during covid my sister's college put up signs in the bathrooms saying "wash your hands like you just sliced jalapenos and now you need to take out your contacts" and to this day I think that's the most effective hand-washing message I've ever seen
I rescued a bunch of pots from an abandoned house, I put my potatoes in the largest pot. I saw a squirrel digging in it, but they weren't disturbing my plants so I left it alone. In Fall, I dug up everything in there and got both potatoes and peanuts. Squirrels apparently grow peanuts just fine.
We have about 9 massive oak trees in my yard and they drop hundreds of pounds of acorns every few years. We filled a coffee sack 13 times one season alone. The squirrels keep filling our birdhouses with them. I wanna make a squirrel acorn deposit box so i dont have to pick them up myself! xD
Omg, this video was awesome! I really needed a good laugh! Thank you so much! 1) I always research anything I am thinking of growing or impulsively buy. 2) I always wear gloves when I handle hot peppers because I have sensitive skin. My husband on the other hand does not and got me with the residual pepper burn, um let’s just say, in bed. Not fun! (But yeah, go ahead and laugh.) 3) The smoking cactus was probably caused by mold or mildew dispersing spores when he watered it.
It was my first garden and I like tomatoes so I planted seeds indoors. I transplanted them outdoors thinking that each plant would give me 2 or 3 tomatoes. I planted 54 indeterminate plants in about 200 Sq ft plants thinking I could handle the 120 tomato or so yield. Then I dislocated my knee in July so I stopped pruning them and let them go. It was not only a prolific year for tomatoes in general, but multiplied by 54, I was completely overwhelmed with my dense tomato forest that I had created. I was praying for frost so they would die off. I was picking (5) 5 gallon buckets of tomatoes per day, crutches and all- begging people to take them off my hands. Never again.
My family's greatest gardening disaster was my Mother. Dad once tried to grow a veggie patch in the backyard. He worked hard to plough out a section of ground with regular gardening tools, put a raised edging around it, built it up with compost, fertiliser, mulch, all the good stuff, and worked out his planting plan. First up was spinach. Several weeks later whilst Dad was at work Mum decided to help with the veggie patch. The spinach was about 3 inches tall, and there was a weed growing among the veggie patch that was a little bit larger, so Mum went and did the weeding. Yeah, you guessed it, Mum removed all the spinach instead of the weeds. Dad saw the funny side of it and decided to plant more spinach, and also some beetroot, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, and radish. Later on, just as it was starting to look good, Mum decided to help again by buying some liquid fertilizer and giving the veggie garden a good spray with it... but got the liquid fertilizer container mixed up with a herbicide and well... Dad concluded that Mum was not to be trusted with a veggie patch in the yard, turned it into a lawn and never did any gardening again. She later learned more about gardening and became great with flowers, ended up with an amazing cottage style flower garden anyone would be proud of. She never dared to grow anything edible though. My greatest gardening bungle so far was the first time I grew mint. My grandmother grew it in a garden bed and it was always a neat little cluster - I didn't know she had it contained by growing it in a buried black plastic bucket that was mostly hidden by the loose leaf mulch on top. I created a little garden circle in the corner of the lawn and planted the mint there, blinked, and ended up with a mint lawn that smelled lovely when mowed.
Haha! I have a neighbor that grows so much stuff in her yard as she is a retired widow. She also has bees and a greenhouse provided by the USDA for testing nitrate in the soil compounds, but she is allowed to grow whatever she wants. She twisted her ankle last spring and asked if I could come over and help trim back her mint. Me thinking it had overgrown a bit, it was an understatement. It was EVERYWHERE in her greenhouse and was going out the door into her lawn where she grew these purple potatoes! 😂 We trimmed it back and decided to put it in her compost bin, but I got some propagation cuttings myself for helping. I have my mint in large pots that I trim back every little while and it’s now starting to come back again!
😂😂 my mother also has a proclivity for killing my plants, for this very reason she is strictly forbidden from touching any of them. This however did not stop her, so the last time she murdered another I just got exceptionally dramatic about it. And whined and mourned it like I was fucking hamlet, and actually left the plant around so she could actually see what she had caused ( I used to remove plants after she'd been at them because I knew they wouldn't survive )
I remember as a kid my dad planted 12 tomatoes and we then got a mild frost; all the plants looked dead so he decided to plant 12 more. After a few weeks the original 12 perked back up and soon looked great again. We harvested something like 3 laundry baskets of fruit that year and no one but dad liked tomatoes. Mum did make a ton of salsa which was good.
My neighbor to the north went through this summer of 2022. LMAO Let's just say that by the time the first hard freeze hit, she was sick to death of tomatoes!
That's pretty stupid. Not growing but you not liking tomatoes. I seriously don't get it. You don't like kiwi ok you don't like blackberry ok. But tomato? The #1 homegrown crop? Very stupid. It is the most delicious vegetable, full of vitamins. We eat them straight from the vine in Europe. Also salsa? 🤨 Tomato sauce dude. Make tomato sauce. It can be used as base for soup, stew, and so many other things. Or you could make ketchup, tomato puree. So many great things.
Ah man y’all made my whole week, I am glad it made you laugh too! I actually sent my roommate down to the Braum’s on the corner to get the milk. Skim milk, I told him, because I figured the tomatoes wouldn’t need the extra fat. After it became abundantly clear that I had made a significant error in judgement, I wrote to the guy on NPR who does the You Bet Your Garden show, begging him to tell me how to save the (already very dead) tomatoes. He wrote back with something like “You have done so many things wrong that I cannot even begin to help you.” Y’all were much nicer about it! Of course I was very hopeful that maybe a miracle would occur and the tomatoes would resurrect. So I left their desiccating corpses and their containers of rotting milk soil in the garden for like three more weeks, until my boyfriend was like “Enough is enough” and insisted I dispose of their remains. This was only a few years after I had a sinus infection and was like “I know you can rinse your sinuses with something to help. Is it salt water? Or lemon juice?” I contemplated this in the terms of what seemed like it would be more caustic and thus kill more germs, and thus settled on the lemon juice. SPOILER: THIS WAS THE INCORRECT CHOICE. I have since learned to run my plans by someone who is not me for a sanity check. 😂😂😂
The fun part of the tomato story is that if you buried the curdled dirt and planted tomatoes there the next year, they likely would have thrived. 🤗Silver linings...! Lemon juice?!? Do you still have simuses???!?
At 40 yrs of age I planted 2 cherry tomato plants and a couple peppers. The cherry tomatoes grew so vigorously that I was lectured by my dad for planting so many and not making pathways. I was eating tomatoes from morning till dark. At the end of the season it took 5 lawn bags and I used my wide blade snow shovel to scoop all the fallen tomatoes up. I left the 2 tree like stumps to prove to my dad that I only planted 2. Now I've had so many garden fails in the 10 yrs since that I'd love to know that variety so I could boost my growing confidence a bit. And they had a great burst of acidic flavor. Should have cut back but they were growing so well I didn't have the heart.
I had a similar experience. I realized that the first year they were grown in containers so were water stressed, which gave them much better flavor. Tomatoes in ground can have too much water, which dilutes their flavor.
I had a mystery cherry tomato plant show up in my garden 10+ years ago. Similar situation. I'd never planted small tomatoes before so I knew it couldn't be a volunteer from a previous year and it showed up more or less on a pathway, not somewhere I would have ever planted. Massive, massive harvest. It grew red and orange cherry tomatoes, so many we couldn't keep up. Used the for salsa, marinara, finally just started drying them in the smoker. Didn't save any seeds and never saw it again. This last year a plant started to grow along the path in the side yard. Transplanted it. Turned out to be pumpkins. I'd never grown pumpkins before, they were ready for Thanksgiving, turned into 5 pies and pumpkin spice ice cream. Have no idea where the seed came from.
You technically don't have to cut them back if they have enough space to spread out, which it sounds like they did. The fact that you didn't prune them heavily is probably one of the reasons you got a bumper crop.
@@the_motherlord You don't say what your living situation is, but it could have been from birds, or other animals, visiting your neighbors. I live and work on a working farm, and we have plants show up now and again due to the various wildlife in my area passing seeds through their digestive tract.
My fav is a UK reporter who was doing a garden segment and said that every time she dug up corn there wasn't anything. The professional gardener and co-host died explaining that corn doesn't work that way. She thought they were related to potatoes lol
One year my kids "helped" me plant some seeds in one of our 3 raised beds, we thought a pumpkin would be fun to try but they ended up planting 6 pumpkins in a VERY full raised bed, and we ended up having the pumpkins climbing old ladders, rope, and anything we could get our hands on, but we did harvest 3 beautiful pumpkins by the end of the season!
@@FrozEnbyWolf150 yes, we did the 3 sisters last year for the first time. We had problems with a raccoon getting to my conr before us, and we didnt plant them in the right timeline so my beans never really took either... but it's all a learning process.. The year we had the pumpkins it was in a bed with squash, celery, melons, and peppers.. and it was only a 12ftx4ft bed, but we were trying to get the most out of our garden (this was also the beginning of 2020) and we had never grown pumpkins before or even seen a real pumpkin patch because they are tough to grown in our zone, but we soon learned that pumpkins grow very fast at the beginning and go everywhere! But they can also climb which saved the rest of our bed, then when we started seeing fruit from it we took rope and made slings for them because they would get too heavy to hang from the plant without breaking.. Now weve taken that same principle and made an arch out of cattle panel and had great success growning melons over it and other things that need more shade can grow under the arch, you just have to use something to wrap around the fruit, like old T shirts or pantyhose...
@@j.d.x4451 Sounds like you had better luck with pumpkins than I did. We have extreme pest pressure around here, so any Cucurbita pepo cultivars I tried growing got demolished by squash vine borers and squash bugs. The Cucurbita moschata cultivars, being more resistant, took off and did what you described. Had Tahitian butternuts coming out of our ears. I like those because they grow to the size of your arm.
Very enjoyable video! My big gardening fail was in 2019. I had finally figured out how to compost correctly after four years of having basically dried leaves and dried up food trash sitting in the bin. I had a couple of different kinds of store-bought squash that I had waited too long to use in the kitchen that were going bad. So I chucked them into my compost bin ... seeds and all. I assumed the heat from the composting process would kill the seeds. Oh how wrong I was!! Once I started using that finished compost all over my garden (beds and containers) I suddenly had squash everywhere!! It even vined over the wood fence separating my yard from the one next door. Fortunately, that yard belonged to my landlady. There was an old jungle gym her tenant had built for his daughter when she was younger and the squash took over that as well as a good portion of the back yard. I was constantly picking squash seedlings out of my containers as they popped up, to the point where my landlady nicknamed me the "plant abortionist". Another thing I learned is that seeds sometimes wait a year or two to sprout!! I think 2021 was the last errant squash plant that popped up. I hope. So I learned my lesson about being careful what I put in the compost bin. The other lesson I'm still learning: If you want to save your lettuce seeds from plants that have bolted, make sure you cover them with some type of tulle fabric. Santa Ana winds can pop up at any time and the next thing you know, you (and your neighbors) will have wild lettuce growing in your grass!!
For anyone else considering Chip Drop, I recommend growing mushrooms in the woodchips. Wine caps are a good choice, but any kind of fungus will help rapidly break down the chips and enrich your soil. Whenever I dig into them, I see a dense network of white mycelia, and the woodchips crumble apart like wet cardboard. I've had the woodchips break down in a matter of months, instead of years. Around here there are also so many native fungi that the woodchips rarely last longer than a year if I leave them alone.
I'm new to my state and wasn't aware of some weather issues. Last summer I grew a huge fantastic array of vegetables. They were coming up beautifully. I mean, really incredible amount of veggies. I had spent hours researching so everything was perfect. Hours and hours of research and gardening. I woke up in the middle of with lightening, thunder and machine gun pounding sounds on my roof. It was monsoon weather in New Mexico and golf ball sized hail stones wiped out my entire garden. Everything was ruined except one very sad tomato plant.
Oh my, I can commiserate 100%. Not sure the counts as a fail, but I had lots of beautiful flowers in my yard, iris, hyacinthe?, gerber daisy, they came up at different times of the year. Once the kids grew up and moved away, I did the mowing and trimming. My wonderful husband wanted to help me and surprised me by mowing while I was at work. He was so proud of his job, but he'd mowed my iris, thinking they were just some grass something. The look on my face told him never to do that again. I just about cried.
