Garden Failures...

Inge Leonora-den Ouden wrote:My potatoes I planted indoors did so well. The weather was right to 'harden' them, putting them outdoors during the day. Went OK too. After some days, still warm weather, I decided they could stay outdoors during the night too ...
No, it wasn't a cold night ... not at all ... the temperatures were high enough to activate those tiny slimy bandits that liked eating all leaves off of my potato plants ...

They love to climb up plastic. Then they go down inside to hide in the mulch during the day and lay eggs. I have to scatter slug pellets in my peas which worked until it got warm enough for the cut worms.

This failure had a positive side too! One of my garden friends asked me if those plants had already grown new potatoes. I thought it was too soon, but it wasn't! I found about seven small (but not very tiny) potatoes, just enough for my lunch today!

@R Ranson, this winter was so depressing I haven't even read permies in months.  

Favas...melted into the ground.   No survivors.

Herbs: dead.  

Soil: glop.

Started peas indoors this year so they wouldn't just sit and rot.   Only just started direct seeding stuff yesterday and...well...who knows.  

I had no more room in my "plant starting" greenhouse, nor in the workshop, so I decided to start lots of snap peas in ... the cellar.
Somehow humid, constant temperature (around 13°C), I thought this could work. I had already done so with other peas and fava beans with good success.
Not this time I'm afraid. Almost all of them rotted. And the ones that sprouted got eaten by slugs who found their way through the aeration hole.
I still have a few seeds, but I won't eat snap peas this year...

I was planning to plant some shrubs in my backyard together with my other flowering plants. However, I am not pretty sure if what kind of shrubs to plant. Lol. Seeing the pictures here seems a little bit odd. I remembered my garden way back in my mother's hometown where I plant a pumpkin and after how many months, its really not nice to see though with other beautiful plants which had been planted by my mother.

Okay, this one has taken a long time to be confirmed. Last year I tried planting carrots by placing the seeds and covering them with a very light layer of composted wood chips, before the soil had cooled enough for germination. I was really excited when shortly after the first rains with a cool spell there were plentiful seedlings that looked like carrots everywhere I'd done this, and nowhere I hadn't. There's a plant here (hedge parsley) that looks nearly identical to carrots and it wasn't germinating in my yard at the same time, so I was pretty confident my planting experiment had worked. I've been watching this plants, pulling back the soil to see if the roots have started coloring up and weeding grass away from them, all winter. Now the hedge parsley in the rest of the yard is up and starting to bloom. So are my carefully tended plants. Today, I pulled them up to make room for sweet corn. Next year we may let them grow in other garden beds to harvest these roots before the plant starts flowering. As a wild edible they could be a very great success. The roots are nearly domestic carrot size. I also planted some carrots from Joseph Lofthouse, these aren't flowering so I'm confident (again) that I've correctly identified carrots in the garden. So long as they aren't hemlock, I'll post here again if they aren't carrots, either.

I did have the pleasant surprise of having another failure turn around, at least one of my olive trees actually did survive the winter. It's leafing out. I was going to cut down both trees this week, instead I'm giving the other tree more time.

John Weiland wrote:

Carrots will spank you every time....don't try to plant carrots unless you feel you are really in deep with the deity of your persuasion.  

Just found this, laughed myself silly.

I want to know what the sacrifice is to what diety to get good radishes? At home where I grew up, we had beautiful radishes. Here, mreeep. I grow beautiful lush tops. I've tried all sorts of balances of PH, soil amendments, etc (trying to starve the nitrogen to get them to make roots, etc). Nada. Not. Zip. I was up home end of April, I almost swiped a suitcase full of dirt to bring back. I'm that desperate. Ah well.

Haha Deb. I could never grow radishes when I lived in the states. (Vermont). Then for some reason I ended up with a packet of radish seeds in Kenya.  I think it was a free gift packet.  So I said what the heck, maybe I'll get some greens to eat, and randomly tossed the seeds in. Tropical Africa, and I grew the best radishes ever! Big crisp bulbs, just the right amount of bite.

But give me traditionally heat loving crops, and I'm still struggling!  Can't grow a tomato to save my life.  Am currently harvesting a handful of pods from knee-high okra, and out of 300 pepper seeds I put in the nursery bed... I got one plant.

