Terrible garden year: a whine.
I just need to vent and maybe get some commiseration here. It has been such a trying, frustrating garden year and I’m not even sure what I could do differently.
Squirrels chomped all my peanuts. Oh, and the little jerks also ate most of my beet sprouts and okra.
Hot and dry killed multiple squash seedlings even with plenty of water twice daily (random heat dome nonsense after a ton of rain where everything was stunted for a month).
The aforementioned cold/rain rotted a few cabbages and drastically slowed down my eggplant, peppers, and tomatoes.
Japanese beetles nuked the leaves off strawberries, blackberries, and several apple trees.
Rabbits chomped a bunch of my lettuce and carrot tops and two crops of attempted radishes.
Cucumber beetles murdered my honey melons, cantaloupe, and practically every cucumber vine (I had six, I’m down to one and succession planted four new ones. sigh.) Fam, I managed to harvest one cuke this season. Everything else has rotted on the vine barely pollinated while the whole thing wilts.
And lastly, in the snatching-defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory columns, I’d waged a very successful war against squash beetles and vine borers, only to be hit with a random second wave of borers last week who appear to have eaten into my Bianco de Trieste and several Black Beauty zukes. FML. Oh, and did I mention the absolute plague of powdery mildew the last two weeks that has tried to take out every cucurbit that the squash bugs and borers and cuke beetles didn’t? So that’s fun.
I love gardening, but I swear this year has been a catastrophe on so many levels. I was so careful and did as much preventative maintenance as I could, but between weather and pest pressure it’s just been horrible and discouraging. I don’t know if I’m alone in this boat but this is my worst garden year in the last six. BOO HISS.
