Gardening '12 Hits and Misses: Misses

Hey, there....hope all of you lovely people are hanging in there this week. I will tell you what, my school has gotten its money's worth on me in the recent past.

Wow. That's all I got on that. For now.

So....as fall is upon us, I like to reflect on what went well or not-so-well this year with gardening. If you've kept up with my sporadic blogging this summer, you know that I've been less than pleased with the growing conditions Little Miss Mother Nature has imposed on us all. She is a fickle one, I tell ya.

As to end on a positive note, let's start the first of this two-part series with the downers.

I think nothing, NOTHING, was more disappointing than this garden bed. I had such high hopes for it.

Clearly, there was a whole lotta nothin' going on here. For the last several years, I had planted Profusion zinnias in this area (and in a similar area at our old house). They would get quite large and fill in the space so well. But...in this spot, there is a lot of yellow throughout the season and the orange/yellow combo was not doing for me so much. I talked with a worker at the plant store and she steered me toward impatiens. This area faces east. So, I tried New Guinea impatiens on one side of the garden and the traditional type on the other side. The NGs were just PATHETIC. I can't see myself committing to those again anytime soon. 

To add insult to injury, I decided to plant salvia along the back of the bed. I was envisioning  a nice bright blue with a hot pink-ish color from the NGs. Well...

The salvias have come on only in the last 3-4 weeks. Ummmm, I didn't wait 3+ months to have you start blooming now. Ugh. The only upside is that you can dry these....or, if you have a mild winter in our area, they might overwinter. Hm. We'll have to think on that one.

The traditional impatiens did much better. I will post those in the positives.

Pretty much anything that was directly sowed into the garden did not do well. Green beans? No. Zinnias? No. (this broke my heart)

I did plant this squash plant my neighbor gave me......it was huge and had really nice yellow flowers....but no squash.    ?  ?   ?

I had a really nice crop of sunflowers, but I did not realize how much they would dominate the garden, space-wise and shade-wise. This did not benefit my direct-sowing.

There you have it. The worst of my year in the garden. Stay tuned for a more uplifting post...