Currently I have some absolutely gorgeous cauliflower seedlings nearly ready to transplant.  I will laugh sooo hard if I manage to grow a head of cauliflower on the equator (another thing I never could grow in Vermont). We

I got cauliflower for the first time ever a few years ago, bought plants and put them in my heated hoop (small greenhouse of pvc pipe bent to make ribs and sheet plastic) that had a rain gutter heat tape buried 12 inches (30 cm) in ground with a brooder light for air temp heating... I got small store sized heads for the first time ever and they finished just as our summer arrived. To get that size head, the plants get huge (4 feet or more across, 1.3 meters). The broccoli, same thing. I had grown it at my parent's place but the florets were small and you had to pick through to get enough, no real heads. That year it went right and I got four harvests, first heads were store sized.

Radishes. Oh well. I also can be hit and miss with okra. Knee high plants, of six plants, maybe 8 pods. Friend not that far away, seeded out of the same packet, had 7' tall (2.2m) and bursting with pods. This year at least I have seen some come up.

I have tillage radishes--ya know, the daikons that are supposed to grow giant roots to drill into soil. Mine make pitiful, skinny little roots, and they seed EVERYWHERE. But, my husband loves the radish seed pods (he calls them "spicy green beans"). Interestingly enough, the Celeste radish that I bought for my three year old's garden made perfect little round radish roots, while a daikon he planted there grew a scraggly little root. Maybe try a different radish variety?! I should see how the Celeste radishes do in other areas of the garden--it might just be we got really lucky with his garden bed, which is literally made up of duck bedding with 1-2 inches organic topsoil.

My sweetcorn has been rubbish this year.  Ok so we went on holiday for Easter, but it was germinated in its little placcy bag pots, so I gave it a good drink and shut the propagator lids.  I think it was too cold and wet, and half of it was just wilted and died.  So I sowed another packet and that has done the same.  I've got maybe 50% success rate, and usually I get close to 100%.  The ones that have got as far as the allotment are looking better, under plastic bottles and few are now poking out the tops, so fingers crossed they get away now.  I did everything the same as last year.  The only thing I can think apart from cold and wet is to give the bag pots a really good wash this year in case there was some fungal infection in there.

Also, I sow my broad beans and field beans in late autumn, and this year the broad beans died off completely overwinter.  I couldn't find aquadulce claudia and sowed aquadulce simonia instead.  So, this autumn, look harder!  And use the empty space for french beans.

Deb Rebel wrote:I got cauliflower for the first time ever a few years ago, bought plants and put them in my heated hoop (small greenhouse of pvc pipe bent to make ribs and sheet plastic) that had a rain gutter heat tape buried 12 inches (30 cm) in ground with a brooder light for air temp heating... I got small store sized heads for the first time ever and they finished just as our summer arrived. To get that size head, the plants get huge (4 feet or more across, 1.3 meters). The broccoli, same thing. I had grown it at my parent's place but the florets were small and you had to pick through to get enough, no real heads. That year it went right and I got four harvests, first heads were store size.

You have to observe that the natural cycle of that family of plants is to disperse their seeds at the end of summer and sprout with the fires fall rains. They then survive the winter chill and short days and start to form heads when the day length increases, like February/March.  In zone 7b on the waterfront where cold air could run out onto the bay and air warmed by the water would return back up the bank we could get heads more than a foot in diameter.  I had a broccoli live 4 years in the back of the greenhouse and finally died this winter because I failed to water it.

Higher up in this thread on Oct. 11th of last year, I harvested the small amount of peanuts that I tried to get from some Spanish reds planted in the spring.  Those nuts were dried down over the winter in their shells and planted this year.  Now they have had the luck of Job in providing a new crop.  First, my wife didn't realize where I had planted them and repurposed that same plot for some eggplant.  Fortunately, many of those eggplant got crushed by beetles.  When they had died, I notice some young peanut plants emerging!......the leaves of which quickly got devoured by some other insect.  So you could say that 'survival of the fittest' is at work in these peanuts.  If they ever become my main stock here in Zone 4, they will have stories to tell their great grandchildren!