My first year growing tomatoes was one I won’t forget…this was before I learned about pruning and spacing them appropriately. The vines all grew into one huge jungle and I had enough tomatoes for Everyone! I refused to undo any of it and I was so impressed with the quantity and they were all delicious. It didn’t bother me that I had to crawl down the row and reach up to harvest and then back out of the row on hands and knees carting my harvest with me.
For some people, what happens in the garden has long-lasting consequences that don't stay in the garden and end up living in the house 10 months later. Your mileage may vary.
On that topic and in relation to the Carolina Reaper dude, I fermented some Ghost Pepper hot sauce and decided it was too thin so I figured I would just cook it down and thicken it up... I didn't think this one through until my eyes started to itch in the other room and by then it was too late. The worst part was knowing I had to go turn off the stove, the aerosolized capsicum was much denser there. I was choking up snot and crying. In the future I will make sure to turn the stove hood on and maybe open some windows.
oh that reminds me the of the time I was big into dehydrating. I got a really good deal on a commercial dehydrator and it was coming to the end of the season at the farmers market. The guy who sold peppers basically gave me a box of all his hots and EXTREMELY hot peppers one day. I froze some and I thought i'd dehydrate the rests to powder. I slice and put them in the dehydrator...mind you it's august in eastern washington...115 plus temps outside....and hit the on button of the dehydrator. A few minutes later my little one wanted to go to the store for ice cream so off we went to the store. I had no clue what I was about to encounter when I opened my front door when we got back. We were basically assaulted upon entry. Eyes, throat, face were on fire. The dogs ran out of the house and face ran on the lawn to put the fire out. When I realized what I did I felt so bad. I ended up taking my shirt off to cover my face and eyes and went in the house with only a bra on to try to turn the dehydrator off and possibly roll it outside. By this time my daughter has my neighbor over inquiring about our little situation. I have never felt stupider in my entire life!
Similar thing. My Grandma found some poison ivy on her property, so she removed it & threw it in the burn barrel. You can guess the rest; smoke got in her face & she ended up with poison ivy all over. Including her eyes. 😢
@@ronaldperkins4222 Yeah that's a crazy dangerous situation. If you inhale that smoke you can get it in your lungs. My buddy was hospitalized in the middle of a camping trip, he was in pretty bad shape for a few weeks.
My grandfather did a similar thing to us as kids! He tried to dry out some chilli's "faster" by putting them in the microwave. I remember thinking that the house was on fire when I was being pulled out of bed as a child, and told to hold my breath as we crawled on our hands and knees out the house😂 we all stood outside for an hour or so till the fumes subsided enough to go back inside.
I don't think I've ever laughed so much while watching a video. Definitely do more of these. Between the actual fails and your reactions to them, it was hilarious! So many favorites, I can't name just one 😅😂🤣. May have to watch this again!
Phew! I laughed so hard I cried. As far as gardening fails my toddler was following after me and pulling up each marker and the occasional plant I had placed. Though he did try to replant the plants. I ended up not knowing which peppers were hot and sweet because I picked similar looking peppers so I didn’t eat them. They were very pretty to look at though. Gotta laugh at yourself sometimes.
In the beginning, we planted out tomatoes in a sunny spot we thought was perfect. We didn't realize that it was sunny because it was the beginning of spring and the tree had no leaves. Once spring started, the leaves popped up and our area was in shade. Another bad one was I fertilized one of my raised beds, I forgot to close the door to the raised bed. I had planted really organized rows of lettuce, spinach, radishes, beets, carrots, garlic and onions. My dog had gone and dug everything I planted because she was attracted to the fertilizer. This one hurt...
Or dog wants to play with it because we did. This, I think, is why my Sprint Husky disrupted my thinned and transplanted iris rhizomes. He didn't eat them. Sitting right at the soil surface, they make easy targets!
With lead, it's especially prudent to check if you have chickens! Most garden plants won't really take up lead from the soil (at least your more popular garden plants, tomatoes, etc... But chickens and their eggs will have elevated levels of lead if you let them graze.
THIS⬆ I've spent the majority of my life living in a 140 year old mining town that sits on top of one of the largest and richest silver-lead-zinc ore bodies in the world. I can confirm that lead contamination in soil is a serious risk with animals and passes to their muscle tissue/meat, and their eggs, and milk, in high enough quantities to be of a genuine health concern to humans that are consuming them if the lead levels in the soil are high enough to give the animals a high enough blood lead level - keep in mind that poison is all about the dose. However, it's far less of a risk with fruits and vegetables. Although some plants can absorb some lead, it usually gets trapped in the root system, and even then, it's absorbed slowly in such small quantities that it's not going to pose a health risk to humans, again keeping in mind that poison is all about the dose. Root and tuber crops are annual, they don't have time to absorb enough lead into the roots to cause us harm, and the plants that can absorb enough lead to start being of concern are perennial plants that we eat the leaves, seeds, and fruits of, not the roots. We're far more likely to absorb more lead by breathing in particles of dust kicked up into in the air from us digging in the dirt than by eating vegetables from a lead contaminated garden - EXCEPT that you MUST VERY thoroughly wash the veggies before eating them, as the lead is mostly in the soil in the form of extremely fine dust particles, it can get all over not just the roots and tubers we eat, but also all over the rest of the plant including the fruits and leaves we eat. Mulching well can dramatically help reduce that problem, and never dig in dry soil, wet it down first to keep the dust down, but keep in mind that soil dust from the neighbour's yard can blow into your yard on a windy day, and chances are if your yard is contaminated with lead, their yard probably is as well.
@@robertacomstock3655 the poison is in the dose. Yes, it builds up, but our bodies are capable of removing it gradually over time. It's only a problem if the amount absorbed is greater than the amount our bodies can get rid of, and the amount plants are able to absorb is far too low to be of risk. It's impossible to eat enough of the plant matter that can absorb lead to get high enough amounts of lead into us that way to be of any concern. The harsh reality is that industrial pollution is by far the greater concern than any edible plant we can grow in our gardens so long as we wash the produce before eating it. Coal plants which powers most of our homes pump tons of heavy metals including mercury and lead into the atmosphere, which we then breathe in, and it settles on everything including fruits and veg, so it doesn't matter if you're growing fruit and veg in your lead contaminated back yard soil or buying it direct from a farm with clean soil, it's probably going to have some trace amount of lead on it from somewhere, so just wash your produce before eating it, wash your hands before eating, and don't eat dirt.
Rachel made me laugh-cry so hard. I do often rinse my milk jugs for recycling and dump the water on plants outside the kitchen door. That curdled milk soil though!
Regarding the "smoke" in the cactus torture by Gatorade story I could imagine mold spores inside a dead and desiccated cactus or just plain dust being flung into the air by the stream of liquid.
One year I decided to grow basil in some planters that I had hanging from my fence. After a while I had a half dozen 4-inch plants and I was excited by dreams of a bumper crop harvest. One afternoon, I checked on my plant after returning from work and every single one had been snipped off at exactly the same height. I was indignant. Someone was stealing my basil! The next day the plants were all an inch lower than the day before. I was furious. I started giving my neighbors the evil eye. Who was stealing from me and snipping my basil with such perfect precision?? The next day they were one inch lower again and I decided to catch the thief. The next Saturday, I camped out in my window, never blinking, as I watched my precious basil. Imagine my surprise when two ROUS’s (rodent of unusual size) came trotting along the top of the fence straight to my basil plants. They gripped the top of the fence with their back claws and hung down over my basil, carefully mowing each plant about an inch, each one exactly the same height. Who knew rats love basil?? They do in SoCal! Now I grow basil indoors. 😂 🐀
The squirrels my neighbor was feeding (raw peanuts) burried their stock in my plants and I actually had peanut plants growing with my flowers. We left them one year, but the squirrels planted them too late for our canadian summer and the peanuts were too small. But if they were to plant them earlier we’d definitely get peanuts!
I love surprise wildlife gifts. Was weeding the flowerbeds one day and found a stray carrot. We don't grow carrots! I think the turtle doves that love to hang around in our garden may have snacked on someone else's harvest and pooped out the seeds 😛
The corn story resonates. First garden I transplanted and put corn seeds in the ground. Two weekends later I went out to weed the garden and pulled 3/4 or the corn plants out thinking they were grass haha. Realized it and replanted. No harm no foul.
I was playing "corn or grass?" a month ago after I planted corn for the first time and then realized it wouldn't be a good idea to pick out the crabgrass from my bed like usual!😅 Had to wait a couple of weeks for the corn sprouts to get big enough that I could tell which was which.
My parents managed to get zucchini and cucumbers mixed up. They grew the zucchini up canes, and the cucumbers along the ground. They actually ate a raw zucchini for dinner assuming it was a cucumber, even though it was very hard and a bit spiky on the outside. I couldn't believe it when mum showed me the 'inedible cucumber' and waved a zucchini in my face.
I’m still in my fail stage! If you saw my garden I’m sure you would question everything I’m doing! But it’s okay, every failure is a learning experience. Very nervous about summer time and those green flying beetles, I always find a few grubs in my soil when I dig to plant something! Doesn’t help that I’m lowkey scared of them
I feel lucky I haven't had a problem with those big nasty grubs (knock on wood) unfortunately there's slugs and snails galore, those caterpillars that eat the brocolli plants and weavel beetles that eat the crap out of my strawberry plants among other pests..
I’m in Arizona & am BRAND SPANKIN’ NEW to gardening- like only weeks into it. I have already made so many mistakes and have felt so stupid. Planted, realized I did stuff way wrong, dug it all up, transplanted a few things and started all over … This video was so wonderful to watch!! I have definitely gotten a kick out of my ignorance and have laughed at myself for sure BUT it helped me a lot to know it’s not just me!! This video had me cackling, but it was also wonderfully informative. I love how helpful and tender you guys offered up validation to newbs & gave suggestions, etc … Excellent video! Thoroughly enjoyed!
One of my favorite gardening videos of all time! Love that fellow gardeners can commiserate with our shared failures. Laughed so hard I had tears running down my face! Please do another one of these.
The last bit about overwatering cacti. Mum had a Christmas cactus that was supposed to flower at Christmas. She kept it on the windowsill in the bathroom and hardly ever watered it so the moisture it got was mainly from the steam from baths and showers. It used to flower usually 6 or 7 times a year instead of just once.
My epic garden fail was one I unknowingly repeated multiple years. There's chameleon plant all over my backyard that the previous owner had planted and in order to grow anything I would need to get rid of it. Little did I know, chameleon plant grows so invasively because it spreads by rhizomes. So all the back breaking work of pulling out these plants (with much difficulty because of our heavy clay soil) did nothing because they just popped right back up. Then I got frustrated and just tossed the pulled plants into a different part of the yard and it took over there too🥲 Now after many years of heartbreak, I'm sheet mulching with cardboard to shade them out
Best solution and you may have to do it with a few layers. I did some sheet mulching with cardboard for my 85 year old neighbor. Wild grape vines invading from an empty lot. Two years later and the vines are coming thru again. Nasty buggers! Good Luck.
My garlic in NH gets planted 5" deep and heavily mulched. As spring comes I remove the mulch and the ground is one big block of ice, but that garlic is unfazed and grows huge bulbs, only lose one or two. Nature amazes me.
That cucumber story reminds me of the first year I grew yellow crooked neck squash. I thought I was going to lose some of them (and I did), but I ended up with around 25 plants producing. My entire house had squash just stacked all over the place. My neighbors quit buying squash from the store that year.
Should have seen my garden. Had the patio redone by what was recommended to me as a professional landscaper. He made a complete mess of it. Not a year later and not only were the paving stones sinking into the ground but weeds were growing 3 feet tall through the cracks between them. Turns out the company had failed to put in a sand layer, failed to compact it, failed to fit the slabs together well, and failed to add sharp sand between the slabs to stabilise them and prevent weed growth. And me, with a bad back and knees couldn't keep up with the ever faster growth of weeds.
