Gardening flops

[Anniep1978]

The thread about our favorite vegetables to grow has got me wondering what your least favorite vegetable to grow is or maybe one that just was a flop?

For me it would have to be watermelons, they would get about the size of a softball and just stop growing, it is so frustrating! I think I`ll just save myself the hassle and purchase them at the farmers market.

 

[lovinglife]

Now last year I grew huge watermelons, but I can't get a decent carrot to save my life! My soil must be too hard. I watered my melons a LOT, and they had a lot of good natural fertilizer....don't know if that helped, and also we had a really hot summer last year.

 

[claudine]

For me it would be strawberries. I'd love to have a little field of delicious strawberries in my garden because I like them so much, but they just don't want to grow. My strawberries are small and not very sweet, and there is some kind of insect attacking them every year

 

[liquidfuzzy]

I agree on strawberries. I can never get big, bright red ones like in stores! I try and try. Maybe the ones in stores have unnatural ingredients that make them so large and red!

 

[jubbly]

I have had some catastrophic flops this year and I think they are all related to the awful British summer we have had. You could count the sunny days on one hand and there has been some gale force wind that has physically destroyed my maris piper potato plants.

My apple tree failed to fruit. 3 out of my 4 strawberry plants died. My peppers never appeared. The only thing seeming to thrive are my parsnips.

 

[Tmann]

A few of my flops have been carrots, they all seem to grow two legs not one nice root. I have had no luck with cantaloupe in the past however this year it came back on its own and we had 3 cantaloupes. I have had the same frustration with pumpkins, planted them from a plant bought at a store and nothing, however this year they grew from the seeds where i threw the rotting pumpkins from halloween last year, go figure.

 

[lovinglife]

I found a place that sold plants that grew giant berries, I emailed them and asked if they were GMO or heirloom, they never answered... I got good size from mine when they were younger and not so crowded...just a thought.

 

[bellahpereira]

I had a huge flop this year from my bell peppers. I planted them in three different places to make sure I got some and none of them grew. It was rather upsetting, and I do not think I'll be wasting my efforts on them next year! I had heard that they were simple to grow and I do not know if I simply did something wrong or if it was the soil, but it didn't happen.

 

[zigs]

Pretty much total veg failure here this year. Like Jubbly, we've had droughts, floods and an almost total lack of sunshine. Due to the jet stream being much further south than usual. I'm in Somerset, South West UK, been more like Winterset.

I'm normally self sufficient in veg, last year the veg was great, but this is a recent harvest.

We've had blight wiping out the tomatoes & spuds, everything else got eaten by the plague of slugs, or just didn't grow with the lack of light & warmth.

 

[Jed]

Similar to zigs I had a hopeless tomato crop because of blight. Even when they do succeed in other years the crops are poor and late ripening. I chose to give them a miss this year. I got a weird disease in my potatoes and had them checked out by the agricultural department who couldn't put a name on the disease. So much for certified potatoes for planting. A portion of my crop was affected.

 

[zigs]

We've had a kind of slow acting blight over here. The RHS said it was just normal late blight, but that takes out the crop in a few days, this one was kept at bay with Bordeaux mixture for a month or more.

They are banning Bordeaux mixture in the EU soon, i've been stocking up on it.

We have a free blight alert service here, they will send a TXT and e mail when conditions are right in your area, so we know when to spray, didn't help much this year though as it was often too wet to spray.

 

[jubbly]

My potatoes were pitiful. I planted 18 maris piper seed plants in the ground and 6 seed plants in containers. The ones in the ground were blown down by the wind and didn't seem to recover. I left them in for a full 3 months but they produced a crop of tiny hard potatoes.

The ones in the containers were not affected by the wind but were still very poor. To be honest, the spuds I planted from a bag of supermarket potatoes did better.

The plants did not look diseased in any way.

 

[iluvmario]

My big flop was strawberries. First my bare roots just never grew, I soaked them and watered them and nothing for weeks so I tossed them. Then I ordered strawberry seeds from amazon. Then I read that it takes them two years to fruit so I will save them for later. Then I just cheated and bought the seedlings. I accidentally over fertilized them and all the flowers shriveled and died. I finally got some to grow tiny little strawberries and the snails ate them all. Next year I am going to try the giant strawberry plants.

 

[Jessi]

We had cucumbers really flop one year. They would only grow to about the size of a sweet pickle and then would turn yellow and shrivel up. They were pretty much useless. I think maybe we had too much sun that year, but nothing I could do about that.

 

[jessamom]

My container herbs did awful this year because of the dry heat of our summer. Mid-July my cilantro completely burned up, even though I watered it almost every day in the coolest part of the day