which plants do you not manage to grow or find difficult to succeed(despite trying)

Creating this topic for fun, i can think of several plants i have sown from seed without much success.
First on my list is the asian winged bean (psophocarpus tetragonolobus).
I tried two or three times, with soaking, scarifying the seeds and so on and 0% germination

Second cherry trees from seed. The last 3 years i tried with 500+ cherry seeds to grow them from seed. I stratified them, in the fridge and outdoors in draining soil, and got 2 plants only after i desperately cracked them open with pliers, having watched some youtube videos on the subject, and then placing them in moist tissue paper at room temperature. I find them really hard to grow from seed. A friend of mine told me he ate nice cherries with his son, puts the seeds in a pot with soil and the next spring he had plenty of seedlings. I tried 3 years in a row with very little success. If anyone can enlighten my ignorance please let me know.

Third, parsley i find is a tricky one too. Germinating takes a long time and seems irratic.

Fourth, turnip-rooted chervil (chaerophyllum bulbosum) is another pain to grow from seed but SO DELICIOUS!!! And then if you do manage to get a miserable few to grow, they make the tiniest roots. No wonder they are really expensive!

Fifth, Maca  (Lepidium meyenii) Same as for the turnip-rooted chervil, albeit much less delicious, but REALLY HEALTHY!!!  And yes, tiny roots......

What plants are giving you a hard time when you try growing them?

The English saying about parsley is that it "goes to the devil and back" before germinating, and to allow at least 14 days and expect low germination rates. I had a supermarket flat-leaf parsley that I planted out, and it self-seeded itself all around my neighbourhood, So they will grow from seed, but seem to prefer to find their own place.

Cherries might depend on the variety. The wild sour cherries grow freely from seed here in East of England, but I haven't managed to get any seedlings from my sweet cherry (variety Stella, I think).

head cabbage
brussel sprouts
head lettuce
corn

I've moved to collards to replace cabbage, abandoned brussel sprouts, or any actual lettuce. I use a mix of mustard, kale, and turnip greens for salads instead of lettuces. My neighbor does fine with corn. Even from the same seed packages, mine do poorly. A miniature popcorn and sorghum do fine for me though. Go figure.

Jane Mulberry wrote:The English saying about parsley is that it "goes to the devil and back" before germinating, and to allow at least 14 days and expect low germination rates. I had a supermarket flat-leaf parsley that I planted out, and it self-seeded itself all around my neighbourhood, So they will grow from seed, but seem to prefer to find their own place.

There is another saying about parsley in England, which is "Parsley grows best where the woman wears the trousers"  I find that parsley grows best when germinated inside at around 25C it comes up pretty fast then. But a good cheat is to buy a small pot of parsley from the supermarket, tear it into 4 or 8 and plant out the little clusters.

As to things I cannot grow,
Cauliflower. mine are pathetic,
Jerusalem artichokes yes the unkillable things, mine are dead.
Celeriac I got good ones this year, but the seedlings were a gift, when I try from seed I get something marble sized.

My son has the ability to grow anything. I mean I used to laugh when he'd shove his citrus seeds in one of my houseplant pots but darned if we don't have enough citrus trees I'm officially giving them away. I should make him take over gardening.


I find absolutely everything difficult to grow. Everything.

There is also a german saying about parsley "Petersilie bringt den Mann aufs Pferd, die Frau aber unter die Erd" meaning:
Parsley will put the man on the horse, but the woman under the ground.
Implying, maybe, that parsley might be more of a man's herb than a woman's, since parsley, in high doses was used to cause abortion/miscarriage with unwanted pregnancies in the past.

This raises the question whether male (better for men) and female (better for women) herbs exist.
I guess starting this would totally digress the point of the initial post but it's an interesting point.
Classical herbal knowledge talks of ladies mantle (alchemilla mollis) and chaste tree (vitex agnus-castus) as being powerful mainly "feminine" herbs,
whereas this german saying about parsley that i found in a herb book seemed to say that women shouldn't eat too much parsley (even without talking about being pregnant) but men can indulge
without any problems, quite the contrary.
Also chinese medicine says that traditional ginseng is much better for men than for women.
So apparently there is herbs "better" or especially for women and herbs "better" or especially for men.
It's all very interesting, and don't look to me for answers because i know nothing.
All i can tell you is that when i eat vast amounts of parsley it makes me feel very good and it energizes me.

I also find parsley difficult.  But I prefer lovage and it is massive and happy and comes back every year no problem, so I just use it instead.

Scorzanera (sp?) I have tried a few times, and it seems like the seeds just never germinated; too bad because I thought it would be a great perennial vegetable.

Twice I tried to establish asparagus beds which foundered.  I think that I did not bury them deep enough.  I was relying on instructions to "hill" the dirt over the crowns, but my soil just does not "hill," it just washes back to its own flat level.

Both sweet potatoes and sweet peppers never quite reach their peak in my yard; not enough hours of sun before fall, I guess.  

I've had trouble with chives. Three packets of chive seed, zero chive plants. I'm trying again this year.

For me, it's:

Cabbage
Celeriac
Carrots (I hate germinating them. Every year my sisters ask me to grow carrots!)