Omg! I almost pissed myself laughing at the milk on the tomatoes! 😂 The stench of the rotting milk might of at least kept the critters away... I hope you do more of these videos and please post your failures because we learn from your mistakes too. We can laugh together and not at you. 💕 😂
This is one of the best videos you all have ever done... I am still laughing about the milk on tomatoes, but in all fairness, we probably all have some good stories about mistakes we made. Please do more of these!! I love hearing what others have done and what you all have experienced as well. I too thought those Japanese green beetles were beautiful, and they are, but didn't know that their larva was probably what was killing some of my plants. I have many such stories, as I am sure most of your gardening viewers have. Great video!
My 1st real year of gardening I failed at seed starting in seed starting mix, so I tried the paper towel method using the same amount of seeds one would used with the soil method. I ended up with EVERY seed germinating leaving me with over 100 plants; almost 10 different types of vegetables, and about 5 plants of a couple different varieties. I couldn't bring myself to get rid of the excess so I planted all of them. The lack of being able to keep up with that many plants and not being prepared with available space pretty much took care of getting rid of some of the plants for me and I ended up with 10% of my plants giving me some sort of fruit. Out of the dozen plants I had left, I got a handful of beans, 4 zukes, a handful of tomatoes, and a couple cucumbers. No bell peppers grew bigger than a golf ball. For some reason, my carrots turned out to be the best crop.
I live in the Netherlands and a big Dutch supermarket chain did this thing where you, for every 15 euros you spend, got a free compostable tiny flower pot thingy and a bunch of seeds. I ended up with a bunch of them from other people and couldn't bring myself to toss any of them. Spinach. So, so much spinach...
Our first big year gardening my husband started like seriously 30 tomato plants and couldn't bear to like toss any so we had WAY to many tomatoes and the kind we had were indeterminate so it was a big viny mess trying to pick the tomatoes. Lesson learned, planning our space properly this year!
I hate to brag but…..I never had trouble or a failed garden. Not because I’m so great but I lived in Southern California and the land our house was built on had been where a dairy farm was The soil was so rich I could grow anything. Plus I never used anything that wasn’t natural. The soil was perfect and it was full of big beautiful worms. And I only used my hands without gloves to work. There’s nothing like the feel of rich soil. Sure do miss those days. I’m almost 86 and I can still almost smell that soil and feel those worms righting in my hands. ❤️
Thanks to all the folks for sharing your garden stories. Gardening is always an adventure. I had a similar issue with pollination with my ‘baby corn’. Used the tiny cobs to make a vegetable stock for a pasta dish and it was very good, but needless to say I won’t be growing corn again until I have a bigger growing space. 😂 P.S. Kevin, I think you should keep that peanut video up, regardless if you think it’s embarrassing. I remember that video and I was a new gardener at the time and I found both endearing and encouraging.
Garlic - I live along the Wasatch front in Utah. For half a century, I have planted garlic in late October. They overwinter in the soil much like tulips and although the ground freezes solid, the garlic never has died. Usually in late March, they start to peek out of the soil. Harvest is always about the first week in July.
The Chipdrop story was funny/not funny. My first drop was great. The second was full of the worker’s lunch trash in the middle of the pile that I didn’t get to for a couple weeks . It was full of ants eating the garbage. At the bottom was a bunch of water bottles and a “workers ahead” sign that I doubt they were supposed to leave behind. I will get more next year but will spread it sooner.
That's why I've always been afraid to order chip drop even though I could really use arborist chips. Saw a video where someone said "some logs were OK". She wound up with more than a dozen huge logs from a 3' + diameter tree. Even two people could not lift. In addition, half of the logs were in her neighbors driveway. I think Chip Drop has gotten better but it's still a risk.
They've gotten better. Each time I've ordered from them in recent years, they've given me the name and contact information for the arborist who is set to deliver the chips. Then I can get the arborist on the phone and narrow down the time, and get a good idea of what will be in the drop. Your story about the lunch trash reminds me of what the landscaping crew did 13 years ago when we'd hired them to install the garden fence and rebuild the garden. They put landscaping fabric down along the paths and unused areas to suppress weeds. Not only did the weeds grow right through it and on top of it, but I also found out years later that they'd buried their lunch trash in the soil, along with hundreds of chunks of scrap rocks and concrete leftover from the construction. I went to reclaim the bed a few years ago, and I was digging out polystyrene containers and crushed soda cans. I've never been so angry at a landscaping company, and if I ever see them again, I'm chasing them away with a rake.
Had the same problem as dogs with peanuts. Live in northern B.C Canada. I was weeding a pea shoots row and never looked behind as I went. Until the end of the row and I looked back to find not one pea plant and a very helpful grouse is hopping along behind me ripping all my pea plants. Little bugger. Then noticed the other side of the garden and a black bear eating all my lettuce. Fence fence fence.
Birds will eat grubs. There are grubs in my garden but they never do any noticeable damage. I'm in an urban area so no chickens. So I put these large decorative trellises in my garden that I use for tomatoes. These trellises include thick horizontal supports that the birds love to sit on. They sit on them and watch the garden. In the morning they dig in it nibbling on grubs. In the afternoon, they chop on the tomato horn worms. Admittedly, they also poop in my garden and any weed seed in their poop is now in my garden but so is that fertilizer. And I have to plant extra seeds when I direct sow bc they always find some of them too. Overall though, the birds are worth it.
Same here. The birds are a big help and do no damage that I can tell. I draw them in with buckets of water (which I use up in two days so there are no mosquitoes in them).
This didn’t happen to me, but I read a story in a gardening group about a new gardener who thought she was growing mint… used the leaves in drinks and dishes thinking it was mint… and then found out it was a tomato plant when a tomato grew on it. She made mint juleps with muddled tomato leaves and didn’t notice 🤣🤣🤣
My biggest fail so far still makes me laugh to this day. A few years ago despite being a failed container gardener, I got suuuuper excited looking at seeds online and bought 8 different types I had never grown before. 2 of the 10 types were echinacea and chamomile. I decided to grow them side-by-side in the same container with reused soil. I added fertilizer to amend it's nutrients (incorrectly, I realized years later lol ) and roughly tested PH and nutrients with my new cheap soil test kit. My plan was to grow indoors through the winter and put the planter outside mid-late spring. I germinated the seeds, cared for them, talked to them gently, and watched them grow strong. I put pure love into those little guys. 3 months later and they were outside. The Chamomile grew ok (I got some harvest) but eventually got burnt by the early summer sun. But my echinacea! oh it was strong! and the leaves were green/REDDISH and looking VERY healthy despite the heat. As it grew the bottom leaves/stem turned more reddish and the plant got very tall, hmm🤔 Then the flowers started to come in and I thought they looked a bit odd. This was supposed to be purple cone flower ecinacea, but the flowers were teeny tiny pink ones with dry curly grass-like swirls on the plant. hmmmm🤨 I went online to a gardening place and posted pictures asking if anyone knew if this was normal. No one had a clue what it was, but knew it wasn't echinacea. Well what the hell had I been talking to and caring for these last 6 months?? I google image searched the pictures I took. It was Northern Willow Herb. It was weeds. Non of my echinanea seeds had germinated, and the latent native weed seeds in the reused soil grew perfectly in it's place. I had baby talked to weeds for 6 months 🤣 So needless to say now I make sure I know EXACTLY ( not relatively) what a plant is supposed to look like BEFORE I grow it lol
I had a friends child stay with me while her parents went on vacation, I decided to let her help me plant seeds. She held the seeds while I walked 15 to 20ft away to get a bag of compost she had opened all the packs & threw the seeds into the bed, It took me 2 & 1/2 days to thin and find homes for the plants once they popped up, I couldn't bring myself to throw them away, space was extremely tight but the local shelter and the food bank loved seeing me weekly with produce. Every time I've talked to them she asks if she can help again, LOL! It felt nice to be able to share but my back, shoulder & hands hated & tortured me all season, back to my very small garden this year.
Your content helps me cope up with depression. Its helps a lot in looking forward for tomorrow. By caring for my little garden. Thanks a lot from philippines
I once planted habaneros in the same bed as nardello peppers. Both grew very well and produced delicious peppers. The next year, I skipped the peppers, but one sprouted any way! It didn’t look like either pepper and tasted like a crossbreed. They were an amazing smoky sweet that ended in a “what the hell did I put in my mouth!” The fail? I didn’t save any seeds.
I’m dying laughing at the person who chopped off all the corn cobs 😂😂😂 update just watched the one where they lady fed her tomatoes 🍅 milk and I’m snorting while laughing now 😂 I LOVE THIS STUFF
Back in 1991, my dad grew habenero's. He got this idea to use a food dehydrator, make hot pepper flake. He set it up in the kitchen at nite. We woke up at 7am, eyes burning & itching. We had to evacuate the house, was like mustard gas thru the entire house 🤣
I grew my first tomatoes last year in my flat. Until the flowering stage, everything went perfectly fine. After a couple of weeks, I noticed that the flowers started dying one after another so I put on a fan and tried to pollinate using a brush as well. I grew three cherry tomatoes in the span of 9 months.
Not so much a fail but something I could have thought more about: mixing bee balm in with my herb bed. It’s not taking over, I keep on the herbs and keep them even; but the barn cat loves the bee balm smell and now just uses all my herbs as a bed. He’s too cute to be upset about it though
G'day. What a fun and informative video. This was great and I'd love to see more of this. The milk story was just the best and I was in tears with laughter here from both the story and your reactions. 😂 Thanks for brightening my day. Daz.
Oh my gosh my biggest fail was before I even read a word about gardening. I thought I could just plant a big old onion in the dirt and it would split out into more onions for me, just like flower bulbs do. It was a really pretty flower though 😆
I definitely made the tomato mistake. In the past my Dad only grew determinate, but my first time was with indeterminate cherry tomatoes, thinking I'd only need a small stake or cage. I only planted them about a foot apart and had one stake per tomato. While I did everything else right, I failed at support. My stakes were leaning, and one rainstorm later my 7 foot tomato vines collapsed. I desperately tried to manage this tomato jungle by holding them up with bungee cord and string all over the garden. And 5 cherry tomato plants is way too much tomatoes for 2 people. My husband never wants to look at a cherry tomato again.
This video was truly Epic! 😂 Thank you! Over my 20+ years of gardening, I have had many seeding, planting and growing failures. Probably the biggest failure was to keep notes from one year to the next, relying on memory is not always as reliable as we would like to think. Between note taking, RUclips and continued but more spotty failures, gardening is still my most enjoyable therapy.
i also had 5 peanuts! and i was sooo happy i had those since my climate is cold. my biggest mistake was using plastic cover over my bean seeds in may with the soil wet it was very black. the sun came out and the black ground absorbed all the sun and litterally boiled them. i pulled the plastic off and the ground was litterally steaming. did a resow XD
@bethb8276 -- Hmm, so taking the traditional overkill-response method of killing them with fire (from the sun), but with water... that's a new twist, lol! Well, at least it works to kill unwanted plants as well as it accidentally does on the wanted ones.
Oh man these were good. The worst thing I've done is just get started way too late, but there's still the rest of my life for fails. One good thing is this video re-solidified my desire to get my soil tested. I was only thinking of what it might be lacking, not of anything dangerous that could be in it. Luckily I'm growing everything edible in containers or a Birdie's 13-in 8-in-1 purchased from you guys for my first year.
Great show guys! I always tell my friends how fun gardening is. They look at me like I'm crazy.👀 But, I laugh more in the garden than anywhere else these days. 😂❤️💯
9:10 i saw that happening to my corn too and i was confused wondering why it branching out i decided to leave it to see what Would happen, it's a good thing. 😅 it was my 3rd time Growing corn i think it looked that way because I had less in the pot this time.
Moving from Ohio to Oklahoma after I got married, I thought I knew what I was doing. My husband kept saying I was planting everything too close, and I was so stubborn. Never had I ever seen tomatoes grow so tall! They were taller than both of us, and we got only a handful of veggies that year.
Omg I had the same thing happen with wood chips! Although it wasn’t through chipdrop. There were some tree guys cutting my neighbors tree one day so I went and asked if they would give hook me up with some chips, they said yes of course! The next next day I came home right as they were dumping a GIANT literal dump truck load of chips in my backyard. Luckily I’ve a huge yard and the chips are super handy for lots of areas. That was last year and I’ve still got a large pile out there. In fact just yesterday I was spreading chips.
