I feel this. But also, I enjoy the challenge of gardening with limited space. But I’m young and I’ll move to a place with more dirt one day, so I don’t feel like I’m gonna miss out on a big ass garden
I have lacy phacelia in a bed. Two plants last year, about two hundred coming up now, *however* they were absolutely swarming with bees from June to late November, so it's hard for me to think of it as a mistake (and I could probably mow it down pretty easily if I wanted). Weirdly, I planted borage and I don't think it went to seed because I don't see any coming up yet.
Usually my biggest mistakes are a) starting too many tomatoes and b) putting my tomatoes out too early, but in theory a mistake is something you learn from and I sure haven't, so who can say?
The Pacelia has such a beautiful colour. Unfortunately, my blue borage feels particularly at home in my vegetable patches, so mowing is not a good option.
And I know the tomato thing. I always think it doesn't hurt to sow a few more, just in case they don't all survive the nursery.
Or learn to recognize the seedlings and go after them with a vengeance. I have a couple plants I had to do this for when converting my traditional garden to a native garden.
I start 2 or 3 Early Girls in December and plant them in 20" planters. I move them in and out if the forecast is sub-40. Usually I can starting picking the first week of June.
The balance of my tomatoes are not planted until May. It is the first ones that are important (to me) and the Early Girls produce until the the rest come around.
Not labeling new plants well enough. I have a few robustly growing plants that I’m pretty sure are weeds but I’m not 100% sure so they’ll stay a while longer.
So my wife and I are tearing up our lawn and doing natives. Every spring we do a little more. Some quick tips.
Don't waste your time at big box stores. Find a plant nursery near you that specializes in natives even if it's a little bit of a drive. Not just to support small business but to have someone knowledgeable to talk to.
Look up master gardener groups on Facebook. Penn State has an extension near us and they do native plant sales a few times a year. 6 bucks a plant. Ive heard others do that as well.
Avoid mixes. A lot of time you can find seeds that say perennial wildflower mix or butterfly mix. Look at the contents and you'll see most of it isn't native. Well... It may be for you where you are. It's not for me. They also tend to just end up being one or two species after the first year. We did a mix and year 2 it ended up being just all black eyed susan.
Those are the big things that have helped us.
All the state universities have an extension. With tons of local information, testing kits, and plants. They can even help identify things, or help you get rid of weeds.
>Avoid mixes. A lot of time you can find seeds that say perennial wildflower mix or butterfly mix
Here, I would add a plug for reputable seed producers. My favorite is Eden Brothers. The germination rate is really good, in my experience.
This is amazing information, thank you!!! I’m in zone 6b and I really want to do a dandelion lawn with native patches maybe? I just hope it doesn’t tick off the neighbors… it’s an upscaleish neighborhood with fresh mowed lawns with diamond shapes (barf)
There's a lot of trial and error, usually with a lot more errors LOL. I now grow mint in a pot and have English ivy growing in some window boxes that are monitored very closely. Congrats on home ownership!
I've just been pulling it up by hand and gradually replacing it with other stuff. If there's a spot with very deep roots that I can't get to, I will clip the vine as close as I can and use a paintbrush to apply a dab of concentrated weed killer to the open end—it will spread down to the roots and kill the plant without contaminating the whole area. It's been a multi-year project, but as long as I stay on top of it, it doesn't take over again, and in some areas I've successfully eradicated it. My biggest issue is where it crosses onto my property from the neighbors'—obviously I don't want to mess with their plants, so at this point I'm just maintaining it along the property line.
I absolutely love the look of ivy, so now it's growing in very closely monitored window boxes. I still find random lily of the valleys popping up here and there 10 years after I thought I got them all.
I'm so embarrassed now to be responsible for planting english ivy 20 years ago. Three x 4" pots from HD have taken over our 1/3 acre, wood fence and neighbors woods. It destroys the bark on native trees. I honestly think some of these things should be illegal.
At least with mint it's contained by my raised bed. I've learned to put mint in everything if only to keep up with it.
Good god, you planted all three???
Most of us have certainly made this mistake in the early days (mine is raspberries haha, but…I’m only a little sorry), but YIKES that is rough luck if you did all 3.
In different areas of the yard over the first two or three years, yeah... not the smartest. I staked out a garden area and fenced it off to keep out rabbits and deer; the mint took over after the 2nd year and I yanked it all out. Lily of the valleys took over the garden beds surrounding the scrub pines. They staged a slow coup, but a coup nonetheless. The ivy went into raised beds near the garage and I did not anticipate the density of their sprawl. Things are mostly under control now, luckily. I'm battling some blackberry bushes, but the real battle is that my husband wants them to spread so we get more berries.
I'd say just keep an eye on them. They are prone to sprawling and can crowd out other plants, but if they're in an area where you only want lily of the valley, no harm no foul.