Most everything else, thankfully, has been fine

I have three reasons why things don't grow:
* Slug pressure (like really, really high)
* Short season/late frost/shady garden (because of surrounding buildings) due to my latitude
* Soil conditions

This means that I have difficulties with:
Peppers (reasons 1 and 2)
Cauliflower (I guess soil, but I managed to grow some small heads this year, yeah!)
Egg plants (mostly get eaten by slugs and then the season is over)
Broad beans, which is almost a joke as everybody says they are easy! I guess they don't like my soil which stays very cold and compact in spring

Oh so many!
I sort of gave up on annuals a bit when we came here.  This was due to pressure of work (of various kinds) and slugs.  Once you've got perennials started they are much less trouble.  I'd rather fail with Oca than carrots, it sounds much more impressive!
I still do a bit in the polytunnel but in a slightly chaotic way.  I like to have a tomatoes - cucubits - legumes - sweetcorn rotation going, but due to my short season, acid soil, slugs, lack of soil nutrition, and lack of effort this was the first year the cucubits did pretty well. I'm still trying to repeat the success I had one year with sweetcorn.  They just don't seem to germinate well for me, and if they do they just sit there at 8 inch tall!  I wish I could remember what variety they were.
I've tried twice to germinate Korean pine seeds and have one seedling out of about 12 seeds.  So many exciting shrubby seeds just come to nothing, but I keep on trying.  I now have a couple of Gevuina avellana the third year trying : they seem to thrive more on neglect by me!  This year I'm hoping that the Shepherdia argentia will germinate.....and that the harder winter than we've had for a while doesn't kill my seedlings.

Yep, cherries! I grew lots of peach, apricot, apple, and even two lemons from seeds, but not one cherry out of dozens buried indoors, outdoors, three different years. Of other tree seeds, I've had poor luck with acorns and beech nuts, and fine luck with Robinia (black locust) and Albizia (mimosa). No luck at all with currants but hoping I can get some cuttings. No luck with hardy kiwis and sadly no plants I've heard of in my region to get cuttings from.

Parsley gets much easier once you've let the first couple go to seed and collect your own seed. That way you'll get some self-seeding, OR your seed is fresher than what you bought (I read that parsley seed goes unviable soon), OR you'll have a much larger amount of seed than one skimpy packet so you can seed more thickly.

Escarole, chervil, pansies didn't germinate for me at all. I'm so curious about how chervil tastes!

Nettles and mulberries both have tiny seeds and seedlings, and both I lost several tries over 4 years where they germinated but I took my eyes off them for a second and they dried out, but finally I've got both growing.

Actually petunias were the same: powder-like seeds, very hard to start and keep alive, but now I've two in a pot indoors, surviving over the winter!

I seem to struggle with things that are supposed to be easy. Comfrey, cucumbers, radish. They all usually end up growing, just slowly, or funny or whatever. I've successfully grown cucumbers once in ten years, a Lemon and Armenian white.  

Philip Heinemeyer wrote:Creating this topic for fun, i can think of several plants i have sown from seed without much success.
Second cherry trees from seed.

Third, parsley i find is a tricky one too.

I've never been able to help a cherry tree survive. I have gotten two seedlings, which promptly died. Like you, I had to crack the seed to get that much. It was actually interesting--I think there must be a lot of inbreeding in those populations. One of the two seedlings never had any level of chlorofil. It was in full sun and stayed white until it died.

I tried for years to start parsley. I got one plant to survive, it went to seed, and now it's a weed. I've found that with a lot of things--If I can get one to survive, it goes to weed.

I've had a hard time with basil, lavender and marjoram.

I have two vegetable gardens not too far apart but with extremely different soils. The sandy loam or is it loamy sand (closer to sand than loam) garden I've had multiple fruit trees die (probably giving up on fruit trees there) and most years tomatoes do poorly. Fortunately I've stopped growing tomatoes there and grow them in the heavy clay garden where the tomatoes generally do well.

The heavy clay garden is not nice for carrots. Maybe someday after years of mulching, composting and cover cropping the soil will be ready for carrots.

Once you let parsley go to seed you'll have all you need. I never had much problem starting them indoors and transplanting though they always take a minimum of three weeks to germinate

In my current garden I have had a very difficult time growing beets. They take forever to make a pathetically small, woody root. I think my soil is deficient in some micronutrient they need (boron?). This year I added some glacial rock dust and biochar, and I will fertilize with liquid kelp and see if that helps.

For the past 2 years I've also tried and failed to overwinter red cabbage. They grow slowly, never head up and just bolt in the spring. This year I'm trying January King instead since it sounds like the most reliable variety for overwintering.

I've also never managed to grow a great basil crop but I think that's pretty normal for my region. They seem to need humid heat and warm nights.

Krystal Comerford wrote:In my current garden I have had a very difficult time growing beets.

I've also never managed to grow a great basil crop but I think that's pretty normal for my region. They seem to need humid heat and warm nights.

My beets were small before I started to mulch.
Now I take care that they are mulched and planted quite closely so that the soil never dries out. I have much better harvests now, and also see an improvement with the added humus due to mulching.

Regarding basil, I keep them as underplants in my big tomato pots that are located under a shelter and against a south-facing wall. Beautiful plants and no slug damage!