You guys killed it, I laughed so hard, you're the best. The grubs issue, wow, I got more than a thousand since last summer. My plants were dying mysteriously, then I got them. The green beetles would chew on blooms seriously. I know even this year I have to do something. I started using neem oil with dish soap. Would like to know other ways as well. Thanks guys.
Our grubs are from june bugs & mormon crickets. I watched a vid where a guy is using neem meal. I did not know it existed. I have tried beneficial nematodes, those help some. I also used neem oil, spraying at night & watering in in the morning. I usually dug through my beds & throw the grubs into a cup of water. I used to give them to our chickens when we had them. I'm going to try the neem meal this year if I can find some. You only spread a little, then the compost topping over, etc.
The Japanese Beetle was brought here. There's no predator for it here. I use DE on them. I re purposed a bottle with one hole in it. It streams out DE to hit the JB before it burrow or while on plants. It just wants soft soil and it doesn't matter what plant it is, living or not. The grubs end up in my compost. I let them take over then discovered how to starve them out so they become part of the compost and my red wiggles come back again.
@@classicrocklover5615, I use 2 table spoons neem oil and I teaspoon dish soap mix with 1 gallon water. Make sure the ground is not dry. Here in Europe we use liters, so I hard 30 liters of water, 13 tbsp neem and 13 tsp soap, slightly warm water.
I have plenty of failures with lifetime of gardening withmy grandma and dad. Over those years I have learned to love those EPIC fails because they make me an overall better gardener. Thanks to your followers for sharing their challenges. I now know that milk is not good for tomatoes!
1st year on our new property, was so tortured by these thorny bushes...like 20 ish. I cut them down to the ground. The next year's my yardwork was largely neglected. I was surprised to learn they were black berries. So grateful for their resilience.
Blackberry bushes are like an invasive species where I live - I would be pretty grateful if cutting them down would kill them, but it doesn’t. They spread by the roots, and emerge anywhere that there is dirt. Keeping them from coming up in my garden beds is a pain.
@doloresreynolds8145 -- You have to dig up the hearts. Every single one of them. Or they'll just keep on coming back. I hate Himalayan blackberries with a passion now, I'm convinced they were the inspiration for Sleeping Beauty's thorny barricade.
I have a school garden and we did corn. When it was about 3-4 feet high the kids kept asking why we didn't pick it. They thought the stalk was the part you eat. When it was full grown and started to ear they were a little disappointed that all they got from that big plant was the comparatively small ears.
@@zarahsgarden2097 I am all about novelty. We have blue potatoes, red carrots, yard long beans, black radishes, and the corn is actually popcorn. If it's different and fun and good to eat, what more could you want?
Definitely recommended to test for lead/heavy metals especially if you live within a couple miles of a general aviation airport. Many of those planes are older, run pretty dirty, and still require leaded fuel. This is something that people often overlook unless they are immediately adjacent to airport property. Always love and learn something from your videos! Thank you
My biggest fail was when I moved back to my moms house and the people there before me had a small rosemary bush in the ground that didn't seem to be growing at all and was in a location that only received morning sun, I dug it up and potted it feeling excited. That plant root rotted and died and left me sad. Over the next 2 years during covid and stuff I tried using cuttings from poultry seasoning packs at my local store but they never grew. I'll copy and paste my comment from another video on rosemary growing that details my current hopefully successful redemption: I'm currently running a Rosemary experiment. 2 different small seed bags and I got 7 to sprout. 2 sprouted in the paper towel method but only 1 survived. The rest took way longer than a month but eventually popped up out of the soil in their pots. 2 died after sprouting from the ground. I currently have 4 alive and I'm using the water bottle with the bottom removed as a mini green house method on 2 of them, so far 1 of them in mini green house method is doing the best with 8 true leaves and branches forming at every node. The paper towel method seedling with no green house method is doing second best with 6 true leaves and 1 node starting a new branch, the other two are still behind with 4 true leaves each. I'm also rooting some cuttings from a friend to compare end results. The water bottle method might be worth it for rosemary seedlings though, really protects them from the extreme rain I've had lately and also helps heat up and dry out the soil for them. Side note: I recently saw an old video from an old timer who had grown lots of rosemary and seemed to have the best sprouting from seed technique out of everything I've seen, he spread a bunch of seeds over the top of some potting mix and covered with a moist paper towel, lightly pressing the towel into the soil to get the seeds firmly lodged into the soil. That man did the world a service by making that not highly viewed video of his lifetime of knowledge and I don't think he faked his results at all, he got a ridiculously high germination rate in comparison to any other techniques I've seen. I'm currently satisfied with my own number of growing rosemary plants but I'll be sure to try his technique in the future if they die or even if they ever make seeds themselves.
I have a rosemary story too. I'm an asian and dont use western herb much but for one of my cooking lesson ( i study food science during my uni ) we buy a few stalk of it for our group . I kept one of the stalk , put it in water for it to take root. It worked , i even transplant it into a small pot. After a few week, the bald stem even started to grow new bud. And , holiday comes. I bring it home with me ( end of term holiday,2 month) . It grown quite well. There's already new leaves. Then, i make the most foolish decision , to replant it in my backyard. Why, you ask? The next day, our chicken ate it. All of the efford raising it from bald stalk to a healthy plant with proper leaf gone in less than a day. Never plant it again after that. Not that i will ever use it but, i still wish i could strangle that chicken.
@@ahmadfaezuddin177 Wow Chickens eat rosemary? I'm from Hawaii where chickens run wild everywhere but they haven't touched any of my plants yet, they just like scratching the dirt around newly planted stuff so I always gotta put something down to cover and protect till the stuff grows. I've only ever wanted to strangle 1 chicken. After a night of partying I was spending the night at a friends house in his guest bedroom when all of a sudden at 2 in the morning a rooster hopped on the fence on the border of the property which happens to be like 5 feet away from the guest bedroom window. That rooster somehow mustered the loudest crow I've ever heard from a chicken and it was echoing in the room, he kept going every 5 minutes for the rest of the entire night and in the morning I had nothing on my mind but strangling that rooster.
@@ziggybender9125 i didnt really expect that to happen too. Usually they dont really bother any of the plant and vegetable my mom planted. They just scrath the soil around it a little. Maybe because it was a foreign plant and they got curious about its taste? I'm from malaysia . Our rooster was not that crazy. They usually crow at 6 am and stop after sunrise at about 7.30 am. It dont really bother us because most of our family already wake up at that time.
@@ahmadfaezuddin177 Ok now I'm curious because you specified it as a western herb. What are the popular herbs in Malaysia? I'm sure I could try grow some here in Hawaii, I'm curious if the chickens here will eat them.
@@ziggybender9125 What my family plant here were tumeric, ginger, galangal, bird eye chilli, curry leaf , lemon grass, daun kesum ( i dont know its english name ) and pandan . All of them were just planted for self consumption and not for sale. We basically use them in our daily cooking.
Omg not only were these hilarious but so we’re you reactions. The milk one was awesome. It was so good to hear these. It helps me from throwing in the towel
I was having a bad day until I watched this video, I laughed so much! So I'm not the only one who made horrible mistakes at the beginning. Thanks Kevin and Jacques, for making my day with this video, hahaha!
When we moved into our new house and started an herb garden with a huge mint patch, we very quickly discovered two things: 1) mint is closely related to catnip and 2) there was a colony of (fixed and released) community cats living nearby. Couple of days later and our mint patch was completely demolished. Twelve cats were laying around in the remains, eleven of them high as a kite and number twelve clearly sick from eating too much. We were afraid we had to trap the poor thing for a vet visit, but fortunately we could resolve it by phone. They do a great job at keeping rats out and fertilizing the garden, so I do still grow some mint for them. Just in moderation 😺
Mine: my first year I didn’t understand about container water retention in my 9b summer heat. Didn’t get a single tomato that year because I didn’t realize the water was hydrophobic once it hit June. It looked….okay, but I think the few droplets of water that got to the roots just went to the few sad leaves it was able to push out. 😂
This video had me cracking up😂. Also…thanks to the lady who shared about her corn mishap because I’m attempting corn for the first time and could absolutely see myself making this mistake
Loved this so much, such funny issues that we all have. Was great to relive some and to know your not the only one haha😂. And to remember that we are doing this for fun and relaxation. So funny guys thank you 🤗🤗🤗🤗
I laughed so hard I cried over the curdling milk story 😂 Seriously the best video! I haven’t been able to garden yet this season due to epic snow storms in my area and was starting to feel down with all the grey skies until this. Thank you so much for the laugh’s that I didn’t realize how desperately I needed. Hilarious
I always say that the best gardeners have killed the most plants. You have to have many failures so you can learn and grow.
Counterintuitive, but true!
But [gatorade]s got what plants crave.
it's got electrolytes
SO true, failing is just another avenue TO success not against it. :)
I fully agree! You need to understand how to water and explore different methods of growing plants
Amen to that!
during covid my sister's college put up signs in the bathrooms saying "wash your hands like you just sliced jalapenos and now you need to take out your contacts" and to this day I think that's the most effective hand-washing message I've ever seen
How hilarious and effective ! 😂
Now for the boys that and you need to pee I'ma be honest Wash your hands plz plz I never cried so much plz plz :(
As a nurse and contact wearer, I support this message! 💗💗💗
😂😂😂
That's so funnyyyy
I rescued a bunch of pots from an abandoned house, I put my potatoes in the largest pot. I saw a squirrel digging in it, but they weren't disturbing my plants so I left it alone. In Fall, I dug up everything in there and got both potatoes and peanuts. Squirrels apparently grow peanuts just fine.
We have about 9 massive oak trees in my yard and they drop hundreds of pounds of acorns every few years. We filled a coffee sack 13 times one season alone. The squirrels keep filling our birdhouses with them. I wanna make a squirrel acorn deposit box so i dont have to pick them up myself! xD
Omg, this video was awesome! I really needed a good laugh! Thank you so much!
1) I always research anything I am thinking of growing or impulsively buy.
2) I always wear gloves when I handle hot peppers because I have sensitive skin. My husband on the other hand does not and got me with the residual pepper burn, um let’s just say, in bed. Not fun! (But yeah, go ahead and laugh.)
3) The smoking cactus was probably caused by mold or mildew dispersing spores when he watered it.
It was my first garden and I like tomatoes so I planted seeds indoors. I transplanted them outdoors thinking that each plant would give me 2 or 3 tomatoes. I planted 54 indeterminate plants in about 200 Sq ft plants thinking I could handle the 120 tomato or so yield. Then I dislocated my knee in July so I stopped pruning them and let them go. It was not only a prolific year for tomatoes in general, but multiplied by 54, I was completely overwhelmed with my dense tomato forest that I had created. I was praying for frost so they would die off. I was picking (5) 5 gallon buckets of tomatoes per day, crutches and all- begging people to take them off my hands. Never again.
oh my goodness 🤭🤭🤭🤭
Where did you get the thought that one tomato plant would provide you with 2/3 tomatoes?
I count that a win actually. Lol
This story is wholesome and adorable. 🤭
Yo thats not a fail
If i were you i woulda made many friends 😅
My family's greatest gardening disaster was my Mother. Dad once tried to grow a veggie patch in the backyard. He worked hard to plough out a section of ground with regular gardening tools, put a raised edging around it, built it up with compost, fertiliser, mulch, all the good stuff, and worked out his planting plan. First up was spinach. Several weeks later whilst Dad was at work Mum decided to help with the veggie patch. The spinach was about 3 inches tall, and there was a weed growing among the veggie patch that was a little bit larger, so Mum went and did the weeding. Yeah, you guessed it, Mum removed all the spinach instead of the weeds. Dad saw the funny side of it and decided to plant more spinach, and also some beetroot, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, and radish. Later on, just as it was starting to look good, Mum decided to help again by buying some liquid fertilizer and giving the veggie garden a good spray with it... but got the liquid fertilizer container mixed up with a herbicide and well... Dad concluded that Mum was not to be trusted with a veggie patch in the yard, turned it into a lawn and never did any gardening again. She later learned more about gardening and became great with flowers, ended up with an amazing cottage style flower garden anyone would be proud of. She never dared to grow anything edible though.
My greatest gardening bungle so far was the first time I grew mint. My grandmother grew it in a garden bed and it was always a neat little cluster - I didn't know she had it contained by growing it in a buried black plastic bucket that was mostly hidden by the loose leaf mulch on top. I created a little garden circle in the corner of the lawn and planted the mint there, blinked, and ended up with a mint lawn that smelled lovely when mowed.
