On accepting failures in the garden

Yesterday's gardening column by Adrian Higgins in the Washington Post resonated for me:

Gardening mistakes are inevitable, even for the experts. Don’t let them mess with your mojo.

Opening paragraphs:

"For the Apollo moonshots, failure was not an option. In gardening, it’s a requirement.

And if not strictly required, messing up is certainly inevitable. When you’re dealing with dozens of plant species — each with its own growing preferences — an ever-shifting pattern of weather and climate, and your own lack of knowledge, the errors will mount.

Ideally, the mass of mistakes is confined to a few early years, and, with experience, the ratio of successes to flops grows to a point where both the garden and gardener take shape."

Like Mr. Higgins, I've had a year where some vegetables just did sprout, and planted some shrubs I came to regret.  

"Success has many parents, failure is an orphan."

Your thread is timely for me. I had a bad sleep last night that was triggered by a self-assessment of several failed or failing projects that I'm currently undertaking. I realized that I was in denial and refusing to admit my failure(s), which just creates a horrible mess in the future. Thank you for this thread. The title alone is all I needed to hear.

That was a good article, thanks Mk.

For me, the best gardening advice comes from old codgers in my local area. They've been plodding along, year after year, so they know a thing or two about what works for where I live and grow. What works for Zone 8B in the Middle Georgia area is a far cry from Zone 8B of Coastal Oregon. A kindly old gardening friend of mine once recommended Better Boy tomatoes. He was right, they do the best in my area. He was a wealth of acquired wisdom. Mr. Joe was my gardening mentor.

I've also come to believe that nothing is really a failure if you learn a lesson or two along the way. For example, I've struggled with green bean harvests the last few years. Turns out, they drop their blossoms when the air temp gets about 85 degrees. But if you can get them through the summer, they'll start producing again in the fall until the first frost. If I hadn't researched why I'd had trouble, I wouldn't have learned that I need to grow gobs of them early, and just leave them be during the hot months. This year, I've had better harvests than ever. Another example is that I'd heard growing Irish potatoes in containers would increase yield. I believed it and failed miserably with my potted taters. I learned they don't produce tubers when the soil temp gets about 75 degrees. In the Georgia summer, even our air temps rarely get below 75. So, lesson learned, I can't grow taters in pots. Back into the ground they went, and my yields increased significantly.

I've also regretted a few plants. For instance, I bought a Goji berry bush before I realized no one in our family likes Goji berries. We have a bush, and the poor thing is so unloved.

Hello Garden Buddies. Stacie, you had codgers, real codgers? Plural codgers? I would have given anything to have even one codger!! The mistakes that I hate the most are the ones that take years to recover from.

Wanted a garden since forever. Took me 30 years to finally buy my place 10 years ago and start my garden. My dream was finally coming true! The first year was so-so as expected. I was trying to grow in pulverized rock and needed to create beds and amend, amend, amend. I ate some squash and cucumbers. But the 2nd year was awesome and I don't know how that happened. I was in heaven. So I decided full steam ahead.... and that fall I made 3 ginormous mistakes all at once!  Because I didn't have a codger, just the stupid internet which is full of bad info or also as Stacie pointed out what works in one place doesn't always work in another. I'm also in zone 8b and I can't grow a Better Boy.

Mistake # 1- I hauled in truckloads of manure. And I really didn't want to put poop in my garden. Yuck! That just doesn't seem right.  The internet said you could use any old, aged animal manure so I chose horse and alpaca because they were free on Craigslist.
Mistake # 2- I made all of my beds keyhole beds and placed the compost right next to each one.....because the internet said so and I was lazy...not really... I was still working full time back then.
Mistake # 3- I was getting lots of huge bags of rotting organic vegies from a local grocery store for my compost. But suddenly they didn't have a wide variety of vegies any more, just orange rinds and carrot pulp from their juicing machines. The internet said orange rinds were fine in the compost! Yeah, right. Well, apparently not when your composting a couple of hundred pounds of them at once!

So, what happened? A fellow gardener came by a month later and told me the orange rinds were full of D-limonine....you know, ORANGE OIL which is great for cleaning or stripping paint but will not help my vegies grow. I spent 2 weeks digging out half rotted orange rinds and hoping for the best. Putting the compost right next to each bed was like putting up a sign that said ALL YOU CAN EAT to the bugs. The next summer I was overrun with earwigs. They ate everything and multiplied like crazy! By fall I figured I had probably killed about 35,000 of them. Not kidding. Got over that but the next years I was overrun by hundreds of thousands of pill bugs. I would put out a beautiful little seedling and the next morning I would just find a pile of pill bugs where my seedling had been! It took me 4 years to get a handle on those monsters!  All the manure probably contained lots and lots of Roundup so for the next 3 years if a seedling did manage to escape the bugs it quickly wilted, turned yellow and died.

Anyway, as Samwise Gamgee said to Frodo..... Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. There's some good in this world.   I have conquered the bugs for the most part and I guess I finally washed away the Roundup or it has destabilized over time into more benign organisms. My garden has finally been thriving for the last 4 years in spite of what I do to it. And it gets better every year. And yes.... IT IS WORTH FIGHTING FOR. IT'S TOTALLY AWESOME. I don't know why but I hope my sad story cheers some of you up.

Happy gardening everyone.

Debbie Ann,
Your garden is breathtakingly beautiful. I have never been fond of desert climates, but I think I could spend many hours in your little oasis. You have every right to be proud of your accomplishments.
As for codgers, I'm sad to say they've mostly passed away by now. They did things "old school", with Triple 13 fertilizers, Sevin Dust insecticides, etc. I didn't always agree with them on that, but as for what to plant and when to plant it, they were a wealth of wisdom. I hope to be the old codger someday, and hopefully people will want to hear what I've learned from both successes and failures.
I made the horse manure mistake in a raised bed one year, too. The horse stables nearby said I could come to get whatever I wanted. I thought I'd struck gold!!! After I got it all spread out in my new raised bed, the stable manager called to say, "Oh, I forgot to tell you we put some (forgot the name) weed killer down to keep down the (forgotten name) poisonous-to-horses weeds." Needless to say, that bed was a disaster. Nothing grew. I didn't even try. We sold that house, having never grown anything in it. Sometimes you get what you pay for!