Is Anyone Else Having A Garden-Gone-Goofy Year?

[PGB1]

Hi All!

This year, despite the usual routine of watering & feeding, my garden is producing interesting results. I sure can't figure out what went so wonky.

The 5th year asparagus went straight to the fern stage. None of the plants yielded a single spear. This happened in mid March & has stayed the same all summer. I feed them well and mulch, plus water, too. Oddly, the ferns are now brown as though it were already late fall.

The bean plants are taller than ever, but there's not a single bean, let alone a flower.
Of all tomato plants, of 4 different breeds, two have tiny fruits starting. That's it. Some are even 6" tall still. Others are tall & bushy, but no flowers came.
The Anaheim & Cubanell pepper plants are still under 12" tall. Some are as short as 4". No fruit either.
My precious dill are tall & wispy stems with few ferns. Some went straight to seed with no ferns at all.
The oregano certainly isn't oregano. I planted seeds from 4 packets in pots with 4 different soils. The same odd plant grew in each. (Photo attached)

In the non-edible gardens, the situation is similar.
The Harebell had no flowers, nor did the violets & iris'.
The many year old Tiger Lilly plants didn't flower.
Both Gazinia grew to about 5 feet tall with no flowers. Today, i found what look like seeds starting. (Photo attached)
The Serbian Bell Flower had few flowers & they lasted 2 days. It's usually very flower laden.
One Trillium had 1 flower & the others had none.
Even our hedge rows are losing branches & have bare areas. (A sample is seen in the Gazinia photo)
The "lawn" is worse than ever. We're surrounded by maple trees, so the lawn is kind of hopeless anyway. (And bumpy from the maple roots)

On the happy side, the 9 year old rose bush is having its best year. It's producing many big, beautiful flowers.

This is certainly puzzling, and somewhat comical, to me.

We use absolutely no pesticides- anywhere ever. All fertilizer is organic. The dirt was well tilled in fall with shredded, dry, brown leaves mixed in like usual.
Do any of you have an idea of why we've got a Franken-Garden this season?

Thanks for your ideas!
Paul

 

[Oliver Buckle]

Oops, misread the title, not a 'Garden gnome goofy year'

Anyway, no, that is not like any oregano I have ever seen, though I have noticed that the common names oregano and marjoram seem to be used inter-changeably on various different plants. Do they have any scent?
Otherwise, have you seen my rant in the cherry tree thread?

Cherry tree issue?

My cherry tree has been in the ground for about 1 year and is probably 3 years old. I'm in Southeast Coastal Georgia, zone 8b. The temperatures have been in the mid to upper 90s for about 1-2 weeks. Is this a water, heat or disease issue? Or is it a seasonal situation, coming into Fall?

www.gardening-forums.com

I have a horrid feeling we are going to see a lot more posts like this.

 

[Chuck]

Hi All!

This year, despite the usual routine of watering & feeding, my garden is producing interesting results. I sure can't figure out what went so wonky.

The 5th year asparagus went straight to the fern stage. None of the plants yielded a single spear. This happened in mid March & has stayed the same all summer. I feed them well and mulch, plus water, too. Oddly, the ferns are now brown as though it were already late fall.

The bean plants are taller than ever, but there's not a single bean, let alone a flower.
Of all tomato plants, of 4 different breeds, two have tiny fruits starting. That's it. Some are even 6" tall still. Others are tall & bushy, but no flowers came.
The Anaheim & Cubanell pepper plants are still under 12" tall. Some are as short as 4". No fruit either.
My precious dill are tall & wispy stems with few ferns. Some went straight to seed with no ferns at all.
The oregano certainly isn't oregano. I planted seeds from 4 packets in pots with 4 different soils. The same odd plant grew in each. (Photo attached)

In the non-edible gardens, the situation is similar.
The Harebell had no flowers, nor did the violets & iris'.
The many year old Tiger Lilly plants didn't flower.
Both Gazinia grew to about 5 feet tall with no flowers. Today, i found what look like seeds starting. (Photo attached)
The Serbian Bell Flower had few flowers & they lasted 2 days. It's usually very flower laden.
One Trillium had 1 flower & the others had none.
Even our hedge rows are losing branches & have bare areas. (A sample is seen in the Gazinia photo)
The "lawn" is worse than ever. We're surrounded by maple trees, so the lawn is kind of hopeless anyway. (And bumpy from the maple roots)

On the happy side, the 9 year old rose bush is having its best year. It's producing many big, beautiful flowers.

This is certainly puzzling, and somewhat comical, to me.

We use absolutely no pesticides- anywhere ever. All fertilizer is organic. The dirt was well tilled in fall with shredded, dry, brown leaves mixed in like usual.
Do any of you have an idea of why we've got a Franken-Garden this season?

Thanks for your ideas!
Paul

This sounds like it can only be caused by two things, weather and nutrition. Has the weather been different this year than other years? And it also sounds like your nutrition is lacking in something. What exactly are you fertilizing with?

 

[Sheal]

I think some years it just doesn't happen with plants, due to the weather or bad seed. A number of Brits are complaining about the lack of performance with plants too. Many plants are also producing crops or flowers quite late.

 

[PGB1]

Thanks All for taking time to reply. I appreciate your ideas.

Chuck asked if the weather's been different this year. That's hard to say, since every year is different in the last decade or so. This year, it rained daily from May through June. Then, July has had nearly no rain. Unfortunately, this means I had to water with city water more than usual. It can't possibly be as good as God's water for the plants.

Feeding has been as usual. Every 2 weeks, each plant gets 2 tablespoons of Epsoma Tomato Tone. That's my usual routine.