Haha! I have a neighbor that grows so much stuff in her yard as she is a retired widow. She also has bees and a greenhouse provided by the USDA for testing nitrate in the soil compounds, but she is allowed to grow whatever she wants. She twisted her ankle last spring and asked if I could come over and help trim back her mint. Me thinking it had overgrown a bit, it was an understatement. It was EVERYWHERE in her greenhouse and was going out the door into her lawn where she grew these purple potatoes! 😂 We trimmed it back and decided to put it in her compost bin, but I got some propagation cuttings myself for helping. I have my mint in large pots that I trim back every little while and it’s now starting to come back again!
A mint lawn actually sounds amazing, tbh
That raises a question in my mind, St Augustine grass vs the most aggressive mint... Who would overgrow who?
😂😂 my mother also has a proclivity for killing my plants, for this very reason she is strictly forbidden from touching any of them. This however did not stop her, so the last time she murdered another I just got exceptionally dramatic about it. And whined and mourned it like I was fucking hamlet, and actually left the plant around so she could actually see what she had caused ( I used to remove plants after she'd been at them because I knew they wouldn't survive )
Your grandmothers solution is genius tho!
I remember as a kid my dad planted 12 tomatoes and we then got a mild frost; all the plants looked dead so he decided to plant 12 more. After a few weeks the original 12 perked back up and soon looked great again. We harvested something like 3 laundry baskets of fruit that year and no one but dad liked tomatoes. Mum did make a ton of salsa which was good.
My neighbor to the north went through this summer of 2022. LMAO Let's just say that by the time the first hard freeze hit, she was sick to death of tomatoes!
Sounds like a great opportunity to give a lot to the neighbours (although then you invite the return-fire of zucchini later!)
@@Lamefoureyes. Return fire of zucchini until the squash bugs destroy the zucchini plants.
That's pretty stupid. Not growing but you not liking tomatoes. I seriously don't get it. You don't like kiwi ok you don't like blackberry ok. But tomato? The #1 homegrown crop? Very stupid. It is the most delicious vegetable, full of vitamins. We eat them straight from the vine in Europe.
Also salsa? 🤨 Tomato sauce dude. Make tomato sauce. It can be used as base for soup, stew, and so many other things. Or you could make ketchup, tomato puree. So many great things.
@@CaptainPuputaste is subjective but regardless sauce or relish is a great idea
Ah man y’all made my whole week, I am glad it made you laugh too!
I actually sent my roommate down to the Braum’s on the corner to get the milk. Skim milk, I told him, because I figured the tomatoes wouldn’t need the extra fat.
After it became abundantly clear that I had made a significant error in judgement, I wrote to the guy on NPR who does the You Bet Your Garden show, begging him to tell me how to save the (already very dead) tomatoes. He wrote back with something like “You have done so many things wrong that I cannot even begin to help you.” Y’all were much nicer about it!
Of course I was very hopeful that maybe a miracle would occur and the tomatoes would resurrect. So I left their desiccating corpses and their containers of rotting milk soil in the garden for like three more weeks, until my boyfriend was like “Enough is enough” and insisted I dispose of their remains.
This was only a few years after I had a sinus infection and was like “I know you can rinse your sinuses with something to help. Is it salt water? Or lemon juice?” I contemplated this in the terms of what seemed like it would be more caustic and thus kill more germs, and thus settled on the lemon juice.
SPOILER: THIS WAS THE INCORRECT CHOICE.
I have since learned to run my plans by someone who is not me for a sanity check. 😂😂😂
I laughed so hard at your lemon juice experiment, I'd better admit that I once tried to relieve congestion by snorting ground ginger.
Only once!
Girl your stories are totes reliable ❤ Thank you for sharing
I laughed so hard at that milk story and the follow-up lemon juice. THANK YOU. You should take that on the road... call yourself the Garden Comic.
The fun part of the tomato story is that if you buried the curdled dirt and planted tomatoes there the next year, they likely would have thrived. 🤗Silver linings...!
Lemon juice?!? Do you still have simuses???!?
LMFAOO what resources are you getting these ideas from? 😭
At 40 yrs of age I planted 2 cherry tomato plants and a couple peppers. The cherry tomatoes grew so vigorously that I was lectured by my dad for planting so many and not making pathways. I was eating tomatoes from morning till dark. At the end of the season it took 5 lawn bags and I used my wide blade snow shovel to scoop all the fallen tomatoes up. I left the 2 tree like stumps to prove to my dad that I only planted 2. Now I've had so many garden fails in the 10 yrs since that I'd love to know that variety so I could boost my growing confidence a bit. And they had a great burst of acidic flavor. Should have cut back but they were growing so well I didn't have the heart.
I had a similar experience. I realized that the first year they were grown in containers so were water stressed, which gave them much better flavor. Tomatoes in ground can have too much water, which dilutes their flavor.
I had a mystery cherry tomato plant show up in my garden 10+ years ago. Similar situation. I'd never planted small tomatoes before so I knew it couldn't be a volunteer from a previous year and it showed up more or less on a pathway, not somewhere I would have ever planted. Massive, massive harvest. It grew red and orange cherry tomatoes, so many we couldn't keep up. Used the for salsa, marinara, finally just started drying them in the smoker. Didn't save any seeds and never saw it again. This last year a plant started to grow along the path in the side yard. Transplanted it. Turned out to be pumpkins. I'd never grown pumpkins before, they were ready for Thanksgiving, turned into 5 pies and pumpkin spice ice cream. Have no idea where the seed came from.
@@the_motherlord You must have been praying to the crows to help with your planting.
You technically don't have to cut them back if they have enough space to spread out, which it sounds like they did. The fact that you didn't prune them heavily is probably one of the reasons you got a bumper crop.
@@the_motherlord You don't say what your living situation is, but it could have been from birds, or other animals, visiting your neighbors. I live and work on a working farm, and we have plants show up now and again due to the various wildlife in my area passing seeds through their digestive tract.
My fav is a UK reporter who was doing a garden segment and said that every time she dug up corn there wasn't anything. The professional gardener and co-host died explaining that corn doesn't work that way. She thought they were related to potatoes lol
ruclips.net/video/vfFjRs9t_FU/видео.html
One year my kids "helped" me plant some seeds in one of our 3 raised beds, we thought a pumpkin would be fun to try but they ended up planting 6 pumpkins in a VERY full raised bed, and we ended up having the pumpkins climbing old ladders, rope, and anything we could get our hands on, but we did harvest 3 beautiful pumpkins by the end of the season!
😂 love this
Sometimes I feel like I grow pumpkins for the flowers and the leaves when it's all said and done!
Well, you can intercrop squash with other plants, if they're the right kinds. The Three Sisters is a good example.
@@FrozEnbyWolf150 yes, we did the 3 sisters last year for the first time. We had problems with a raccoon getting to my conr before us, and we didnt plant them in the right timeline so my beans never really took either... but it's all a learning process..
The year we had the pumpkins it was in a bed with squash, celery, melons, and peppers.. and it was only a 12ftx4ft bed, but we were trying to get the most out of our garden (this was also the beginning of 2020) and we had never grown pumpkins before or even seen a real pumpkin patch because they are tough to grown in our zone, but we soon learned that pumpkins grow very fast at the beginning and go everywhere! But they can also climb which saved the rest of our bed, then when we started seeing fruit from it we took rope and made slings for them because they would get too heavy to hang from the plant without breaking..
Now weve taken that same principle and made an arch out of cattle panel and had great success growning melons over it and other things that need more shade can grow under the arch, you just have to use something to wrap around the fruit, like old T shirts or pantyhose...
@@j.d.x4451 Sounds like you had better luck with pumpkins than I did. We have extreme pest pressure around here, so any Cucurbita pepo cultivars I tried growing got demolished by squash vine borers and squash bugs. The Cucurbita moschata cultivars, being more resistant, took off and did what you described. Had Tahitian butternuts coming out of our ears. I like those because they grow to the size of your arm.
Very enjoyable video! My big gardening fail was in 2019. I had finally figured out how to compost correctly after four years of having basically dried leaves and dried up food trash sitting in the bin. I had a couple of different kinds of store-bought squash that I had waited too long to use in the kitchen that were going bad. So I chucked them into my compost bin ... seeds and all.
I assumed the heat from the composting process would kill the seeds. Oh how wrong I was!! Once I started using that finished compost all over my garden (beds and containers) I suddenly had squash everywhere!! It even vined over the wood fence separating my yard from the one next door. Fortunately, that yard belonged to my landlady. There was an old jungle gym her tenant had built for his daughter when she was younger and the squash took over that as well as a good portion of the back yard.
I was constantly picking squash seedlings out of my containers as they popped up, to the point where my landlady nicknamed me the "plant abortionist".
Another thing I learned is that seeds sometimes wait a year or two to sprout!! I think 2021 was the last errant squash plant that popped up. I hope.
So I learned my lesson about being careful what I put in the compost bin.
The other lesson I'm still learning: If you want to save your lettuce seeds from plants that have bolted, make sure you cover them with some type of tulle fabric. Santa Ana winds can pop up at any time and the next thing you know, you (and your neighbors) will have wild lettuce growing in your grass!!
Oh how I wish I had your problem!
But 'plant abortionist' had me in tears of laughter...i love it!
For anyone else considering Chip Drop, I recommend growing mushrooms in the woodchips. Wine caps are a good choice, but any kind of fungus will help rapidly break down the chips and enrich your soil. Whenever I dig into them, I see a dense network of white mycelia, and the woodchips crumble apart like wet cardboard. I've had the woodchips break down in a matter of months, instead of years. Around here there are also so many native fungi that the woodchips rarely last longer than a year if I leave them alone.
It's all good until they dump three truckloads on your driveway while you car is still in the garage!!!!!!!!!!
@@gabriellakadar I am so sorry to hear they did that, but I did let out a few chuckles whilst reading 😭🤣😭
Love this, the Kevin -Jacques banter is at its peak. Laughed till I cried at the milk remedy. 😂😭 Also, great tips 👌
Seriously, them DYING laughing about the milk had me DYING laughing right along 😂😍
I'm new to my state and wasn't aware of some weather issues. Last summer I grew a huge fantastic array of vegetables. They were coming up beautifully. I mean, really incredible amount of veggies. I had spent hours researching so everything was perfect. Hours and hours of research and gardening. I woke up in the middle of with lightening, thunder and machine gun pounding sounds on my roof. It was monsoon weather in New Mexico and golf ball sized hail stones wiped out my entire garden. Everything was ruined except one very sad tomato plant.
Uff. This hurt to even read.
💔
Oh my, I can commiserate 100%. Not sure the counts as a fail, but I had lots of beautiful flowers in my yard, iris, hyacinthe?, gerber daisy, they came up at different times of the year. Once the kids grew up and moved away, I did the mowing and trimming. My wonderful husband wanted to help me and surprised me by mowing while I was at work. He was so proud of his job, but he'd mowed my iris, thinking they were just some grass something. The look on my face told him never to do that again. I just about cried.
My first year growing tomatoes was one I won’t forget…this was before I learned about pruning and spacing them appropriately. The vines all grew into one huge jungle and I had enough tomatoes for Everyone! I refused to undo any of it and I was so impressed with the quantity and they were all delicious. It didn’t bother me that I had to crawl down the row and reach up to harvest and then back out of the row on hands and knees carting my harvest with me.
Sounds like a success story to me. I had such a poor harvest last year that I wouldn't have minded having so many that I had to crawl on the ground 🤣
that's totally my tomato method to this day... chaos gardening for the win.
I hope you made a ton of passata sauce with all that glorious tomatoes
@@kategomez2090 Chaos Gardening!! EXACTLY!! LOL!!!
Lol!❤
No failure stories. What happens in the garden stays in the garden. 😎
Especially if that garden is located in Las Vegas...
Exactly 🤫
Exactly!
😂😂😂
For some people, what happens in the garden has long-lasting consequences that don't stay in the garden and end up living in the house 10 months later.
Your mileage may vary.