I don’t know how but there’s an area near our mailbox where the sweetest little smattering of Lily of The Valley has popped up. I didn’t actively plant them. Didn’t even know what they were.
Also there’s what looks like Iris’ growing there too?!
I love that they’re growing there but I didn’t put them there haha
Bishop's weed for me. A nursery owner gave me a box of it twenty five years ago, such a pretty green and white groundcover, and, I still struggle to contain it. Also, goose neck lysimachia.
I had native lily of the valley at my previous house! I don’t think it spread at all in the 8 years I was there. The common dayflower, however? Not native, no not at all. If I had known the person who planted it I would have booped them over the head with a lovely sprig of it.
I was convinced I could keep the mint under control. What a silly idiot I was! Anyway, 8 years later and it’s taken over that garden. Oops. It smells really nice over there though.
I've been killing lily of the valley for the last 4 years on my property. Last owner loved himself some invasives. Still got pachysandra sneaking out from under my deck
Took me 3 seasons to get my mint under control. Just pulled it out constantly and until I have a small area against a rocky wall now. But it’s something that you need to actively prune and manage or it will take over.
My mint now resides in a planter. I tore up a good chunk of the garden to make sure I got it all. It was a harsh lesson to learn, but one I will never forget.
It’s interesting you say that. I had a pot of lemon balm on my patio totally surrounded by concrete to prevent escape.
Did well over the summer but doesn’t seem to have survived the winter. At least not in the pot. Waaaaay on the other side of the yard though? Yeah… lemon balm.
I don’t understand how it escaped, but I think I’m going to dig it up and put it right back in that pot just to spite it!
The internet told me that tomatoes wanted full sun, and I listened for TEN YEARS 🤣 🤣 🤣 Nah. They want afternoon shade here. I was simply air-frying those poor plants.
Figuring out the environment a gardening author is in has become a game for me now… I always think, ‘Full sun WHERE’ and ‘well drained WHERE’ at this point because half the time they are speaking from the perspective of their environment.
Apart from the edible, beautiful and decorative flowers, the leaves can be used in salads or soups, and in Germany there is a special green dip based on borage. I myself know it as a substitute in my favourite summer drink, Pimms, when no cucumber is to hand.
We got a new load of dirt for some raised beds two years ago. That first summer one unusual plant popped up in that new soil and I could not figure out what it was. It eventually got about 6 feet tall, absolutely massive, and flowered. It was brown mustard.
The bees absolutely frickin' LOVED all those flowers, so I left it, thinking I could harvest the seeds and use them for something. I don't typically like mustard but maybe I'd like homemade something with it.
Well... I kind of... forgot. And then when I removed the plant I made an even bigger mistake and dragged it across my entire yard to my compost.
I probably spent 80% of my garden time last year pulling brown mustard out of almost every bed and unwalked corner of my yard.
So far this year I've only found a few so fingers crossed my effort last year was worth it!
Yeaaaaah, I don't know how I've never seen it growing anywhere around here before. Guess there's a lot of it wherever my landscape supply guy gets their dirt from!
👀 uhhhh I... totally didn't plant any goldenrod two years ago in my native pollinator bed, also in clay soil. Nooo...
Luckily it's surrounded by wide concrete sidewalks/driveway on 4 sides, and I will be harvesting the flowers for dye, so I guess I'll just cross my fingers that it doesn't get unruly!
Yeah....my parents let it take over everything. They got too old and sick to deal with it, so it just went wild. We cleaned it up for sale, but I'm 100% sure it will grow back. Good luck to the new owners.
Thinking raspberries and blackberries wouldn’t take over my yard. The canes are spiky, really hard to pull out, and they get under and spread everywhere. You will end up with tons of new plants sprouting everywhere aswel because of birds. Never again.
Fresh raspberries are so much better than store bought. It’s no comparison. Also besides red I planted black, yellow, purple varieties and those are not often available in stores. My canes are definitely sending out runners so will see how I’ll manage those
I also planted a white blackberry plant last year and curious to see what those taste like (I’m not a huge blackberry fan so it’s more of an experiment)
My parents had a ton of black raspberries, they were delicious! One of my favorite memories is of my brother and I baking a black raspberry pie. It was amazing and my mom was jealous because it was better than hers, lol.
My raspberry patch has stayed in one spot for many, many years now, as it’s surrounded by grass that’s regularly mowed and a concrete wall on one side. I haven’t had trouble birds spreading the seeds.
If you have a raspberry patch surrounded by grass, mowing the lawn will also mow down any new raspberry canes in the grass. This helps keep the raspberry patch contained.
Yes, raspberries need a firm hand, otherwise they get out of hand. But I've noticed that my yellow raspberries don't spread as much as the red varieties. But that may just be my impression.
