What sizzled, what fizzled in your garden this year?

[K8-EEE]

Eggplant, tomatoes, bell peppers, hot peppers, cukes and sunflowers did great for me!

My disappointments for 2008 were things that were my best performers last year: French string beans & zucchini. Beset with numerous and sundry problems and now gone.

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[Blue Gardener]

1. The tomatoes and peppers have been great

And the sunflowers are getting ready to bloom.
The cukes and zinnias both succumbed to powdery mildew. :(

[sazemisery]

2. My garden was in transition this year

I am making a lot of architectural changes to the landscape and have had little time to actually garden and the spring/summer season here was so wildly different than in past years that the few things I did plant have reacted in unusual ways.

My tomatoes did really well until this early fall(!?!?) hit us this month. My newly planted asparagus patch is teeming with new ferns daily. In two years I can envision a pleathera of tasty spears. The butternut squash and pumpkin were not planted until July and are taking over the garden like rain forest undergrowth. Plenty of butternuts but no pumpkins yet. I had plenty of Ichiban Eggplant and my peppers are going gangbusters.

I am finished building my dry creek now and have begun the tedious job of weeding all the areas I have left unattended all summer. I will be moving plants to the new areas around the dry creek in order to naturalize the surroundings. Xeriscape is the buzz word in this renovation of my gardens. If it can't live in NE Oklahoma without water it is not going in the garden. Vegetables are exempt from this rule. :)

[XemaSab]

4. Xeriscaping?

You might want to check out High Country Gardens. They specialize in xeriscaping plants, many of which are native to the plains and western US.

Building a dry creek sounds like a fun project. :D

[sazemisery]

6. I have been to that website many times

to get ideas and references to native plants of my area.

The dry creek was a labor of love. Shoveling 7 tons of river rock has been good for the arms and legs!

Here's a link to the unfinished project. If it ever stops raining here I will post more of the finished project.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=246x9673

[XemaSab]

10. Su-weet!

Is there a native plant society in your state?

You might also check with them for plant ideas.

[sazemisery]

11. Yes and they have been a great help

I am connected with every plant, food and sustainability group in Oklahoma. Believe it or not there are many of us in this RED state that care about our country, environment and each other.! Then there are a lot of others that care ahhhh not so much :-( x(

[XemaSab]

3. Peppers and tomatoes rocked.

The eggplants and all the melons and squashes didn't do much at all.

I don't know what happened to the potato plant, and the strawberries died spectacularly. :shrug:

[BOSSHOG]

5. Our "Sprite" Grape Tomatoes continue to produce

mass quantities of tasty tomatoes. By far the best plants we have this year. And the seeds were free!! Other stuff did fairly well except for the exotic tomato seeds I bought produced zip.

[K8-EEE]

7. I hear ya on the fancy tomatoes!

Thanks for nuthin' Mr. Stripey!

My best tomatoes were the old standbys -- Early Girl, Celebrity & Lemon Boy.

[BOSSHOG]

8. I love the irony

I bought ten bucks worth of "exotic" tomato seeds and for my business they threw the Sprite seeds in for free. Creole plants always work great for us every year. I'm planning on trying Tomatillo from seed next year. I told the wife we'll have a Salsa garden next spring, tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos.

[K8-EEE]

9. Salsa!!!

I have a salsa garden!! The tough thing for me is keeping the cilantro going in the heat of summer. It tends to bolt. Basically I just keep re-sowing it every three of four weeks.

I'm going to try tomatillos next year too! My hub loves Enchilladas Suizas - with homemade salsa verde he will be putty in my hands, LOL.

[BOSSHOG]

12. You might try

Cilantro in pots next year, so you can control how much sunshine they get.

[bvar22]

13. Tomatoes and Peppers....excellent.

The tomatoes were very late.
Early May heatwave set them back about a month. The first tomatoes were ugly (split and burned) and few in numbers. Our tomatoes are just now peaking and the tomatoes are beautiful and bountiful.
We talk about cutting back on tomatoes next year, but we love each and every variety we are now growing. They are getting better every day.





Corn and Sunflowers also good.

Strawberries: very good early harvest very tasty, none since mid-June. Black Spot and gray mold forced us to top the plants. We are going to plant a mold resistant June Bearing strain next year.