Sheal mentioned bad seed. That makes the most sense for the alleged oregano. Maybe it was a factory mix up.

The tomatoes were from 3 sources: I bought 3 seedling plants from a nursery. Two came from a neighbor as 2" tall seedlings. (I haven't seen her to inquire if hers are doing well.)

The best growing tomato, Cuore d'Italia, came to me as seeds from one of my brother's garden. The peppers are from seeds of plants I grew last year. Those were from seeds from the previous year and before that, years. They are many generations old.

Crazy, huh?

 

[DirtMechanic]

Try some shade cloth as an experiment. Detroit seems pretty far north but it may make a change that can at least inform next season's efforts.

 

[Mr_Yan]

@PGB1 I'm about 3 hours drive west of you on the right side of the state and it's been a pretty typical year other than being dry.

Things I have gauged this "normal" on:

• First cherry tomatoes ripe within 3 days of my eldest kid's birthday.
• Bunch of snap peas at the end of June through July.
• Apples growing on trees.
• Bell peppers filling in in late July.
• Onions starting to fall over about now.
• 4 sizable pumpkins on vines now.
• Pole beans flowering out and putting on pods now.

A few things I find unusual:

• No pollination of my raspberries. There were a bunch of flowers but no fruit. These plants were pilfered from my inlaws place near Pine Knob.
• Late emergence of my asparagus relative to when it appeared in my CSA box and at the local road side stands. But this is the first season I've had it planted.
• No flowers on my Montmoracy tart cherry.
• Frost damage to my North Star cherry.

One thing that badly irritates me - I was traveling a lot this spring for work so didn't get chores done in my garden on time.

 

[PGB1]

Thanks for the shade cloth idea DirtMechanic.
I'll give it a try this year in sun-all-day areas & see if it helps. It very well may, as yesterday was cloudy all day (God's shade cloth?) and it rained several times. (In contrast to the last few weeks of sun and dry) Yet this morning, there are a couple flowers on the Coure d'Italia.

It sounds like you're having a wonky garden year too, Mr. Yan. I don't know what the weather was like in your area in spring, but if it was like ours, spring was delayed due to soaked ground- and all the re-soakings. Perhaps your traving didn't delay planting after all. I didn't get to transplant until June 3rd.

There are not a lot of pollinators here either, as your raspberry sentence suggests. We get fewer each year. No bees at all so far & no wasps nor hornets nor moths.
I'm attributing much of it to the increase of people having companies spray insecticides & chemical fertilizers on their lawns. At dawn some days, I see hundreds of dead insects on the driveway (& birds eating them).

The number of dead squirrels & birds in our yard increases dramatically each year. Insects crawl on the treated lawns, birds eat the insects (including the poisons the bugs picked up off the lawns). The bird dies.
Squirrels (and dogs, cats, raccoons, etc.) walk on the lawns, picking up chemicals. They lick their paws to stop the irritation, ingesting chemicals.

I also wonder how much oil is consumed & pollution created in making and distributing these needless chemicals.
All for a beauty lawn. Good-bye planet. It was nice knowing you. (Complain a lot, don't I?)

 

[DirtMechanic]

I read the Tonga Volcano eruption increased high level stratospheric water vapor by 10% which among other things will result in surface warming. One thing about water is that it is very good at absorbing infra-red heat. From the earth up that would act as a insulator to a degree.

 

[Oliver Buckle]

One thing about water is that it is very good at absorbing infra-red heat

So all we need is cars that run on hydrogen and it will make up for the loss of the ozone layer

If only it was that simple.

 

[Chuck]

So all we need is cars that run on hydrogen and it will make up for the loss of the ozone layer

If only it was that simple.

The US military already has hydrogen powered vehicles. I just cannot fathom why it is such a secret and why hydrogen technology isn't more in the forefront.

 

[DirtMechanic]

So all we need is cars that run on hydrogen and it will make up for the loss of the ozone layer

If only it was that simple.

Here is the link about Tonga, thought you would enjoy it:

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022GL099381

Radiative forcing is what happens when the amount of energy that enters the Earth's atmosphere is different from the amount of energy that leaves it. Energy travels in the form of radiation: solar radiation entering the atmosphere from the sun, and infrared radiation exiting as heat.

 

[Oliver Buckle]

The US military already has hydrogen powered vehicles. I just cannot fathom why it is such a secret and why hydrogen technology isn't more in the forefront.

It is a bit dodgy in that a tank full of hydrogen under pressure is a bit of a potential bomb in an accident, on the other hand they cope with propane powered vehicles.
Could it possibly be pressure from vested interests in the hydro-carbon fuel industry? It wouldn't be a first.

 

[DirtMechanic]

The US military already has hydrogen powered vehicles. I just cannot fathom why it is such a secret and why hydrogen technology isn't more in the forefront.

5000 psi gas tanks, actually 3 small ones, and customers with hands frozen to the pump handle snatching away and breaking off their fingers?

 

[Mr_Yan]

The Brits are moving to 20% hydrogen in the nat-gas mains. I've been listening to this on and off on the BBC Inside Science podcast over the last year or so. There's two big problems with hydrogen (1) pure hydrogen burns clear so you can't see a flame (2) metal is permeable to hydrogen. Gas lines are already largely plastic so that is solved but the clear flame is a safety hazard.

A buddy of mine used to work at Fermi Lab (US national science lab with a particle accelerator) and was telling me how they would get a build up overtime of hydrogen in some of the vac lines as the atoms would permeate through a few inches of stainless steel.