In the photo, you basically see bare ground with some purslane and....struggling peanuts.  

My ongoing attempts to get okra going. I am on my fourth seeding. Gave up with everything but Joseph Lofthouse's stuff. Out of those I have four trying for it (pretty small but at least they're above the dirt).

Maybe the diety in charge is fond of bindweed (which is bursting all over that patch even with mulch) that I keep removing before it becomes one solid mat. So I'm getting the karmic revenge.

Ditto on the bindweed... I just pulled bushels of it off of last year's (currently still unharvested) potato patch.  I'm sure the spuds are there, hoping to remain 'unmolested' : )   Yes, the mulch worked just as well for the bindweed as the spuds.  Now.... on to another strategy! (hope springs......)  I'm thinking that since the organic market gardeners (Jean Martin Fortier, Curtis Stone, etc)  (and the Permaculture Orchardist) all use 'black plastic"  i.e.,  *silt fencing, very successfully, I will also.  Spuds are not lettuce, but..... more will be revealed!   (I'm interested to see the 'spaghetti' of bindweed roots that will probably develop right underneath the 'fencing' (aka 'weed mat' I think) .... hopefully, easier to access and remove....gee, I'm already getting excited about this lastest (of a dozen prior failures!) tactic : )   *silt fencing/weed mat is an air/water permeable, woven,very UV resisitant black plastic material ... it's not the generic 'black plastic' that crumbles after a year or two in the sun.

Checked on potatoes under hay this morning. Couldn't find any........

I can't seem to grow fava beans well, here in Ohio. I had great success in Northern CA, but the last two seasons, the favas will grow, flower and fruit but during the summer get attacked by aphids (?). I have tried spraying with soapy water, neem oil, capsaicin/garlic concoction to no avail. They just wither and die from the attack. Last year I tried companion planting marigolds. That didn't seem to help either.

I also had a vole problem last year. They ate all the cucumbers and melons they could get to, ate all the broccoli seedlings and chewed on the beetroot sticking out of the ground. I put out mouse traps with peanut butter and grains and only caught one sparrow. :{ The traps got too rusty to work after a while. I am trellising most of that stuff this year. The melons are Sakata sweet and they are so delicious. I only got a few!

My lovely red Russian kale was attacked by cabbage moth last year, too. I took off all the affected leaves and drowned them or gave them to the chickens. My Brussel sprouts were also infested. I need to keep a better eye on it this year. The kale recovered nicely and gave me a few more crops at the end of the year.

Also, every ear of corn had at least one worm last year.

I have a major mouse/vole/mole problem. Am feeling got at...

I put down traps to kill the rats that were destroying my garden. Killed the rats. Also managed to get a thrush, which was heartbreaking. Managed to free it from the trap but doubt it lived much longer.

This year`s plant-related failure is one of those "be-careful-what-you-wish-for" kind of things. Planted favas and loofahs, expecting nothing. They both went gangbusters and took over most of my garden. Now I'm waiting and waiting so they can both finally ripen and I can put my winter plants in (got so much kale, bok choy, etc waiting). But these stinking vines have taken over and show no signs of either the fava beans or the loofas ever maturing. Getting tired of sitting on my hands here. Early experiments show that I could maybe get some usable loofahs out of the unripe ones, but it's a lot of work and the sponges are kind of wimpy. The unripe favas, there doesn`t seem to be any way around it: gotta wait.  Ugh.

One of the better posts "all" comments included. Failure is a fact of life. Failures in the garden that are certain, are going be be an awesome teaching tool for our nine grandkids ages 4 months to 17 years.

Our 36 acres of deep sandy loam soil, 100% devoid of rocks any size requires supplemental (irrigation) water for the 150 day warm growing season. Drilling of our water well is scheduled for late June into July where green manure crops will be started to build the soil structure (also have an elk tag).

I know, irrigation water, a sin but we have no choice. Green manure crops will be equally geared to support establishing honey bees next spring with the hives protected by a chain link enclosed yard - open range cows frequent the 24,000 acre grazing paddock and I'm sure they'll find our crops and hives.

Squash bugs love grabbing onto the underside of a wet board placed overnight next to plants. Just flip it over in the morning and smash them.

