I am very good with flowers. Really. I have also grown pears, strawberries, tomatoes and peppers for years to make my own salsa and pasta sauces to can. This year, with DH being layed off work for so long I decided to expand the veggie garden. My squash and mellons all rotted away. The apple and pear tree are covered with rust so the leaves have been dropping. They have very few tiny fruit. I have 2 little plum trees that didn't set any fruit. I tried cauliflower for the first time and instead of one head I have several tiny ones with leaves between them, What happened there? I bought a packet of mixed cabbage. I have a few heads but some are growing loose leaves, not as far apart as brussel sprouts, but not heads. I don't know what happened there either. My broccoli are tiny little heads. Some of them the rabbits got but I put up a taller fence and planted more that I had started in a greenhouse and they are tiny spaced buds out too. the second plants I put out are romanesco that I have never seen growing so I don't what I did wrong. My onions got the size of golf balls and then the tops fell over and are dying off. Flea beetles attacked my eggplants but I also had extras that I kept in the greenhouse until they were good sized and I just put them out. I have been spraying everything with neem oil. I got a little bit of lettuce before most of it bolted. I got about 3 cups of cilantro from 8 plants before it bolted. I guess I'll try again next year. So far my tomatoes are doing good! :-D
Squash problems here too... first powdery mildew hit a few, then the main stems rotted away... it was GROSS, actually.... Yes, let's chalk it up to a learning experience, Gardentoad! We'll do some things differently next year! Kudos to you for trying so many different things this year!!!
I came back here to delete that post. I was just in a sorry mood yesterday. We were getting another flooding rain. I think the biggest problem this year is so much rain. I'm pretty sure that rotted my melons and squash. I just don't know what went wrong with most of the plants like the onions,carrots,cauliflower, cabbage and broccoli. I tried onions and carrots before without luck. I have clay soil that I mix in homemade compost. I mixed huge amounts of sand into a raised bed for the onions and carrots this spring because someone told me that my problem was that the soil was too dense and moist. Now I just don't know.Maybe I still have too much compost? The apple and pear trees have ceder-apple rust from my neighbor's ceder trees and there isn't a good organic solution for that so I will look for varieties to replace some of them. I had been looking for a liberty apple but I can't find one. I was told to get a granny smith but I have one of them and it is teribly infected too. I will get a few pears this year that are small and deformed. I may just juice them. The apples were horrible so I have been throwing them away. I am planning on remaking my entire garden area this fall and have all raised beds. that should help next year.
It sounds like all of it got way to much rain .Ours got way to much heat and sun.Next year maybe better for everyone.
Even with our hot weather streak I have powdery mildew and rust. I can't grow melons because of the normally wet cool weather. :'( My hollyhocks have actually given me flowers for the first time ever with the warmer than normal weather :-D . Give your cole crops a little more time. Sometimes here they just take longer to mature when the weather is cool. (This year the cabbage has headed up much too early to store in the cool cellar, so have to use it.) Usually they are more of a fall crop here. Glad your onions got at least golf-ball size. Mine all went to seed almost immediately...crazy but they made great stakes for the pea vines. The weather has been so weird, but maybe it always is and I'm not as sensitive to it when it rains. That is what is expected here. I don't try with carrots, they take something I can't give them. Good for you to try!
My gardens are a learning experience every year gardentoad! Every year there are crops that do very well and crops that do very poorly...you have to take it in stride and not get too upset about it. This year my Impatiens got a fungus and died, the weather has been wet and cool, the aphids and snails have been numerous, and the deer and rabbits have eaten just about everything!!
Gardentoad, I know just how you feel. We had a very wet summer last year, and nothing did well except for the peas, plums and carrots. This year the flowers are doing great, as are plums, apples and even pumpkins. But not the carrots. Why I don't know. It's just one of those things I guess.
