The 2022 Garden Failures and Losses -There’s Always Some!

While most of my 2022 garden was a great success for the most part, I also had a lot of failures and losses included as well.

Contrary to what you might want to believe or what some bloggers have left you to think, you are bound to have issues and pest problems from time to time. Any person who has ever had a garden will tell you that. (And if they claim they have never had failures, they are lying!)

Not every plant is going to grow well. Not every plant is going to produce vegetables or fruit. You won’t always be able to escape every bug or infectious pest. And you can’t control the weather.

As hard as these problems are to stomach, they are just a part of gardening. You have to be able to deal with the lows as well as the highs if you are going to garden. That’s just a fact. Use it as a learning experience and try not to let it bother you too much.

So on that note, I wanted to talk to you about some of the losses that I experienced with my 2022 garden. It might be a bit hard for me to admit how many problems I had, but I vowed to be upfront with my homesteading journey in this blog, and that includes talking about the good and bad.

My 2022 Garden Failures

I am not sure using the word “fails” is really the right route to go since sometimes these issues just can’t be controlled. But title aside, let’s dig in. Hopefully, this list will make you feel a bit better about issues you might’ve had with your gardens in the past!

Pumpkins & Honeynut Squash

So this first “failure” was more of an issue of overcrowding as opposed to not producing fruit. I had one, just ONE honeynut squash planted in one of my growing rows (row 6 to be exact). I planted probably four mini pumpkins in my third raised box where my cold crops had once been. So should’ve been plenty of room for both to roam about.

However, the honeynut squash took off and just grew like mad. I didn’t have the heart to prune the plant, which was a mistake for sure. Instead, I just let the plant grow, and grow it did.

Eventually, the squash and the pumpkins intertwined and started to grow together in one big mass. While this wasn’t an issue initially aside from making it hard to harvest the produce, I ended up with powdery mildew.

Powdery mildew is a fungal infection that happens when plants are overcrowded and create a high relative humidity. Once your plants have it, it can be rather difficult to eradicate. I tried using neem oil but just couldn’t keep up with it. Eventually, it took over the plants and killed them before making its way to my cucumbers as well as my second planting of zucchini.

Green Bell Peppers

Green peppers were another 2022 garden failure/struggle. For the last couple of years, I have not had good luck with bell pepper plants. I’ll get a couple to produce fruit, but I only get 3 to 4 ok-sized peppers per plant. And I say “ok-sized” because they aren’t even what I would consider decent by any means.

Next to the bell peppers, I had two nadapeno plants growing, and they produced amazingly well. As did my pepperoncini pepper plants I had in the same growing row. I even had multiple mini bell pepper plants that produced like crazy. It just seemed to be my larger bell pepper plants that struggled.

Cucumbers – 2022 Garden Failures

This is another one of those crops that I’m not sure what the issue was. I usually have great success with growing cucumbers. But in 2022, they just didn’t want to grow.

I’m not sure if it was the varieties I was growing or what, but only a few plants took hold and took off. One variety I know for sure hardly germinated despite multiple replantings. What did germinate never grew past about six inches tall and then died. (I pitched the rest of those seeds and won’t be trying them again!)

The plants did produce a few cukes that we could eat fresh, but definitely not enough to preserve. Thankfully, I had plenty of pickles left from the previous year and didn’t need to make more.

Carrots

I’m not sure if I should really call the carrots one of my 2022 garden failures either since it was my first time growing them. I can probably chalk them up to inexperience.

I put them in the same raised bed as some of my other plants (pumpkins . . . see above), and they just got lost in the mix. Carrots can tend to be a bit finicky compared to other crops, but I still wanted to give them a go.

First off, I didn’t get great germination rates. I also didn’t really work at it too well and I’m sure let the soil dry out more than what’s needed for carrot germination. Then I didn’t really thin them out, which caused some deformation as well as stunted growth, I’m sure.

And I think we harvested them WAY too early but the looks of what we pulled. However, they were still fun to harvest what did grow. It’s always a fun surprise to pull the carrots out of the soil and see what you end up with!

Zucchini Plants – 2022 Garden Fails

Last by definitely not least were my zucchini plants. The first round was overcome by something. What, I had no clue.

One day they were producing fruit and looked just fine. Two days later, two plants were 80% dead. A few days later, the yellow zucchini plants were also overtaken. I tried using neem oil and sprayed down the plants to try to kill off any pest that might be lingering about, but it didn’t help.

I looked for evidence of squash borers but didn’t find any. However, I’m pretty sure that must have been the issue because nothing else made sense. We did have a few squash beetles milling about, but not enough that should’ve caused a total loss in just a couple of days.

So I am not totally sure what happened. I did end up planting a second round of zucchinis in the raised bed after I harvested my garlic and onions. Those plants did really well . . . until the powdery mildew got them!

Other minor issues were that the onions didn’t do great and the squash bugs did take over my butternut squash eventually. I also failed to plant two tomatillos (which I later learned you needed in order to produce fruit). But as far as I can remember, that is the worst of the failures from this year.

But even with all of those losses and failures, I still had a great successful gardening season! And as I always tell myself, it’s just a normal part of gardening and the learning process!

Until next time, thanks for stopping by!
– Chelsea

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