On that topic and in relation to the Carolina Reaper dude, I fermented some Ghost Pepper hot sauce and decided it was too thin so I figured I would just cook it down and thicken it up... I didn't think this one through until my eyes started to itch in the other room and by then it was too late. The worst part was knowing I had to go turn off the stove, the aerosolized capsicum was much denser there. I was choking up snot and crying. In the future I will make sure to turn the stove hood on and maybe open some windows.
oh that reminds me the of the time I was big into dehydrating. I got a really good deal on a commercial dehydrator and it was coming to the end of the season at the farmers market. The guy who sold peppers basically gave me a box of all his hots and EXTREMELY hot peppers one day. I froze some and I thought i'd dehydrate the rests to powder. I slice and put them in the dehydrator...mind you it's august in eastern washington...115 plus temps outside....and hit the on button of the dehydrator. A few minutes later my little one wanted to go to the store for ice cream so off we went to the store. I had no clue what I was about to encounter when I opened my front door when we got back.
We were basically assaulted upon entry. Eyes, throat, face were on fire. The dogs ran out of the house and face ran on the lawn to put the fire out. When I realized what I did I felt so bad. I ended up taking my shirt off to cover my face and eyes and went in the house with only a bra on to try to turn the dehydrator off and possibly roll it outside.
By this time my daughter has my neighbor over inquiring about our little situation.
I have never felt stupider in my entire life!
I also learned the hard way to cook down/ dehydrate peppers outside the house.
Similar thing. My Grandma found some poison ivy on her property, so she removed it & threw it in the burn barrel.
You can guess the rest; smoke got in her face & she ended up with poison ivy all over. Including her eyes. 😢
@@ronaldperkins4222 Yeah that's a crazy dangerous situation. If you inhale that smoke you can get it in your lungs. My buddy was hospitalized in the middle of a camping trip, he was in pretty bad shape for a few weeks.
My grandfather did a similar thing to us as kids! He tried to dry out some chilli's "faster" by putting them in the microwave. I remember thinking that the house was on fire when I was being pulled out of bed as a child, and told to hold my breath as we crawled on our hands and knees out the house😂 we all stood outside for an hour or so till the fumes subsided enough to go back inside.
I don't think I've ever laughed so much while watching a video. Definitely do more of these. Between the actual fails and your reactions to them, it was hilarious!
So many favorites, I can't name just one 😅😂🤣. May have to watch this again!
I concur, more of these please! I laugh AND learn so much!
Phew! I laughed so hard I cried.
As far as gardening fails my toddler was following after me and pulling up each marker and the occasional plant I had placed. Though he did try to replant the plants. I ended up not knowing which peppers were hot and sweet because I picked similar looking peppers so I didn’t eat them. They were very pretty to look at though.
Gotta laugh at yourself sometimes.
In the beginning, we planted out tomatoes in a sunny spot we thought was perfect. We didn't realize that it was sunny because it was the beginning of spring and the tree had no leaves. Once spring started, the leaves popped up and our area was in shade.
Another bad one was I fertilized one of my raised beds, I forgot to close the door to the raised bed. I had planted really organized rows of lettuce, spinach, radishes, beets, carrots, garlic and onions. My dog had gone and dug everything I planted because she was attracted to the fertilizer. This one hurt...
Or dog wants to play with it because we did.
This, I think, is why my Sprint Husky disrupted my thinned and transplanted iris rhizomes. He didn't eat them.
Sitting right at the soil surface, they make easy targets!
😮 That's painful!
That hurt to read I’m so sorry for your loss
With lead, it's especially prudent to check if you have chickens! Most garden plants won't really take up lead from the soil (at least your more popular garden plants, tomatoes, etc... But chickens and their eggs will have elevated levels of lead if you let them graze.
THIS⬆ I've spent the majority of my life living in a 140 year old mining town that sits on top of one of the largest and richest silver-lead-zinc ore bodies in the world. I can confirm that lead contamination in soil is a serious risk with animals and passes to their muscle tissue/meat, and their eggs, and milk, in high enough quantities to be of a genuine health concern to humans that are consuming them if the lead levels in the soil are high enough to give the animals a high enough blood lead level - keep in mind that poison is all about the dose. However, it's far less of a risk with fruits and vegetables. Although some plants can absorb some lead, it usually gets trapped in the root system, and even then, it's absorbed slowly in such small quantities that it's not going to pose a health risk to humans, again keeping in mind that poison is all about the dose. Root and tuber crops are annual, they don't have time to absorb enough lead into the roots to cause us harm, and the plants that can absorb enough lead to start being of concern are perennial plants that we eat the leaves, seeds, and fruits of, not the roots. We're far more likely to absorb more lead by breathing in particles of dust kicked up into in the air from us digging in the dirt than by eating vegetables from a lead contaminated garden - EXCEPT that you MUST VERY thoroughly wash the veggies before eating them, as the lead is mostly in the soil in the form of extremely fine dust particles, it can get all over not just the roots and tubers we eat, but also all over the rest of the plant including the fruits and leaves we eat. Mulching well can dramatically help reduce that problem, and never dig in dry soil, wet it down first to keep the dust down, but keep in mind that soil dust from the neighbour's yard can blow into your yard on a windy day, and chances are if your yard is contaminated with lead, their yard probably is as well.
@@grandmothergoose lead & heavy metals are cumulative & persistent in our bodies, so repetitive small doses ARE a concern.
@@robertacomstock3655 the poison is in the dose. Yes, it builds up, but our bodies are capable of removing it gradually over time. It's only a problem if the amount absorbed is greater than the amount our bodies can get rid of, and the amount plants are able to absorb is far too low to be of risk. It's impossible to eat enough of the plant matter that can absorb lead to get high enough amounts of lead into us that way to be of any concern. The harsh reality is that industrial pollution is by far the greater concern than any edible plant we can grow in our gardens so long as we wash the produce before eating it. Coal plants which powers most of our homes pump tons of heavy metals including mercury and lead into the atmosphere, which we then breathe in, and it settles on everything including fruits and veg, so it doesn't matter if you're growing fruit and veg in your lead contaminated back yard soil or buying it direct from a farm with clean soil, it's probably going to have some trace amount of lead on it from somewhere, so just wash your produce before eating it, wash your hands before eating, and don't eat dirt.
Oh, Rachel! Thank you for sharing. I laughed so hard my sides hurt! 😂😂 boy oh boy don’t we do some weird stuff to save our plants!❤
Rachel made me laugh-cry so hard. I do often rinse my milk jugs for recycling and dump the water on plants outside the kitchen door. That curdled milk soil though!
Regarding the "smoke" in the cactus torture by Gatorade story I could imagine mold spores inside a dead and desiccated cactus or just plain dust being flung into the air by the stream of liquid.
Most likely!
No one's made the "it's got what plants crave" joke yet? Or, "Water? Like, from the toilet?"
One year I decided to grow basil in some planters that I had hanging from my fence. After a while I had a half dozen 4-inch plants and I was excited by dreams of a bumper crop harvest. One afternoon, I checked on my plant after returning from work and every single one had been snipped off at exactly the same height. I was indignant. Someone was stealing my basil! The next day the plants were all an inch lower than the day before. I was furious. I started giving my neighbors the evil eye. Who was stealing from me and snipping my basil with such perfect precision?? The next day they were one inch lower again and I decided to catch the thief. The next Saturday, I camped out in my window, never blinking, as I watched my precious basil. Imagine my surprise when two ROUS’s (rodent of unusual size) came trotting along the top of the fence straight to my basil plants. They gripped the top of the fence with their back claws and hung down over my basil, carefully mowing each plant about an inch, each one exactly the same height. Who knew rats love basil?? They do in SoCal! Now I grow basil indoors. 😂 🐀
Those two need to be trapped, drowned, and returned to the food chain.
The squirrels my neighbor was feeding (raw peanuts) burried their stock in my plants and I actually had peanut plants growing with my flowers. We left them one year, but the squirrels planted them too late for our canadian summer and the peanuts were too small. But if they were to plant them earlier we’d definitely get peanuts!
I love surprise wildlife gifts. Was weeding the flowerbeds one day and found a stray carrot. We don't grow carrots! I think the turtle doves that love to hang around in our garden may have snacked on someone else's harvest and pooped out the seeds 😛
@@thaliacrafts407 that’s funny! But since I had potted plants I didn’t love the squirrels. To hide their peanuts, they destroyed my flowers 😣
They planted them too late?? You need to educate those squirrels!
@@rebeccalamb6311 definitly! 😁😆
This is hilarious! I need a part 2!
The corn story resonates. First garden I transplanted and put corn seeds in the ground. Two weekends later I went out to weed the garden and pulled 3/4 or the corn plants out thinking they were grass haha. Realized it and replanted. No harm no foul.
Corn is a grass. Monocotyledon. So you were somewhat right.
I was playing "corn or grass?" a month ago after I planted corn for the first time and then realized it wouldn't be a good idea to pick out the crabgrass from my bed like usual!😅 Had to wait a couple of weeks for the corn sprouts to get big enough that I could tell which was which.
failing uphill is the funniest thing I've heard in a while. Really sums up the gardening experience 6:54
My parents managed to get zucchini and cucumbers mixed up. They grew the zucchini up canes, and the cucumbers along the ground. They actually ate a raw zucchini for dinner assuming it was a cucumber, even though it was very hard and a bit spiky on the outside. I couldn't believe it when mum showed me the 'inedible cucumber' and waved a zucchini in my face.
9:29 I absolutely lost it. Great way to startle your coworkers if you just start cackling uncontrollably at work!
OMG PLEASE do more of these, makes me feel so much better about all of my fails lmao!!!
I’m still in my fail stage! If you saw my garden I’m sure you would question everything I’m doing! But it’s okay, every failure is a learning experience.
Very nervous about summer time and those green flying beetles, I always find a few grubs in my soil when I dig to plant something! Doesn’t help that I’m lowkey scared of them
I'm scared of them and I know they've been there 😭 No clue on what to do 💔
@@jgodwin717 we garden despite the fears 🥲
I feel lucky I haven't had a problem with those big nasty grubs (knock on wood) unfortunately there's slugs and snails galore, those caterpillars that eat the brocolli plants and weavel beetles that eat the crap out of my strawberry plants among other pests..
I’m in Arizona & am BRAND SPANKIN’ NEW to gardening- like only weeks into it. I have already made so many mistakes and have felt so stupid. Planted, realized I did stuff way wrong, dug it all up, transplanted a few things and started all over …
This video was so wonderful to watch!! I have definitely gotten a kick out of my ignorance and have laughed at myself for sure BUT it helped me a lot to know it’s not just me!! This video had me cackling, but it was also wonderfully informative. I love how helpful and tender you guys offered up validation to newbs & gave suggestions, etc … Excellent video! Thoroughly enjoyed!
One of my favorite gardening videos of all time! Love that fellow gardeners can commiserate with our shared failures. Laughed so hard I had tears running down my face! Please do another one of these.
The last bit about overwatering cacti.
Mum had a Christmas cactus that was supposed to flower at Christmas. She kept it on the windowsill in the bathroom and hardly ever watered it so the moisture it got was mainly from the steam from baths and showers.
It used to flower usually 6 or 7 times a year instead of just once.
My epic garden fail was one I unknowingly repeated multiple years. There's chameleon plant all over my backyard that the previous owner had planted and in order to grow anything I would need to get rid of it. Little did I know, chameleon plant grows so invasively because it spreads by rhizomes. So all the back breaking work of pulling out these plants (with much difficulty because of our heavy clay soil) did nothing because they just popped right back up. Then I got frustrated and just tossed the pulled plants into a different part of the yard and it took over there too🥲 Now after many years of heartbreak, I'm sheet mulching with cardboard to shade them out
Best solution and you may have to do it with a few layers. I did some sheet mulching with cardboard for my 85 year old neighbor. Wild grape vines invading from an empty lot. Two years later and the vines are coming thru again. Nasty buggers! Good Luck.
@@sbffsbrarbrr Thank you! I'll keep that in mind and try to keep plenty of cardboard in stock
My garlic in NH gets planted 5" deep and heavily mulched. As spring comes I remove the mulch and the ground is one big block of ice, but that garlic is unfazed and grows huge bulbs, only lose one or two. Nature amazes me.
The milk story! Kevin actually laughed so much he cried.
