How's your garden faring this year?

Kind of abandonned. My dad seems to have got bored of tending for the backyard vegetable garden and nobody talks about it again. The garden was supposed to provide clean vegetables for the family. But that’s too much work for a meal and everyone gives up.

Like you I got a late start. I knew I was going to be gone for a while in early July and I didn’t want to come back to dry dead things. So I bought a few plants this year already halfway grown. Big enough to be able to take this punishing heat. I do have plants that come back yearly but I was a bit lazy with watching for bug damage. I did go through them all finally and cut away dead and diseased leaves and give them vitamins and fresh soil and treat for pests. So for now they all seem healthy and heading in the right direction. But it’s always a day to day battle. Especially with the sun. The plants that I babied last year in the front yard are all doing great but I did keep on top of it since the beginning of the season.

@Mimishu1995 What are the common garden vegetables in Vietnam?

Here in Illinois I think tomatoes and peppers are most popular. Both sweet peppers and hot peppers. Also zucchini squash. Some people grow potatoes.

The grocery stores always have herb plants to take home and transplant, like basil, thyme, sage and mint.

Dead. Severe drought in North Georgia. Hi temps and no rain. And watering restrictions.

Completely missed the season due to a house swap. Have some good tomatoes, basil and cilantro in pots that continue to produce though. Next year the garden is going to be about five time larger than normal.

Terrible. We live in town now and we don’t have the room we used to so I tried container gardening for the first time. We use to have the space for four dozen tomato and pepper plants as well as watermelon, carrot and cucumber. I now have only a dozen pots.

I made a rookie mistake and used a soil amendment instead of soil. I just realized my mistake two weeks ago. My plants look terrible. I doubt we’ll get anything from them this year. I’m so disappointed.

@Call_Me_Jay it isn’t common for families to grow vegetables at home, but there used to be a trend of do-it-yourself gardens where families grew vegetables in their backyards in response to the news about vegetables being full of pesticides. People used improvised tools, anything they could find, for gardens. The vegetables were just your-run-on-the-mill ones like cabbages, tomatoes, spinach… Then the trend just died down. My family wasn’t really into the trend when someone gave us some spinach seeds. My dad did all the improvised work until he decided that it took effort.

It has been way too dry this year for gardens to do well here. I xeriscape so it’s got to be a nice wet summer for good vegetables. I gave up on strawberries the year my old (RIP) girldog sat down in the middle of the patch and harvested all the strawberries. I suppose I could try again now that we have a non-strawberry loving dog.

@Mimishu1995 Few people in the USA grow vegetables at home. But it is a common hobby. Flowers are much more popular.

I’m not a food-grower, but I’ve been growing some low-water California natives in my garden; they’ve been doing pretty well.

A lot of people around here have been ripping out their lawns and it’s nice to see.

Yay @DominicY ! The first thread I ever started on an online forum was about 20 years ago when the NYT ran Abuzz… Death to Lawns. Boy, did I get hated on. Now, people get it. Well, some people get it.

Tried to grow peas two times and nothing grew. Just tried again today. Tomato plants are doing poorly and haven’t even generated flowers yet. Strawberry plants only made one small strawberry. The weeds are thriving though.

I got a squash. All the other plants set flowers, but no squashes. I had an idea: Is it possible that I only got one squash because there was only one honeybee in the neighborhood?

Exactly the opposite of last year. In 2015, peas, beans, carrots, tomatoes, lettuce were outstanding, while beets, peppers, eggplant, chives and scallions were a bust. Reverse that for this year. (Although, to be fair, the puppy has trashed the raised beds, I need to devise better barriers next summer). But the pots and whiskey barrels still show the reversal.
I’m hoping that next year everything thrives!

I don’t have outdoor space, but I have a sunroom. At home I have, in pots, cilantro, pansies, galardia, morning glories, chives, coleus, a polka-dot plant, and two terrariums with mixed succulents. Besides the succulents, all grown from seed. Doing okay – think I just need to be patient and wait for them to get bigger, other than than the morning glories which shot up in about two seconds but haven’t bloomed yet. At work I have a little potted spider plants which is doing great.

I just moved to a new property in June and the resident garden here is outrageously huge and flourishing. It is right next to a huge, like 2 acre pond with cascading weeping willows, Koi fish and frogs galore surrounded by expansive lawns and lillies and all sorts of flowers and shrubbery. There is an apple tree that we harvest as horse treats and plum trees as well.
There are walls of, perfectly trained, blackberry vines ( lots of wild blackberries in this area as it is ) and scads of several varieties of squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, string beans, chard, and other things I am sure I am forgetting.

