and using whatever works.