How did your garden grow?

That’s a first. I’ve never heard of zucchini not producing enough. I’m growing a second crop of peas, lettuce and radishes for the fall. Timing is the tricky part.

No green beans. Plants were beautiful, but no veggies. Very dissappointing.

@JLeslie Did you use fertilizer on them?

How did your garden do this year?
Lettuce was great, radishes started out good. Snap peas were best ever, green beans were ok. Zucchini, nothing. Peppers are starting to come in. Tomatoes have been crazy. I grew 5 varieties and they are all doing very well. Cantaloupe is slow and my cucumbers started off well and the plants failed practically overnight. First time growing potatoes, and it’s time to dig them out and so far they look good. Nasturtium started off slow but are flowering now. I couldn’t get ONE flower off my marigolds this year. I have to find out what I am doing wrong with strawberries. Wonderfully healthy plants but no fruit.

Kale was the biggest bust which sucks because last year it was my biggest success. We had kale soup to last the winter last year. We are in Massachusetts.

After 20 years of tinkering I think I found the right mix of crap, compost, and dirt. Now I have to get the right pH.

What did you learn and what will you do differently next season? I will stay away from zucchini and raid my father’s garden for that. I am an aggressive gardener and get my plants in the ground at least two weeks earlier than conventional wisdom dictates. This year I paid for that because the week after I planted we received 5 inches of rain then it rained for two weeks after that. Basically I was was where I should have been but at a higher cost. I will still be in the ground by mid-May rather than Memorial Day and beyond next year.

Next year my asparagus and blueberry beds will be ready too.

Third crop of peas is in now and I will be planting fall lettuce and kale as well as garlic for next spring.

I fertilized at the same rates as previous years. I will be changing fertilzers to Mother Nature’s Cuisine for the balance of this year’s feeding and see how that goes. I had been using Miracle-Gro. I do not use any pesticides.

@Adirondackwannabe The dirt I bought said it had wonderful fertilizer in it, do you think if I had added more fertilizer it would have helped? The plants were gorgeous and tall and green and full. I never saw a flower, and I think beans flower first right?

@JLeslie If the soil is too fertile the plant will produce tons of vegetative growth but no fruit or seeds. Especially legumes. Beans flower first.

@Adirondackwannabe Too fertile? So, are you saying I should not have bought earth that has the fertilizer already in it?

Too much nitrogen and the plants will be a gorgeous green, but no fruit. Were your bean plants a really dark green?

@Adirondackwannabe No, they were not dark green.

@JLeslie My bad. More intense green than other years? It’s subtle but if you’re comparing to other years what did it look like? I love a puzzle.

@Adirondackwannabe I have never tried them before. I would never call the color dark. Are we facebook friends? I might have a photo of them when they were younger, but the color is consistent. Unfortunately, about a week ago an animal ate the majority of them because I moved the plants, long story, but they had been growing for a 2–3 months already. My mind is a sieve with time estiates lately, I would have to figure out when I first put the seeds in the ground. Anyway, I would still like to know what went wrong, because I want to try again next year.

Not good. First problem was I couldnt actually have a garden this year because my back injury and god forbid someone sees me outside in my garden that somehow magically means my back isnt actually injured and I get fucked over with the lawsuit. So I was stuck with potted plants.

I started late so that was the first problem. Despite this, everything grew really fast and was doing well. Then we got a really really fierce rainstorm when I was out for a couple days and I came home to realize that I like a dumbass didnt put holes in the bottom of said pots. Good bye half my plants. So then I started stabbing holes in the bottom of them and on THE VERY LAST HOLE that I had to stab the safety on the knife failed and the knife slammed shut on my finger. Yay stitches.

I finally got my plants to recover from the root rot and what not and had some tomatoes and zucchini growing when I met the family next door for the first time. Ground hogs. Good bye veggies. So I borrowed a gun from my pop and took care of that problem. Plants where recovering and coming back then my mom ran half of them over with a lawn mower lost all my peppers. -_ -

I now have 1 baby zucchini growing and 3 little tomatoes. If I can get something edible out of them from this horrible year Ill be happy I suppose. The only thing that really did good through all this was the mint (which is impossible to kill) and stevia (which also seems pretty impossible to kill). My blue passion flowers flowered in the begining of the season and even put out a couple fruits (though barely edible) and my purple passion flowers for some reason only put out 1 freakin flower all year.

