This Year's Garden Fails - Were Fantastic

I had some spectacularly epic fails in the vegetable garden this year! It's been great. Failure after failure, all season long.

A lot of things have gone wrong this season. Some of it I can blame on the ridiculous heat, some on pests and some on my own bumbling moves. But who gives a big, fat, dipsy-sh*t when you fail if it results in a win later on?

Gardening a 10 minute drive away from my home (I garden in a 40' x 40' community garden plot if you didn't know) is also less than ideal.

Creepy Crawly

A lot of things have gone wrong this season. Some of it I can blame on the ridiculous heat, some on pests and some on my own bumbling moves.

It wasn't caused by a raccoon, skunk, mouse, or vole. If you see this kind of bite mark out of your tomato, it was in fact, caused by a hornworm.

But ... this is not a tomato hornworm.

This is a tobacco hornworm. And like the tomato hornworm it can eat every single leaf and tomato on your plant as fast as you can eat a bag of chocolate covered almonds.

I always assumed since they were on my tomatoes that I was looking at a tomato hornworm. That's just good, sound logic.

But the tobacco hornworm and the tomato hornworm are almost identical and both will eat both plants.

Hint: If you notice your tomatoes with this type of damage or see completely eaten leaves you have to find the hornworm and get rid of it. Unless they're really huge, hornworms are hard to see on the plants so people use blacklight flashlights and search for them on the plant at night.

Lesson Learned

Knowing the difference between these two hornworms won't have any effect on them decimating my plants next year but at least when I complain about it, I'll be swearing about the proper pest.

Late Planted Carrots & Beets

In early summer I planted a billion carrots and 5 of them grew so I vowed to plant more. Which I immediately did 2 months later.

Once they sprouted, I brought them to my vegetable garden and transplanted them into the ground.

You can see one month of growth on these transplanted carrots. Even though all that greenery is a good sign, an even better sign is an actual carrot forming.

These carrots are bigger than the pathetic 5 I planted months ago.

The beets are showing some progress but aren't doing quite as well as the carrots in terms of bulbing up so I'll have to wait to see if planting them this late will work out.

You can see a beet starting to form after 1 month in the ground.

Lesson Learned

Always start and transplant my carrots. It works great, germination rate is excellent. It takes about a week for the carrots to get over the shock and start growing after transplanting.

I should plant my carrots much later than I normally do and grow a short season crop(lettuce, radishes, peas, green onions) in the bed prior to planting them. That will double my growing space for the season.

Pantyhose Prophylactics

I still prefer a low tunnel of insect netting for growing clean cabbages, but covering them with nylons like I showed you a few weeks ago works really, really well.

I highly recommend this technique; when the cabbage starts growing all you have to do is cover the head with a knee high. The cabbage moths can't get through the nylon to lay their eggs, hatch their caterpillars, eat your cabbage and poop their poop.

Spray the plants to be covered with BTK first to knock out any cabbage moth caterpillars and eggs that might be on the plant before covering it with the nylon.

Lesson Learned

Continue being curious and experimenting, even with previous fails of the same thing.

I tried this pantyhose thing about a decade ago and deemed it a failure. I can't remember why, just that it didn't work. Oh a whim, I tried it again this year and it definitely did work.

Swiss Chard Damage

I haven't had any Swiss chard this year. Just as it seems to grow, the next time I look at it the leaves are either full of holes or gone entirely.

It's been like this since I planted it in the spring. I couldn't figure out what was eating it but 2 weeks ago I covered the chard with insect netting and there has been no more damage.

My super-sad swiss chard patch is now just starting to grow. So what was eating it? Since a light layer of row cover protected them, chances are birds were pecking at it. I never would have thought to look to them as the pest, but now it makes sense.

Lesson Learned

There are few pest problems in the vegetable garden that insect netting can't solve. Also, when in doubt, blame the birds.

Corn Spacing

I always have excellent germination for corn but not this year. This year over half of my seeds didn't germinate which left a patchy sporadic looking corn bed.

But I noticed something interesting happened with the spacious planting.

Every single stalk grew 2 cobs.

For reference, I have never had a stalk of corn grow more than 1 cob on it before. Technically corn can grow 2 cobs on a stalk but I've never had that happen. Until this year.

Lesson Learned

SPACING IS IMPORTANT and what you think is correct might not be. I now know if I plant half as much corn in the same amount of space I will get the same amount of corn because each stalk will have the energy and room to grow 2 cobs instead of one.

Smashing as many plants as possible into a small space doesn't necessarily increase your harvest. Which is the reason you don't hear anyone talking about square foot gardening anymore.

UPDATE: I picked some corn and a lot of it had poor pollination (because there weren't as many corn tassels to pollinate. So if I want to continue this spacing, I have to help the corn with pollination by shaking the stalks a little when I see there are pollen tassels and corn silks emerging. This will help drop the pollen onto the corn silks, which in turn turn into kernels.

Although a fail is a fail this year, if you're observant and curious enough - it'll turn into next year's win. This ends my motivational speech for today. I have some green hairy balls to check and report back on.