The elderly owner of this property is turning 88 this year and he is an amazing old dude. He is out in the garden every morning and loads up 5 gallon buckets of produce onto his golf cart and then swings by my little place and gives me pick of the litter every few days. Yesterday I took lemon cucumbers, some roma and other big tomatoes and some grape tomatoes, several yellow crookneck squash and a few handfuls of beans. He had buckets and buckets full of everything.

He has a women come pick every few weeks to take the surplus to a battered womans shelter in the area as well. I have been marinating the cukes, tomatoes, thinly sliced yellow squash and olives in either a red wine, balsamic or italian dressing and eating bowls full of this delicious mixture. I have had some pretty impressive veggie gardens over the years but this garden is a work or art to behold, it is truly magical in it’s setting and prolific abundance.

We’re suffering a plague of rabbits on a nearly apocalyptic scale. Nibble, nibble, nibble and there goes yet another $15 perennial. Things we’ve tried:

Dried coyote urine granules and used cat litter sprinkled around (no discernible effect).

Spraying plants with a chili oil and garlic concoction (maybe works a bit, but has to be refreshed after every watering or rain).

Encircling plants with metal mesh (works, but it makes the garden look like GITMO for plants).

Motion sensing water sprayer (works, but goes off whenever wind moves the plants around, or a robin lands in the garden. Plus, at $40 a pop, it would cost a fortune to defend all my garden plots, so I occasionally move this one around, just to keep the little furry fuckers nervous).

Strawberries were here and gone by mid-June. Cucumber is flowering, no fruit yet.
Zucchini, I’ve harvested several individual fruits in excess of 10” long. White Eggplant, fruit is out, still too small for harvest.
Chickpeas, two of three plants survived, looks like we’ll have some garbanzos. Several varieties of tomato and pepper (both sweet and hot),
Kohlrabi, fruit is forming; lemon cucumber, flowers, no fruit yet.
Watermelon, lotsa flowers, waiting for fruit; Carrots—forgot to thin them hundreds of tiny carrots.
Radicchio (2 rows, 6”, 85–100 days)
(Plants) Celery 90–120

Seed-planted 5/28/16, Lower level
Sweet corn (8”-12”, 60–90 days)
Left to right facing house:
Parsley (thin to 6”, 70–90 days)
Yard-long pole.beans, climbing right up.
Cauliflower, old seeds, didn’t sprout. Turnips, still in the ground; tops look healthy. Blue Lake Bush beans didn’t do so well.

That’s about half my garden.

Well we have always planted our tomatos by the side of the house. Its along my watering circuit to take care of plants on the front and back deck. Well hubs decided to plant the tomatoes in the back yard this year, waaaay out by the back fence, even tho i said it wasnt a good idea. Well he did it anyway. I refuse to make that inconvient trek to take care of them so theyll be daid soon and he’ll try to blame me.

Spring was off to a great start, we had sunshine here in Scotland, then it kind of petered out and faded away. However, I was super excited at the start of spring and planted herbs and potatoes, strawberries and tons of flowers. My garden looked super amazing for about a month and all was going well. Then the dreary weather kicked in and a few things just kicked the bucket.

My potatoes of going great guns though!

My pansies gave a great show for an entire month. I was completely super excited each day seeing how many new pansies popped up.

The garden looks damp and kind of neglected for now, but here is hoping for an awesome August? This was my first year at growing things and I think I’m not blessed with green fingers either.
I’d love to post some photos of the garden since I was so super proud of how nice it looked albeit for a short time!

I am about to harvest my first peppers. I grew everything else from seed this year, but this was a plant I noticed at Lowes when I was buying paint. Since I got a late start with the seeds, I thought I might not get any fruit until September.

My Fresno chili peppers

I guess they are a lot like jalapenos, but with a thinner skin.

@LornaLove I planted pansy seeds, and wondered why they never bloomed. Two months after the plants emerged I figured out the pansies never sprouted. I was waiting for some stupid weed that grew on their spot.

My strawberries are still alive! We have yet to harvest any strawberries, but they look cool, hanging off the deck.

Outta control over here, buried under the 7 foot wall of tomatoes right now.

My tomatoes are growing monstrously as well.

I have NO idea how our tomatoes on the lower 40 are doing. However, with my husband’s eternal and infernal luck, it’s rained a LOT this summer so they’re probably doing well.