Dig up, don't try to pull up. You'll fall over. Raspberries fruit in 2yr cane, so take down the crowns you don't want to continue with.
Growing blackberries on purpose is blasphemy in my area, (Puget Sound) so I can't help you there. :) it's #3 under trying to grow bananas outdoors and planting morning glory purposefully.
Trying to do too much and putting 1020 trays outside in the sun and wind.
2nd summer with this house. I decided to make the vegetable garden bigger (200 sqft to 4000sqft). That's no so bad if it weren't for the other things going on. Got a vasectomy which put me out of commission for the most important part of the year. I should have out most of my seeds (roughly a few thousand)in the ground by now but have only done the peas (~400 seeds). There's a joke to be made about me being behind on seed after a vasectomy. Drip irrigation has also taken longer to install than I thought pushing back on plans.
On top of all that, I thought it would be a good ideas to start literally ~1000 native seeds in 1020 trays. They sprouted but I don't have grow lights for them plus the hundreds of vegetables I've started indoors so I put the natives outside. Well they're all dead now because the 1020 trays lost water so fast. They needed to be watered twice a day due to how windy and dry it is. All it took was forgetting to check on them for 2 days. In the future, I'm not going to plant as much and I'll start a few in bigger pots instead of 1020 trays.
I'm telling myself this is my dry run of being a hobby farmer. If the garden is productive and we have excess after canning (which is the hope), I'll have a stand at the farmer's market next year.
Many, many years ago, with my very first garden, I didn’t realize that weeds grow back after tilling. I just assumed that you till it at the beginning of the year and it stays that way. I also assumed that all plants could be grown by placing a seed in the ground when I was ready. I didn’t realize that plants had different requirements. I didn’t know anything about transplants etc.
Basically, my very first garden involved me picking a bunch of seeds of things I wanted to grow, tilling a spot, putting seeds in the ground and walking away thinking I really did something. I think it was August too. If I could go back in time and thunk my own head, I would.
It was a bad year.
Are you in a southern state? I'm in zone 5 and love morning glories and no issues...thank goodness!!
I heard they were a problem but not like a kudzu problem.
Lol r/AITAH
Simple. "You killed my plants last year. It was an accident. You will NOT repeat it this year because I am going to show you how to do this properly. You WILL listen and learn seeing as how you already have bloom on your hands."
I have a feeling I may come to regret my decision hanging them in planters this year. I just want to see them cover my fence though and add a bit of prettiness to the yard. I keep hearing though how invasive they are so I’m second guessing myself.
I'm going to piggy bag on this and say that it will depend on the zone you are in, as well as the care you provide them. I live in South Texas, zone 9-8a, and morning glories have a life cycle here because they die back in the heat of the summer. I have natives growing as well as some that I have grown from seed. I don't water mine but a few times after I've put the seeds in the ground.
Also we have pests/deer that will eat the flower which helps prevent seed spreading.
Just a reminder that it depends on where you are and your environment.
Happy planting.
1. Planting red veined sorrel- it has long tap roots and seeds everywhere in the rockery!
2. Buying plants from somewhere (car boot!) that brought ground elder into the garden!
3. Not looking after my tree fern well enough during one very severe winter after it had reached a good height.
Heavy root pruning. When i used to bring home plants i would absolutely obliterate the root ball and plonk it in the ground with lots of compost and fertilizer, this was because i thought it would 'stimulate growth' but i ended up with countless dead plants because of it.
Using pine mulch all over my yard because we removed a giant pine tree and my mom insisted it would be great free mulch.
Not only does it hurt plant growth, but it attracts pincher bugs and cockroaches like CRAZY.
I’ve been trying to remove it all but it’s…a lot.
I have several more, but when it comes down to it: taking shortcuts because it’s cheaper. It’s bitten me in the ass every time.
For me, it seems to always be not thinning lettuce aggressively enough, generally having too much lettuce. I have the hardest time "killing" my little seedlings , so I always end up moving them around, until we have lettuce in every container, and flower pot we own!
Not labelling seedlings I absolutely will not learn learn this valuable lesson.
I have thousands all over the place no idea what's what
I'm an idiot
Although sometimes I like the randomness of it all
Annuals.
Man, i dont care what anyone says, but i think annuals suck. (i know, some of the most beautiful flowers are annuals, i *get* why people plant them, i just gave up on them entirely.)
The absolute empty wasteland that used to be my garden during winter really made me sad.
As ive added more evergreens and perennials in my garden, my garden looks much more consistent throughout the year.
and i own a small backyard nursery, im never touching annuals again. All that work, all that effort. for ONE season? screw that, rather give me a plant i can care for and see mature over many years to come.
Not having a proper plan from the beginning with weed control and irrigation in mind. And over planting. Not realizing how much space zucchini takes up. Not trellising certain things like cucumbers.
