Originally Posted by chattypatty
First off I must admit, my husband and I are crappy gardeners. We have never had stellar success but this year was a complete disaster. Usually we get nice tomatoes, cucumbers and squash and beans. We live in the country near Portland, Oregon and have a lot of land to have a huge vegetable garden.
Okay so I'm trying to figure out what happened. We have never had our soil analyzed so I don't really know what it needs. We have a horse ranch next to us and they give us their manure. We let the manure sit a full year and compost before we took it and tilled it into the garden soil.
We planted in early May. We had unseasonably warm weather the month of May. Everyone was talking about it. Then, mid June, we had a couple of weeks of bitter, bitter cold. I think one night even hit freezing or just above freezing (maybe 34 degrees). Now maybe this is the whole entire problem, but since our neighbors seemed to get some crops, I'm thinking we have some other problems we need to look at.
Here is what we planted and the outcome:
Potatoes - these actually did reasonably well. They were fairly small for Russets but we got a whole bunch. Some of them had brown spots in the middle when you cut them open, but most did not and were okay.
Tomatoes -- only got a few fruits and the skins were tough, basically inedible, and this is out of 3 regular plants and 1 cherry tomato plant.
Basil -- died straight away
Bell peppers (green, red, yellow) -- died straight away
Eggplant -- looked straggly and produce one small shriveled scary looking eggplant.
Carrots -- got a few, were too small, even though we had thinned them
Radishes -- got a decent crop of nice looking radishes
Lettuce -- came up late and grew slowly and got eaten by critters
Kale and Swiss Chard -- never came up at all.
Squash and pumpkins -- never came up, which is odd because last year, we had a bumper crop.
Broccoli and cauliflower -- plants emerged but did not produce fruit
Cabbage -- got a few nice looking, albeit small, heads
Corn -- came up but appeared to stop growing at about 8 inches tall
Onions -- did pretty well, got a decent amount
Green beans and green peas -- a few plants emerged from the ground but didn't do anything after that, while last year, we got quite a few string beans and snow peas
Cucumbers -- we mounded them, only two came up but never really grew past the 2 leaf stage.
Canteloupe and watermelon -- never even came up
Strawberries (in their own containers) -- gorgeous green plants with maybe 5 strawberries total.
We spent a lot of money building raised planter beds, into which we put some of the plants, whereas the other plants were just planted directly in ground. As you can see, it was a large garden (there are some other vegetables I know I'm forgetting but that we also planted, and they didn't come up). Obviously we were horribly discouraged, wasted a lot of money and effort, and are not sure if the strange weather pattern is to blame, or if there is something wrong with our soil, or yet some other thing we are doing wrong.
I have never been able to get basil or bell peppers to grow, never.
We also had an inordinate amount of weeds in the ground area (not so much in the planter beds) and though I tried to keep on top of them, it was just impossible. I feel this is related to the horse manure but my husband disagrees.
Would anyone hazard a guess as to what went wrong or give me some advice on how to plant differently next year?
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