The First Annual Garden Failure Round-Up
All the things I did wrong last year, and my (extremely ambitious) growing plans for 2023
Hello slugs!
You may have noticed that I stopped doing newsy round-ups like this. I’ve been taking long breaks from social media and also newsfeeds in general, and every time I take a break I don’t want to go back. Gathering the links required a lot of newsfeed immersion, which meant stuffing my brain full of all the world’s horrors on a weekly basis, and I needed to stop that for a while!
I may return to current events, but for now, I’m going to round-up other things for paid subscribers: art I love, books I’m reading, and this week, a little exercise in iteration — collecting the biggest lessons I’m taking into my second year of learning how to grow plants. Plus: a photographic journey through the beginning of my front yard pollinator garden, and the changes I’m making to growing veg this year. I expect all of it to fail at least somewhat!
Last year we moved in April, so I didn’t get to plan very much. I neglected the front flower border entirely, because it was just too much to try to figure out how to landscape in full view of all my new neighbors, plus it was already in bloom, and I was curious to see what flowers would come out of the ground next.
I basically just threw some seeds in the dirt and did a bunch of little experiments last summer, convinced I’d started too late to get any kind of harvest. My only goal was to grow something we could eat, and despite my many mistakes, I did get to eat a lot of things I’d grown myself, for the very first time!
My nice, low expectations were far exceeded. There was plenty of failure, but I found out a lot by just fucking around.
How much failure? Let us count the ways:
Not creating a compost pile (I was scared!)
Growing way too much zucchini (they’re such big boys)
Not building any trellises!!! (we’re going vertical this year baby)
Planting all my fall crops too late so the cold stunted their growth (sorry)
Neglecting to use mulch (couldn’t figure it out)
Planting a perennial bee balm with a spreading habit in the exact center of the best garden bed (she’s already taking over)
Letting wet grass clippings rot in a bucket and then thinking I could use them as mulch (stinky, do not recommend)
A very strong wind knocking down my seedling trays and scattering all my baby plants across the yard (forgot about wind)
Leaving for the entire month of August (the plants didn’t die though, they took over)
Despite all this, it was still totally fine. Like, not totally fine if you’re trying to be a “self-sufficient” “off-grid” homesteader,1 but totally fine if you’re just trying to get into amateur entomology and grow some salad.
I scooped the pepper seedlings out of the grass and repotted them; they still grew so many peppers, I couldn’t eat them all. The tomato plants I didn’t trellis just got tied to the fence until they were so tall they reached across it; they grew so many tomatoes, I got to make sauce.
The zucchini plants were massive and full of beetles; eventually they got chewed up by squash vine borers, but they taught me how to recognize so many different kinds of bugs I’d never seen before.
Every failure is a successful experiment. Maybe the most important lesson I learned in my first year is that plants love growing, which means, you can be kinda bad at gardening, and something will grow despite you.2
Adventures in Pollinator-Friendly Landscape Design
I’ve been ashamed of the front flower border all year. I tried to prune it, but I didn’t know what I was doing, so I just gave up and told myself that I was letting it grow out as an experiment, too. Here’s what it looked like last summer:
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