Blueberries: encouraging and delightful harvest from our four young plants, about a pint.
We are going to plant 20 more plants this Fall.

Black Beans and Field Peas surprisingly good.
This was our first try with these, and we are well satisfied.
Low maintenance and high yield

Green Beans, Cantaloupes, Watermelon, Pumpkins... just OK.

Cucumbers were disappointing, low yield, blight or beetles damaged the 2 plants in June.

Squash was a total failure due to squash bugs.
This was our first try at squash. 2 plants, Zucchini and Acorn.
Early growth outstanding, many blossoms and tons of young fruit before the Squash Bugs got them.
We will have a better plan next year, and are going to plant more squash and different varieties.


Peaches were a zero.
Many blossoms in early Spring, tons of young fruit.
Summer long attrition from birds, bugs, and heat left us with zero.
We had about 5 peaches left that were ripening last week, got up one morning and they were GONE...disappeared....not even 1/2 eaten fruit or pits on the ground. No tracks or signs of anything climbing the tree.
Peaches are personal with me.
I WILL have a peach next year if I have to camp under the tree with a net and a gun!

"Well I love big golden peaches...
...makes me feel right at home"

[susanna]

14. Just south of Detroit checking in...

My tomatoes are MONSTERS. They are giving me so much fruit I'm beginning to wonder what happened the last ten years (they were not nearly so prolific). Weird thing is, I couldn't plant them until early June; we had a frost the last week of May...no joke.

My peppers, squashes and eggplant, on the other hand, are hating the cool nights and lack of humidity; they're not doing so good.

Dried beans were OK, I guess, but I hadn't grown them before so I have no benchmark.

It's weird where I am in Michigan - we had a "California" summer (hottish days, really cool nights). I'm still trying to figure that out.

on edit: Susie Almanac aka the Weather in these here parts...

[asdjrocky]

15. The tomatoes have done great so far.

My one green bean bush produced well, but I learned that I need more than one bush. Both varieties of cucumbers did well, but for next year it's Japanese only for me. (I like them so much better than the American cukes.) The crookneck squash has done well, but again I need more plants.

Soybeans, carrots and radishes, not so much.

[bhikkhu]

16. 3 Months of fresh lettuce!

and a month of fine cukes, so far. A good crop of onions is in. A bumper crop of tomatoes (early girls, sweet 100's and heirlooms) is still on the way - the first ripe within a day or two. Green beans and corn have also done well, and the three varieties of potato I planted are all looking very healthy above-ground.

Less good...snap peas came late and ended early, bugs ate my Daikons and Kohlrabi and turnips, my leeks are still hardly bigger than sprouts for no apparent reason, and spinach failed (bad seeds perhaps). My aragula went straight to seed. I also tried chard this year and wound up with wonderful big plants, but the kids didn't like it. Next year I'll try some asian greens instead.

Looking forward to a good mulching-in and expansion of the garden next year!

[Vinca]

17. My peppers have been a huge disappointment. I planted 4 different

kinds - about 32 plants - and so far I've gotten 1 lousy pepper. Last weekend I went out and subjected them to a little "tough love" and ripped anything off them that looked like a sucker. It must have worked because the plants are loaded with blossoms now.

[kdmorris]

18. Our tomatoes did OK

And the watermelon was growing pretty nicely.. and then Tropical Storm Fay drowned everything.

I guess we will start over now...

My lettuce bolted because it was too hot in South Florida to plant lettuce.

[wildeyed]

19. I had a difficult year.

Good spring season with lots of broccoli and greens, but summer crops have been spotty. Tomatoes did fine, but not as well as in the past. Peppers, eggplants and cukes fizzled. I got one pumpkin and one melon from three plants of each. Summer squash did ok for a while, but got a borer toward the end which I did not catch in time, so they are gone. Sigh.

[conscious evolution]

20. Tomatoes and eggplants did fine.

Got so many we are taking the excess to the local Krishna Temple.

Cucumbers,cabbage,corn and sunflowers did poorly.

[Venceremos]

21. My cranberries, strawberries and asparagus

bore well and their flavor was great. But everything else turned out poorly because we had much higher than normal rainfall and cooler than normal temps.