Thanks for sharing my silly story, I had a good giggle watching this. I’m no stranger to face-palm moments. You don’t know what you don’t know! ❤
Never laughed so hard... Thank everyone for sharing.Great episode.
That cucumber story reminds me of the first year I grew yellow crooked neck squash. I thought I was going to lose some of them (and I did), but I ended up with around 25 plants producing. My entire house had squash just stacked all over the place. My neighbors quit buying squash from the store that year.
My favorite quote: "There are no garden failures, only experiments that didn't work."
Should have seen my garden. Had the patio redone by what was recommended to me as a professional landscaper. He made a complete mess of it. Not a year later and not only were the paving stones sinking into the ground but weeds were growing 3 feet tall through the cracks between them.
Turns out the company had failed to put in a sand layer, failed to compact it, failed to fit the slabs together well, and failed to add sharp sand between the slabs to stabilise them and prevent weed growth.
And me, with a bad back and knees couldn't keep up with the ever faster growth of weeds.
Omg! I almost pissed myself laughing at the milk on the tomatoes! 😂 The stench of the rotting milk might of at least kept the critters away...
I hope you do more of these videos and please post your failures because we learn from your mistakes too. We can laugh together and not at you. 💕 😂
This is one of the best videos you all have ever done... I am still laughing about the milk on tomatoes, but in all fairness, we probably all have some good stories about mistakes we made. Please do more of these!! I love hearing what others have done and what you all have experienced as well. I too thought those Japanese green beetles were beautiful, and they are, but didn't know that their larva was probably what was killing some of my plants. I have many such stories, as I am sure most of your gardening viewers have. Great video!
The lady that poured the whole pack of carrot seeds in a hole gave me a good laugh 😂😂😂
Her mistake was, she forgot to stir! ;)
My 1st real year of gardening I failed at seed starting in seed starting mix, so I tried the paper towel method using the same amount of seeds one would used with the soil method. I ended up with EVERY seed germinating leaving me with over 100 plants; almost 10 different types of vegetables, and about 5 plants of a couple different varieties. I couldn't bring myself to get rid of the excess so I planted all of them. The lack of being able to keep up with that many plants and not being prepared with available space pretty much took care of getting rid of some of the plants for me and I ended up with 10% of my plants giving me some sort of fruit. Out of the dozen plants I had left, I got a handful of beans, 4 zukes, a handful of tomatoes, and a couple cucumbers. No bell peppers grew bigger than a golf ball. For some reason, my carrots turned out to be the best crop.
I live in the Netherlands and a big Dutch supermarket chain did this thing where you, for every 15 euros you spend, got a free compostable tiny flower pot thingy and a bunch of seeds. I ended up with a bunch of them from other people and couldn't bring myself to toss any of them. Spinach. So, so much spinach...
Our first big year gardening my husband started like seriously 30 tomato plants and couldn't bear to like toss any so we had WAY to many tomatoes and the kind we had were indeterminate so it was a big viny mess trying to pick the tomatoes. Lesson learned, planning our space properly this year!
I hate to brag but…..I never had trouble or a failed garden. Not because I’m so great but I lived in Southern California and the land our house was built on had been where a dairy farm was The soil was so rich I could grow anything. Plus I never used anything that wasn’t natural. The soil was perfect and it was full of big beautiful worms. And I only used my hands without gloves to work. There’s nothing like the feel of rich soil. Sure do miss those days. I’m almost 86 and I can still almost smell that soil and feel those worms righting in my hands. ❤️
Thank you for sharing ❤
Your pond is so beautiful and peaceful! You guys are so cool together. Thank you for all the joy you bring!💐
Thanks to all the folks for sharing your garden stories. Gardening is always an adventure. I had a similar issue with pollination with my ‘baby corn’. Used the tiny cobs to make a vegetable stock for a pasta dish and it was very good, but needless to say I won’t be growing corn again until I have a bigger growing space. 😂 P.S. Kevin, I think you should keep that peanut video up, regardless if you think it’s embarrassing. I remember that video and I was a new gardener at the time and I found both endearing and encouraging.
Garlic - I live along the Wasatch front in Utah. For half a century, I have planted garlic in late October. They overwinter in the soil much like tulips and although the ground freezes solid, the garlic never has died. Usually in late March, they start to peek out of the soil. Harvest is always about the first week in July.
The Chipdrop story was funny/not funny. My first drop was great. The second was full of the worker’s lunch trash in the middle of the pile that I didn’t get to for a couple weeks . It was full of ants eating the garbage. At the bottom was a bunch of water bottles and a “workers ahead” sign that I doubt they were supposed to leave behind. I will get more next year but will spread it sooner.
That's why I've always been afraid to order chip drop even though I could really use arborist chips. Saw a video where someone said "some logs were OK". She wound up with more than a dozen huge logs from a 3' + diameter tree. Even two people could not lift. In addition, half of the logs were in her neighbors driveway. I think Chip Drop has gotten better but it's still a risk.
They've gotten better. Each time I've ordered from them in recent years, they've given me the name and contact information for the arborist who is set to deliver the chips. Then I can get the arborist on the phone and narrow down the time, and get a good idea of what will be in the drop.
Your story about the lunch trash reminds me of what the landscaping crew did 13 years ago when we'd hired them to install the garden fence and rebuild the garden. They put landscaping fabric down along the paths and unused areas to suppress weeds. Not only did the weeds grow right through it and on top of it, but I also found out years later that they'd buried their lunch trash in the soil, along with hundreds of chunks of scrap rocks and concrete leftover from the construction. I went to reclaim the bed a few years ago, and I was digging out polystyrene containers and crushed soda cans. I've never been so angry at a landscaping company, and if I ever see them again, I'm chasing them away with a rake.
Use the pitchfork.
Had the same problem as dogs with peanuts. Live in northern B.C Canada. I was weeding a pea shoots row and never looked behind as I went. Until the end of the row and I looked back to find not one pea plant and a very helpful grouse is hopping along behind me ripping all my pea plants. Little bugger. Then noticed the other side of the garden and a black bear eating all my lettuce. Fence fence fence.
Ouch. Talk about insult to injury. Or rather, almost-injury to insult! Glad you made it out okay, even if you lost your pea shoots crop.
Birds will eat grubs. There are grubs in my garden but they never do any noticeable damage. I'm in an urban area so no chickens. So I put these large decorative trellises in my garden that I use for tomatoes. These trellises include thick horizontal supports that the birds love to sit on. They sit on them and watch the garden. In the morning they dig in it nibbling on grubs. In the afternoon, they chop on the tomato horn worms. Admittedly, they also poop in my garden and any weed seed in their poop is now in my garden but so is that fertilizer. And I have to plant extra seeds when I direct sow bc they always find some of them too. Overall though, the birds are worth it.
Same here. The birds are a big help and do no damage that I can tell. I draw them in with buckets of water (which I use up in two days so there are no mosquitoes in them).
This didn’t happen to me, but I read a story in a gardening group about a new gardener who thought she was growing mint… used the leaves in drinks and dishes thinking it was mint… and then found out it was a tomato plant when a tomato grew on it. She made mint juleps with muddled tomato leaves and didn’t notice 🤣🤣🤣
Hysterical! Looking forward to more fail stories. Love that you weave in the science behind your tips. Love your videos.
My biggest fail so far still makes me laugh to this day.
A few years ago despite being a failed container gardener, I got suuuuper excited looking at seeds online and bought 8 different types I had never grown before. 2 of the 10 types were echinacea and chamomile. I decided to grow them side-by-side in the same container with reused soil. I added fertilizer to amend it's nutrients (incorrectly, I realized years later lol ) and roughly tested PH and nutrients with my new cheap soil test kit. My plan was to grow indoors through the winter and put the planter outside mid-late spring. I germinated the seeds, cared for them, talked to them gently, and watched them grow strong. I put pure love into those little guys.
3 months later and they were outside. The Chamomile grew ok (I got some harvest) but eventually got burnt by the early summer sun. But my echinacea! oh it was strong! and the leaves were green/REDDISH and looking VERY healthy despite the heat. As it grew the bottom leaves/stem turned more reddish and the plant got very tall, hmm🤔
Then the flowers started to come in and I thought they looked a bit odd. This was supposed to be purple cone flower ecinacea, but the flowers were teeny tiny pink ones with dry curly grass-like swirls on the plant. hmmmm🤨 I went online to a gardening place and posted pictures asking if anyone knew if this was normal. No one had a clue what it was, but knew it wasn't echinacea. Well what the hell had I been talking to and caring for these last 6 months?? I google image searched the pictures I took.
It was Northern Willow Herb.
It was weeds.
Non of my echinanea seeds had germinated, and the latent native weed seeds in the reused soil grew perfectly in it's place.
I had baby talked to weeds for 6 months 🤣
So needless to say now I make sure I know EXACTLY ( not relatively) what a plant is supposed to look like BEFORE I grow it lol
That’s so funny thanks for sharing !! 😂❤
This was soooo funny as well as very instructive. Living in Dallas with our horrific summers, I can fully appreciate the tomato milk segment.
I had a friends child stay with me while her parents went on vacation, I decided to let her help me plant seeds. She held the seeds while I walked 15 to 20ft away to get a bag of compost she had opened all the packs & threw the seeds into the bed, It took me 2 & 1/2 days to thin and find homes for the plants once they popped up, I couldn't bring myself to throw them away, space was extremely tight but the local shelter and the food bank loved seeing me weekly with produce. Every time I've talked to them she asks if she can help again, LOL! It felt nice to be able to share but my back, shoulder & hands hated & tortured me all season, back to my very small garden this year.
Your content helps me cope up with depression.
Its helps a lot in looking forward for tomorrow. By caring for my little garden. Thanks a lot from philippines
@text-4959 im from the philippines i dunno if it can reach me.
Dude get a life. Your scamming me.
I once planted habaneros in the same bed as nardello peppers. Both grew very well and produced delicious peppers. The next year, I skipped the peppers, but one sprouted any way! It didn’t look like either pepper and tasted like a crossbreed. They were an amazing smoky sweet that ended in a “what the hell did I put in my mouth!” The fail? I didn’t save any seeds.
I’m dying laughing at the person who chopped off all the corn cobs 😂😂😂 update just watched the one where they lady fed her tomatoes 🍅 milk and I’m snorting while laughing now 😂 I LOVE THIS STUFF
Back in 1991, my dad grew habenero's. He got this idea to use a food dehydrator, make hot pepper flake. He set it up in the kitchen at nite. We woke up at 7am, eyes burning & itching. We had to evacuate the house, was like mustard gas thru the entire house 🤣
I grew my first tomatoes last year in my flat. Until the flowering stage, everything went perfectly fine. After a couple of weeks, I noticed that the flowers started dying one after another so I put on a fan and tried to pollinate using a brush as well. I grew three cherry tomatoes in the span of 9 months.
Not so much a fail but something I could have thought more about: mixing bee balm in with my herb bed. It’s not taking over, I keep on the herbs and keep them even; but the barn cat loves the bee balm smell and now just uses all my herbs as a bed. He’s too cute to be upset about it though
G'day.
What a fun and informative video. This was great and I'd love to see more of this. The milk story was just the best and I was in tears with laughter here from both the story and your reactions. 😂
Thanks for brightening my day.
Daz.
Oh my gosh my biggest fail was before I even read a word about gardening. I thought I could just plant a big old onion in the dirt and it would split out into more onions for me, just like flower bulbs do. It was a really pretty flower though 😆
The flower buds are extremely tasty as well...
Wait, they don’t do that?
I definitely made the tomato mistake. In the past my Dad only grew determinate, but my first time was with indeterminate cherry tomatoes, thinking I'd only need a small stake or cage. I only planted them about a foot apart and had one stake per tomato. While I did everything else right, I failed at support. My stakes were leaning, and one rainstorm later my 7 foot tomato vines collapsed. I desperately tried to manage this tomato jungle by holding them up with bungee cord and string all over the garden. And 5 cherry tomato plants is way too much tomatoes for 2 people. My husband never wants to look at a cherry tomato again.