I moved to the fairly arid and warm Southwest about four years ago, with great ambitions for developing a large garden in my back yard. I laid out and dug a lovely branching Permaculture garden with swales to collect rainwater. Then I set about improving the poor soil by mulching with commercial straw, leaves and wood chips, and adding local goat manure, bio-char charged with activated microbes, and even some alfalfa pellets to the soil. Each successive year I seemed to be getting better veggie production, until last year when practically nothing wanted to grow. Many plants that had flourished other years barely grew; it was very disappointing.

Then one of the members of our local permaculture group mentioned that he had a very similar problem, and he attributed it to the accumulation of glysophate from straw he had purchased! I think that this might be my problem also, especially when I realized that the goat manure was likely contaminated with glysophate-laced hay fed to the goats, and even the commercial alfalfa pellets could have been contaminated. How discouraging to poison your garden when you are doing the best you can to enhance it! Now I am focusing on converting the garden to primarily a food forest with as many hardy perennials as will grow, given the conditions.

Kelly Hart wrote:... until last year when practically nothing wanted to grow. Many plants that had flourished other years barely grew; it was very disappointing.

Then one of the members of our local permaculture group mentioned that he had a very similar problem, and he attributed it to the accumulation of glysophate from straw he had purchased! I think that this might be my problem also, especially when I realized that the goat manure was likely contaminated with glysophate-laced hay fed to the goats, and even the commercial alfalfa pellets could have been contaminated.

Probably not glyphosate but an herbicide of the aminopyralid group. Glyphosate breaks down within a few months, but the sinister aminopyralid class of herbicides do not break down in in composting, or even in the digestive system of ruminants or other animals. They are used on hay and grains because they kill broad-leafed plants but leave the grass family alone. So nowadays manure, hay, straw, and compost made from any of these, are increasingly likely to be toxic to garden plants (other than corn, cereal grains, or grasses).

I'm not so good with pictures but I will name two. One has happened multiple times and I think I'm not the only one on this: many times I decided to try an experiment. Either two or more varieties side by side to see which I liked better, or the same variety with different treatments to see which works best. Do I need to label them somehow? Nah, I'll remember which is which. NO I WON'T and neither will you. Either put indelible labels on the ground, or record the difference on a map.
Others' story reminded me of my squash bug problem, particularly my first year here. It got kinda bad by the end of the year, but I still had decent harvests. I left the mulch in place, figuring cold would kill the bugs. The following spring the squash bugs completely killed my winter squash, summer squash and melons. The next year I waited till July first to plant squash in that garden and never saw a bug. Maybe the little cucumber beetles, which don't do significant damage but one year they brought in mosaic disease that ruined my zucchini. I don't use foil and get good squash nearly every year--I just spend a little time, as much as every other day, investigating each leaf of my plants and removing egg patches. I squash any nymphs or adults I find. And throw the leaf bits with eggs into the wood stove. If you grow a great deal of squash this isn't practical of course.
I have some advice on carrots. I don't know why they wouldn't germinate, except that they take a long time, aren't planted deep and require moist soil, so you may have to water every day for a couple weeks. But I have found two tricks that really helped me with carrots--I'm still eating last year's carrots, which spent the winter in my root cellar. First, I have clay soil so I plant Danvers or Red Cored Chantenay, and I add sand as well as compost where carrots will go, and work the bed finely. The other thing--I read somewhere that planting alternating rows of onions and carrots, the carrots repel the onion fly and the onions repel the carrot fly. True? I dunno but I've been getting much bigger carrots AND onions so I keep doing it. I plant onion sets in rows a foot apart across my bed in March, and then in April, when the onions are up and easily visible, I plant a row of carrots down the middle of each gap, for rows six inches apart. (Also I finally realized that onions need a lot of water, and that thinning the carrots earlier would make for more big ones).

Two things on my list of failures: 1) Not mulching and 2) turning my soil annually. I previously believed that a vegetable garden should have beautiful black dirt between neat rows of plants. I believed that the soil needed to be turned each spring and "refreshed" or aerated, with peat moss and/or compost added. Maybe a package of this or that soil enhancer. What ended up happening is a big fail: my soil dried out and weeds took over. By the end of the summer I hated my garden. The few tomato plants that survived were ragged and worn out champions, split fruit, falling over, etc.

