You thought this garden series would just be me flexing and telling information on what I am doing and how well my garden is going? HA! I am a work in progress with my garden and I have had plenty of gardening failures in my past. I will probably continue having them the rest of my life. That is how hobbies work, you try to learn more and there will always be growing pains. There are some vegetables that I have failed in the past that I am trying again.

Honestly, most of my gardening has just been me trying stuff without any research. This is a way different experience than one of my other big hobbies, baking. I am very methodical in baking because it was one of my first true passions in the world and I wanted to become good at it. Gardening started as something to do because I loved the outdoors and a lot of my family gardened.

This year is the first year of my gardening life that I have actually did any research whatsoever. Now that I have done research, I have really realized how easy gardening is because I have done SO MANY things wrong and still got great yields almost all of my gardening years. That is not to say there aren’t hard nuances. I am very overwhelmed now after doing research, because I realized how much information there is out there and how little I knew.

I am resolved to learn more about gardening without letting the overwhelming information get me down. I plan to take on gardening like how I do baking – one recipe (or plant) at a time. I want to get better at the plants I have succeeded in planting, while also taking on a couple new plants each year to learn how to grow.

Now for the plants I have failed at growing before:

peppers

A lot of people will have issues with peppers if they live in the northern United States. Peppers love sunlight and warmth even more than tomatoes and I have found they are a lot more finicky. I have always had luck with tomatoes somehow, but all of my gardening short comings have came through with my peppers.

I have managed to grow little baby peppers that rot out, stalks without any fruits forming, and straight up just had my seed not grow past a seedling.

I have been lucky enough to meet some great people in Maine since we have moved here. A friend here has a HUGE garden with the most amazing peppers I have ever seen. He gave me the following tips:

1. If you start your peppers indoors, use a grow light right above them. The pepper stalks reach for the light and you want the stalk to grow thick rather than stretching up super far to reach for the light.
2. Start peppers inside earlier than your tomatoes. Give them 3-5 weeks longer to grow inside than the package recommends. I guess this makes a way more hardy and healthy plant when transplanting.

That being said – I am not trying either of these this year. I am growing peppers, but it was a last minute decision and I wasn’t able to make either of those tips work this year. I have only one grow light so I can’t dedicate it just to the peppers. Also, planting from seed was a last minute decision for me this year. So even though I got those amazing tricks, I am not trying them out. I plan to next year.

pole beans/peas

Honestly, this one is kind of embarrassing. I have only tried to plant pole beans/peas one time. It was one of my first gardens, and garden is a loose term. I basically just put seeds in a garden bed that had horrible soil and not enough room. Surprisingly, they did sprout but never grew past that.

This year I plan to plant pole bean/peas under my corn, so my peas can grow up the corn stalks. We are going for a classic three sisters garden.

I haven’t learned much more on these vegetables past the basics because I haven’t ran into any problems with them before (besides my own naivety). Fingers crossed I have a better experience growing these this year.

pumpkins

One thing to know about me, I LOVE Halloween and fall in general. My family always adores fall and I have the best memories growing up during this time. I also have amazing friends that continue to make amazing fall memories with me and indulging in my deep passion for all things spooky and macabre.

That being said, I have failed at the most basic nature of spooky season. Growing pumpkins.

I will give myself a bit of a break because last year was my first attempt at pumpkins and I had barely any time to make a garden (we moved into our house at the end of May) – let alone check the soil in the beds.

Turns out, the soil in the preexisting beds was total trash wrapped in creosote. Not only was the soil devoid of any kind of nutrition, the beds were also made with old railroad ties that were rotting. Which if you didn’t know – don’t use railroad ties for your garden. The creosote that they use to make the wood not rot is an unhealthy chemical that leeches into the ground around it!!! They haven’t been able to definitely prove that the chemicals are picked up into the roots – but why even risk it.

I also think the lack of pollinators at our new property is an issue. Without bees and other insects to pollinate the flowers my pumpkin plants produced, none of them received the fertilization they needed to bear fruit- the almighty pumpkin. Luckily, this problem should be solved this year. I have bought a BUNCH of local pollinator wildflowers that I am going to plant around my garden this year. Hopefully this will bring more bees and butterflies to our house.

The pollination issues is just a theory of mine, but whether or not it derailed my pumpkins in besides the point. The friend that gave me the pepper tricks happened to live down the road from us. His bees travelled up and down the road and we always had bees outside our house. Our squash did AMAZING there. Last year we barely had any squash and the pumpkins didn’t even fruit.

cabbages

When I say cabbages, I am referring the the entire family. Broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, and cabbages. I have failed all of those and pretty miserably I may add.

I learned this year that the cabbage family doesn’t like hot temperatures. They basically stop growing when the temp is over 75° on average. I legit just planted them in the garden with all of my crops at the end of May and had no idea why they would stop growing after a month.

Last year, I put my broccoli and cauliflower out in June and they actually went dormant and then continued growing in the fall. They never produced a large vegetable but it made me realize that something was going on in cooler temperatures. Luckily, that is a very big part of how they grow and it was easy to get that information and learn from my mistakes.

Cabbages, on the other hand, also would have failed from the heat if they had the chance. I never let them get that far though! They died from cabbageworms before they had a chance to die from the heat. Turns out there are actually pretty easy solutions for that too.

Unfortunately for my redemption arch, I currently do not have any plans for giving these vegetables a go again this year. Our garden situation has been a mess setting up so far this spring (another blog post to come on that). My chance of spring veggies have gone out the window, but who knows – maybe I will try them out in fall if I have time!

Let me know what vegetables you have had issues growing in the past and rejoice in the failure and hopeful redemption arch that the future may hold!

Keep following along in Steph’s gardening series 2023. If you missed last week, I went into some detail on the berries I am planting this year.

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