This video was truly Epic! 😂 Thank you! Over my 20+ years of gardening, I have had many seeding, planting and growing failures. Probably the biggest failure was to keep notes from one year to the next, relying on memory is not always as reliable as we would like to think. Between note taking, RUclips and continued but more spotty failures, gardening is still my most enjoyable therapy.
i also had 5 peanuts! and i was sooo happy i had those since my climate is cold. my biggest mistake was using plastic cover over my bean seeds in may with the soil wet it was very black. the sun came out and the black ground absorbed all the sun and litterally boiled them. i pulled the plastic off and the ground was litterally steaming. did a resow XD
Ouch! Tough to lose everything! 😔 Wetting the ground and covering with plastic is how I kill weeds in the summer in my garden beds.
@bethb8276 -- Hmm, so taking the traditional overkill-response method of killing them with fire (from the sun), but with water... that's a new twist, lol! Well, at least it works to kill unwanted plants as well as it accidentally does on the wanted ones.
Got Milk!! 🤣🤣🤣
I almost fell out of my chair!!!
Definitely need a part 2!!!
Yes, grubs! Kept digging up 50 or so and I put beneficial nematodes, it definitely helped!
I did the same. We had so many grubs you could see their tunnel trails every where.
@@usbpphillips now it’s 2023 and I haven’t seen grubs,… yet! Those beetles are always around when n the summer so I may have to dig deeper.
Oh man these were good. The worst thing I've done is just get started way too late, but there's still the rest of my life for fails.
One good thing is this video re-solidified my desire to get my soil tested. I was only thinking of what it might be lacking, not of anything dangerous that could be in it. Luckily I'm growing everything edible in containers or a Birdie's 13-in 8-in-1 purchased from you guys for my first year.
Great show guys! I always tell my friends how fun gardening is. They look at me like I'm crazy.👀 But, I laugh more in the garden than anywhere else these days. 😂❤️💯
9:10 i saw that happening to my corn too and i was confused wondering why it branching out i decided to leave it to see what Would happen, it's a good thing. 😅 it was my 3rd time Growing corn i think it looked that way because I had less in the pot this time.
Moving from Ohio to Oklahoma after I got married, I thought I knew what I was doing. My husband kept saying I was planting everything too close, and I was so stubborn. Never had I ever seen tomatoes grow so tall! They were taller than both of us, and we got only a handful of veggies that year.
Omg I had the same thing happen with wood chips! Although it wasn’t through chipdrop. There were some tree guys cutting my neighbors tree one day so I went and asked if they would give hook me up with some chips, they said yes of course! The next next day I came home right as they were dumping a GIANT literal dump truck load of chips in my backyard. Luckily I’ve a huge yard and the chips are super handy for lots of areas. That was last year and I’ve still got a large pile out there. In fact just yesterday I was spreading chips.
You guys killed it, I laughed so hard, you're the best. The grubs issue, wow, I got more than a thousand since last summer. My plants were dying mysteriously, then I got them. The green beetles would chew on blooms seriously. I know even this year I have to do something. I started using neem oil with dish soap. Would like to know other ways as well. Thanks guys.
They attacked the hardy plants coz I lost 12 plants, and saved 3 when I realized
I've never combined Neem oil and dish soap - what ratio? Did the soap just help the Neem adhere a little better?
Our grubs are from june bugs & mormon crickets. I watched a vid where a guy is using neem meal. I did not know it existed. I have tried beneficial nematodes, those help some. I also used neem oil, spraying at night & watering in in the morning. I usually dug through my beds & throw the grubs into a cup of water. I used to give them to our chickens when we had them. I'm going to try the neem meal this year if I can find some. You only spread a little, then the compost topping over, etc.
The Japanese Beetle was brought here. There's no predator for it here. I use DE on them. I re purposed a bottle with one hole in it. It streams out DE to hit the JB before it burrow or while on plants. It just wants soft soil and it doesn't matter what plant it is, living or not. The grubs end up in my compost. I let them take over then discovered how to starve them out so they become part of the compost and my red wiggles come back again.
@@classicrocklover5615, I use 2 table spoons neem oil and I teaspoon dish soap mix with 1 gallon water. Make sure the ground is not dry. Here in Europe we use liters, so I hard 30 liters of water, 13 tbsp neem and 13 tsp soap, slightly warm water.
Love the “Fails” video. I look forward to more. It would be a great ongoing series. Super funny stuff, gents!
I have plenty of failures with lifetime of gardening withmy grandma and dad. Over those years I have learned to love those EPIC fails because they make me an overall better gardener. Thanks to your followers for sharing their challenges. I now know that milk is not good for tomatoes!
1st year on our new property, was so tortured by these thorny bushes...like 20 ish. I cut them down to the ground. The next year's my yardwork was largely neglected. I was surprised to learn they were black berries. So grateful for their resilience.
Blackberry bushes are like an invasive species where I live - I would be pretty grateful if cutting them down would kill them, but it doesn’t. They spread by the roots, and emerge anywhere that there is dirt. Keeping them from coming up in my garden beds is a pain.
@doloresreynolds8145 -- You have to dig up the hearts. Every single one of them. Or they'll just keep on coming back. I hate Himalayan blackberries with a passion now, I'm convinced they were the inspiration for Sleeping Beauty's thorny barricade.
I have a school garden and we did corn. When it was about 3-4 feet high the kids kept asking why we didn't pick it. They thought the stalk was the part you eat. When it was full grown and started to ear they were a little disappointed that all they got from that big plant was the comparatively small ears.
Kids really seem to love Cucamelons! They just love the novelty and even the picky neighbor kids enjoy finding and snacking on them in my yard 😋
@@zarahsgarden2097 I am all about novelty. We have blue potatoes, red carrots, yard long beans, black radishes, and the corn is actually popcorn. If it's different and fun and good to eat, what more could you want?
Definitely recommended to test for lead/heavy metals especially if you live within a couple miles of a general aviation airport. Many of those planes are older, run pretty dirty, and still require leaded fuel.
This is something that people often overlook unless they are immediately adjacent to airport property.
Always love and learn something from your videos! Thank you
That image of the grubs made me think of the joy that my chickens would have if I had that problem! Made me ALMOST want a grub issue :)
4:55 I did this last year during my first gardening season, but with Giant Red Mustard instead 😂 It was a delicious lesson to learn ❤
My biggest fail was when I moved back to my moms house and the people there before me had a small rosemary bush in the ground that didn't seem to be growing at all and was in a location that only received morning sun, I dug it up and potted it feeling excited. That plant root rotted and died and left me sad. Over the next 2 years during covid and stuff I tried using cuttings from poultry seasoning packs at my local store but they never grew. I'll copy and paste my comment from another video on rosemary growing that details my current hopefully successful redemption: I'm currently running a Rosemary experiment. 2 different small seed bags and I got 7 to sprout. 2 sprouted in the paper towel method but only 1 survived. The rest took way longer than a month but eventually popped up out of the soil in their pots. 2 died after sprouting from the ground. I currently have 4 alive and I'm using the water bottle with the bottom removed as a mini green house method on 2 of them, so far 1 of them in mini green house method is doing the best with 8 true leaves and branches forming at every node. The paper towel method seedling with no green house method is doing second best with 6 true leaves and 1 node starting a new branch, the other two are still behind with 4 true leaves each. I'm also rooting some cuttings from a friend to compare end results. The water bottle method might be worth it for rosemary seedlings though, really protects them from the extreme rain I've had lately and also helps heat up and dry out the soil for them.
Side note: I recently saw an old video from an old timer who had grown lots of rosemary and seemed to have the best sprouting from seed technique out of everything I've seen, he spread a bunch of seeds over the top of some potting mix and covered with a moist paper towel, lightly pressing the towel into the soil to get the seeds firmly lodged into the soil. That man did the world a service by making that not highly viewed video of his lifetime of knowledge and I don't think he faked his results at all, he got a ridiculously high germination rate in comparison to any other techniques I've seen. I'm currently satisfied with my own number of growing rosemary plants but I'll be sure to try his technique in the future if they die or even if they ever make seeds themselves.
I have a rosemary story too.
I'm an asian and dont use western herb much but for one of my cooking lesson ( i study food science during my uni ) we buy a few stalk of it for our group . I kept one of the stalk , put it in water for it to take root. It worked , i even transplant it into a small pot. After a few week, the bald stem even started to grow new bud.
And , holiday comes. I bring it home with me ( end of term holiday,2 month) . It grown quite well. There's already new leaves. Then, i make the most foolish decision , to replant it in my backyard.
Why, you ask? The next day, our chicken ate it. All of the efford raising it from bald stalk to a healthy plant with proper leaf gone in less than a day.
Never plant it again after that. Not that i will ever use it but, i still wish i could strangle that chicken.
@@ahmadfaezuddin177 Wow Chickens eat rosemary? I'm from Hawaii where chickens run wild everywhere but they haven't touched any of my plants yet, they just like scratching the dirt around newly planted stuff so I always gotta put something down to cover and protect till the stuff grows. I've only ever wanted to strangle 1 chicken. After a night of partying I was spending the night at a friends house in his guest bedroom when all of a sudden at 2 in the morning a rooster hopped on the fence on the border of the property which happens to be like 5 feet away from the guest bedroom window. That rooster somehow mustered the loudest crow I've ever heard from a chicken and it was echoing in the room, he kept going every 5 minutes for the rest of the entire night and in the morning I had nothing on my mind but strangling that rooster.
@@ziggybender9125 i didnt really expect that to happen too. Usually they dont really bother any of the plant and vegetable my mom planted. They just scrath the soil around it a little. Maybe because it was a foreign plant and they got curious about its taste?
I'm from malaysia . Our rooster was not that crazy. They usually crow at 6 am and stop after sunrise at about 7.30 am. It dont really bother us because most of our family already wake up at that time.
@@ahmadfaezuddin177 Ok now I'm curious because you specified it as a western herb. What are the popular herbs in Malaysia? I'm sure I could try grow some here in Hawaii, I'm curious if the chickens here will eat them.
@@ziggybender9125 What my family plant here were tumeric, ginger, galangal, bird eye chilli, curry leaf , lemon grass, daun kesum ( i dont know its english name ) and pandan .
All of them were just planted for self consumption and not for sale. We basically use them in our daily cooking.
Omg not only were these hilarious but so we’re you reactions. The milk one was awesome. It was so good to hear these. It helps me from throwing in the towel
Can't help but to giggle along with you two! 👍
love it when you discuss the comments. so entertaining.
I hope you two do more of these, it was a lot of fun hearing everyones stories
This is really great because we can learn from all these mistakes without having to make them! Thank you so much for posting this!
I was having a bad day until I watched this video, I laughed so much! So I'm not the only one who made horrible mistakes at the beginning. Thanks Kevin and Jacques, for making my day with this video, hahaha!
When we moved into our new house and started an herb garden with a huge mint patch, we very quickly discovered two things: 1) mint is closely related to catnip and 2) there was a colony of (fixed and released) community cats living nearby. Couple of days later and our mint patch was completely demolished. Twelve cats were laying around in the remains, eleven of them high as a kite and number twelve clearly sick from eating too much. We were afraid we had to trap the poor thing for a vet visit, but fortunately we could resolve it by phone. They do a great job at keeping rats out and fertilizing the garden, so I do still grow some mint for them. Just in moderation 😺
Mine: my first year I didn’t understand about container water retention in my 9b summer heat. Didn’t get a single tomato that year because I didn’t realize the water was hydrophobic once it hit June. It looked….okay, but I think the few droplets of water that got to the roots just went to the few sad leaves it was able to push out. 😂
You really gotta admire plants striving for life. The things we put them through and they still manage to produce a leaf 🤣
The water was hydrophobic?
@@jelatinosa I think she meant the soil was hydrophobic
@@GettinFiggyWitIt that makes sense
@@jelatinosa nice catch! 😆 SOIL became hydrophobic.
I love how you two are having such a good time.
2.15M people laughing at my pain 🤣
LOL
😂😂
This video had me cracking up😂. Also…thanks to the lady who shared about her corn mishap because I’m attempting corn for the first time and could absolutely see myself making this mistake
Loved this so much, such funny issues that we all have. Was great to relive some and to know your not the only one haha😂. And to remember that we are doing this for fun and relaxation. So funny guys thank you 🤗🤗🤗🤗
I laughed so hard I cried over the curdling milk story 😂 Seriously the best video! I haven’t been able to garden yet this season due to epic snow storms in my area and was starting to feel down with all the grey skies until this. Thank you so much for the laugh’s that I didn’t realize how desperately I needed. Hilarious