Now I'm not turning my soil, and I'm covering with newspaper or cardboard mulch and then a layer of old rotten leaves, wood chips or straw.
My goal is now learning how to let nature be nature and how to observe and learn how things grow and interact.

Mary Cook wrote:
Others' story reminded me of my squash bug problem, particularly my first year here. It got kinda bad by the end of the year, but I still had decent harvests. I left the mulch in place, figuring cold would kill the bugs. The following spring the squash bugs completely killed my winter squash, summer squash and melons. The next year I waited till July first to plant squash in that garden and never saw a bug. Maybe the little cucumber beetles, which don't do significant damage but one year they brought in mosaic disease that ruined my zucchini. I don't use foil and get good squash nearly every year--I just spend a little time, as much as every other day, investigating each leaf of my plants and removing egg patches. I squash any nymphs or adults I find. And throw the leaf bits with eggs into the wood stove.

Help me understand squash bug failure.  Last year was the first we saw them and they quickly decimated our squash that was lush and lovely one day and brown and dead the next.  I did not pay attention earlier as I had never had this problem with squashes...only powdery mildew for which we swapped for resistant varieties.  Now that they are here, will they attack all curcubits?  What to look for?  When to plant?  I was almost tempted to grow none.

On a more hilarious fail, I found what I told my coworkers looked like a femur in my hot compost that had been recently delivered.  It was hot, so it was covered in a gray white dusty ash.  I was thinking cow femur, but my coworkers convinced me since I live in a pretty high crime area that I should call the police.  I had dreams about the guy who lost his femur.  Thankfully, it rained and when I went out to get the " femur" assuring it was still there before I called police, it became apparent that it was just a stick.  My coworkers were highly amused and left me this note with a scrap of mulch on it the next day.  😂

Yes, they will attack all cucurbits but I believe they prefer squash and may not bother other things if they can keep finding more squash. You look for small clusters of tiny orange globes usually on the underside of the leaves but sometimes on top (pinch out the cluster rather than removing the whole leaf); brownish black adults running around which do stink when you squash them; and little whitish or greyish nymphs, in bunches, where you didn'ty get rid of an egg cluster in time. And at the end of he season dispose of the mulch that had been around the squash as they will overwinter in it and hot your squash next spring with great ferocity.

I haven't chalked this up as a complete failure yet but last year I put loads of straw on the garden to try Routh Stouts method. It looked wonderful then the left over wheat seeds sprouted and I basically had a wheat field going. Well that wasn't a deal breaker and easy enough to deal with.

Well I went to plant cabbage, peas, and potatoes today and found that there are still quite a few frozen spots under the straw. The last frost date was just the other night, this spring has been kinda cool so I'm not giving up on the method yet but cant get started as early as normal.

I wish I knew about this thread years ago! I lurk too much and disappear too often; I missed it. I'd have won prizes for failure photos.

This year, in an attempt to have an unfailure garden, I decided to downsize. My reach has been bigger than my grasp in the past and my gardens have been nothing to brag or boast about.

I now have a small, maybe 10ish' or so x 15ish' or so garden. Well fenced in against critters (which may still find a way in. They're ingenious that way.) I'm just planting 8 tomatoes: 4 cherrys in planters and 4 Early Girls in ground, 4 zukes stuck in corners and 4 Lady Bell peppers. Looking around these forums I found a nice way to plant potatoes ("Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew.") Get a large box, toss soil in, drop the taters and gradually add more soil as they grow.

Oh, pots here and there of herbs and flowers.

I can manage that. Really. Honest, I can!

I had problem with those giant sunflowers for several years. Specifically, the skyscraper and mammoth grey sunflowers never produced seeds, all were hollow inside husks. Other sunflowers, like black oilseed, evening sun and italian white were doing great growing side by side. And it was not about pollination failure, I saw bees crawling all over.

I gave up growing them early this year, but now I thought it might due to element deficiency. The taller varieties are more susceptible. I have replanted a few to test it out, I am going to apply some bone meal and sea salt to see if that's  the cure. Any suggestions?