Hopefully next year goes a bit better because this year I felt like I was playing Plants vs Zombies and the zombies totally kicked my ass :P

@JLeslie I’m not on facebook. Did you transplant them or were they in a container? Beans mature at the earliest at 60 to 70 days depending on the variety. Also, were they bush or pole beans?

First garden of my life. I’ll just say, I learned that NOT everything grows in rows. In spite of my many questions, no one told me that before I planted. I will do better next year.

My garden is simply a lawn & a playground, crammed with trampolines, football goals & a self made putting green. No growing, just mowing & playing…....& maybe something else ending in….ing!

Mine did OK with some plants, not so great with others.

Tomatoes: For the first time, I planted all heirloom varieties. I knew going into it that some varieties are pickier than others, so this probably wasn’t a good choice for a lazy gardener such as myself. However, I still have a good amount of tomatoes, I’m just not flooded with them like I have been in the past. There are still quite a few coming along though! I should consider myself lucky though, because my neighbors’ tomatoes were completely dismal this year.

My bell peppers did better this year than usual, but out of six plants I’ll probably get no more than 5 peppers. Last year I think I only got two, and they were very small.

I planted two eggplants, one Japanese variety and one regular. So far only one long, skinny, Japanese eggplant. The other plant flowered a lot, but that was it.

My zucchini was disappointing too. Lots of blossoms that just fell off the plants. I’ve had two zucchini from one plant and one from the other.

Strawberries, once again, were all eaten by chipmunks before they ripened.

This was the first year I planted herbs other than basil and oregano. The oregano did well, but the basil never took off AND was eaten up by beetles. I grew the herbs in a different bed, so maybe need to fertilize better next year. The parsley got huge, but the dill got destroyed by bugs. I didn’t want to spray with anything because those two herbs were planted as host plants for swallowtail butterflies (we did find one caterpillar!). The sage is doing OK, but the marjoram…not so much.

Next year, I will go back to mainly plum tomatoes and maybe one heirloom variety. I’ll try to prep the herb garden a bit better, give up on eggplant because we really don’t even like it that much.

Oh, all the flowers I tried to grow died ages ago. Flowers hate me.

It didn’t, damn this heat!

@Judi I don’t plant anything in rows. I use beds because it cuts down on the weeds.

@birdland33 Thanks for the reminder on the garlic as I was bummed I wasn’t going to get a harvest this being my first summer with this plot! When do you plant yours?

Did anyone else that didn’t get good results notice if they had honeybees? I’m going to ask this as a question as well.

@Adirondackwannabe My beans and tomatoes bloomed and did fine so did the peppers. I do think my mistake was three fold. Overwatering, over crowding and the ones that failed were segregated individual plants. Everything that worked was next to or bunched in with a like plant. I had bees….not as much as I am used to seeing either though.

I had a few problems but we managed.

Fluther, Fluther, how does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells and jellies all in a row!

Mother was astounded she had only a handful of puny tomatoes. We didn’t notice any bees either but it’s so hot here, maybe it’s just not a tomato friendly environment.

Plants did great. We took to growing sweet potato plants by sticking chunks of the potato with toothpicks and partially submerging this in water. They grew beautiful and fast enough to plant in dirt where they bloomed into big plush greens- might be sweet spuds later.

Alas, after a fairly nice tomato harvest along with a couple of good harvests of rainbow chard early in the season, my garden has basically burned the heck up in the outrageously hot and dry summer we have had this year.

My garden has had mixed success. I think I planted all my pumpkins a bit late, but they’re finally producing a lot. The corn had trouble fully pollinating some of the ears, I think due to the heat wave that hit right in the middle of the pollination period. Lots of ears per plant, though. The beans are finally vining over everything now, and the tomato plants that I didn’t think would do well are producing.

I plan to plant some radishes and cabbage soon, and next year I’m including a bunch of zucchini and more of the Three Sisters mounds (which the zucchini will be the squash part for some of them. I’m also hoping to move this fall to some place where I can have a garden at least three times as large.