May Lotito wrote:I had problem with those giant sunflowers for several years. Specifically, the skyscraper and mammoth grey sunflowers never produced seeds, all were hollow inside husks. Other sunflowers, like black oilseed, evening sun and italian white were doing great growing side by side. And it was not about pollination failure, I saw bees crawling all over.

I gave up growing them early this year, but now I thought it might due to element deficiency. The taller varieties are more susceptible. I have replanted a few to test it out, I am going to apply some bone meal and sea salt to see if that's  the cure. Any suggestions?

Soil test?

You know, that thing we know we are supposed to do, but somehow never get around to it?

May Lotito wrote:I had problem with those giant sunflowers for several years. Specifically, the skyscraper and mammoth grey sunflowers never produced seeds, all were hollow inside husks.

I've had this happen a few times, empty shells with no seeds inside. I just assumed I must have gotten some sort of hybrid (or mutant, LOL) that wouldn't set seeds? I've got buckets of pollinators here and they love the sunflowers. I can only get "giant", "normal", or those darker Mexican ones that are kind of reddish (sunset, maybe). The  giant ones seem to be the problem, never had it happen when I plant the other two kinds.

Anne Pratt wrote:
Soil test?

You know, that thing we know we are supposed to do, but somehow never get around to it?

You are right. I used the home test kit, came out pH 6.5, low in P and K. But of course, the test was very limited and probably inaccurate too.  I plan on do the soil test on locations where plants grow exceptionally well or poorly for comparison. Trace mineral test should help so if sea salt works in the end, I'd be able to pinpoint the crucial mineral.

May Lotito wrote:

Anne Pratt wrote:
Soil test?

You know, that thing we know we are supposed to do, but somehow never get around to it?

You are right. I used the home test kit, came out pH 6.5, low in P and K. But of course, the test was very limited and probably inaccurate too.  I plan on do the soil test on locations where plants grow exceptionally well or poorly for comparison. Trace mineral test should help so if sea salt works in the end, I'd be able to pinpoint the crucial mineral.

Awesome!  Now, if I can get myself to follow my own advice . . .

I have planted pumpkins 5x this year (different brands).  I have not even had one sprout.  All other crops are ok.

Excited this spring to buy lots of interesting seeds Baker Creek from Rare Seeds (free shipping! frugal me can't resist that!).  Tomato varieties sprouted, transplanted, eagerly wondering if they'll live up to their hype... I just checked their 'tags' to remind myself of the upcoming 'revelations'.  The 'tags' were attached to the top of the trellis over each plant, names written on white plastic from cottage cheese cartons, etc.. with Sharpies .... 3 months ago.  And ... ALL the names had faded away!! Aaaargh!!   So now it's a test of whether I can identify them by physical characteristics... the 'plans of mice and men' .. and mine, especially!  (So I learned something, back to my everlasting embossed pop-can aluminum tags with reusable ... numbers!, and a legend/key w/ name for each number.  Only challenge, keeping track of the paperwork ... guess I could use computer : ) ...

LOL Anne - "Now, if I can only get myself to follow my own advice."  Me, too : )   Guess that counts as another failure :  )

I got the soil test resul. I sampled 10 random spots in the yard, but not the garden area that has been heavily amended. I knew the soil was compacted and poor but it came out even worse than expected.

PH 5.4 low
P: 44 lbs/a. Low
K: 247 lbs/a medium
Ca: 1830 lbs/a low
Mg: 406 lbs/a high
OM: 3.4%

They gave suggestions to add lime and fertilizer. But I remember dr. Redhawk said it is better to amend soil with gypsum than using lime to raise pH. I am going to try it out on new garden bed this fall.

There are lists somewhere for organic amendments to use depending on what is deficient in your soil.  If I find it again, I'll post about it here!

Congratulations on really doing the soil test.  Me, I'm still toying with following my own advice.

Anne Pratt wrote:
Congratulations on really doing the soil test.[/size]  Me, I'm still toying with following my own advice.

Your post that gave me the motivation, so thank you!  I got so many things on my to do list: need to finish up the chicken coop; buy a 8" long drill bit for making wasp hotel; haul hundreds of pounds of gypsum from menard, etc. etc.