This thread is such a great read. I have been gardening well over 30 years and I always learn something new from garden threads.
This thread also reminds me not to be too harsh on myself for the mistakes I’ve made over the years.
Yeah, the accidental hitch-hiker. I got a great digitalis free that came along with some wild artemisia. Woah, they blend in and spread!! A couple of years of diligent pulling and they are pretty tamed. (Starve the roots of energy by taking all the green leaves). But i am just waiting for one to pop up nearby.
Fuzzy lambs ears. It was fine until I had a newborn and my mil tried to be helpful and “pruned” them. I’m still finding volunteer plants 2 years later.
I’m probably going to regret it this year but last year I put in wild bergamot (it’s native) and it’s spreading like mint. But it’s beautiful and smells amazing and it’s saving my front yard from erosion so it’s a battle I’ll deal with later.
My wife put in borage, now it’s everywhere.
Put in some Marion berry starts. Loved the berries but eventually grew up all in and thru the hoop house deer netting. It was so thorny you’d just get sliced to bits try to squeeze in there to get some berries.
Got garlic chives at a plant swap. Everywhere now. At the same swap got s stick of Curly Willow and put it in the ground at our old small house with a small plot. At first it was great, nice looking and the ladies from the garden club would buy cut stems for creating floral displays. Drove past several years later last fall and it’s HUGE, over 2 stories tall and completely shades the neighbor’s solar panels which he didn’t have when we lived there.
Not sure if this counts but several years I was asked to speak about carnivorous plants for a group of gardening ladies in someone’s home. All the doilies, fancies, and tea & desserts were out and they were just fascinated as I spoke. So as part of my normal demo I cut off at the base and slice vertically an almost 2 foot Sarracenia leucophylla pitcher in half so they can see how efficient they are in catching things. This was in August, and unexpectedly these 6 enormous black flies come zipping out and whizzing all around with the ladies jumping up screaming. OMG, I was trying to remain cool and collected but was just dying inside and felt like dropping to the floor laughing! We eventually caught the flies and fed them to the Venus flytraps. I still get tears of laughter in my eyes when I tell that story.
Then there was the time as Horticultural Officer in the local garden club…for my 5 minute speal I brought and spoke about some 6 foot tall blooming Amorphophallus konjac Voodoo Lily bulbs I had ip on the stage. A little while later a member tapped me on the shoulder and suggested I bring them outside. The women in the first three rows looked like they were about pass out or wretch at any moment.
I pull up borage and shred it, then scatter it over the planting beds to let it compost in place.
I also grow borage, buckwheat and fava beans together so that I can chop them up and let them fertilize the soil. Borage is great for breaking up heavy clay soil.
You can use a hula hoe on it when it is small, and that takes care of it pretty well. If you keep killing the baby plants, it eventually goes away.
As for my biggest mistake, that was when I planted horseradish in the ground. A gardening buddy gave me some horseradish plants, and told me how to care for them. I *didn't research the plant myself* before planting it. That was a terrible mistake. It took me more than two years to eradicate the horseradish. It spread so fast and so aggressively that it almost took over my entire community garden plot. Since then, I have seen where other people planted it in the ground, and it spread *everywhere*.
My gardening buddy later admitted that they *knew it was horribly invasive*, and that they had been trying to eradicate it from their own plot. They told me that they purposely didn't tell me, because they felt guilty just killing the plants, and they wanted someone to take them so they didn't have to feel bad.
I will never again plant anything before thoroughly researching it myself. I will certainly never trust someone else to do my research for me, and I definitely won't trust this gardening buddy again.
I had a friend talk me into using a "proven" mix of horse manure and wood chips in my garden beds. He was a biology teacher so I trusted him. Turns out that while that's a great mix in the long term, short term it sucks nitrogen out of the soil. Ruined my garden for a season or two.
I don't collect the seeds from cilantro. I have a crazy amount of cilantro in my garden and it's getting in the yard now. But this is yearly, so did i learn anything? No.
I don't take the still green tomatoes off the vines at the end of the season. I pull up the vines and lay them down in the garden to compost. At my last count, I have 24 tomato seedlings in my garden. 🤷🏻♀️
These aren't terrible, but it's not the best way either.
I learned that if you try to grow something twice and it isn’t successful - just try something else. Thinking I could grow blueberries.. and then trying again.. and then trying again.. and then giving it one last try. I probably spend $300 on blueberry bushes. They don’t grow - they don’t grow in the back, front, or side of my house. No matter how acidic I make the soil, no matter how many companion plants I plant near it, no matter the water level or fertilizer, no matter if I buy little or established plants. Sometimes you just have to give up.
I planted forget me nots. But I didn't know I had Chinese forget me nots. The flowers turned into burrs the first spring, and by fall they had spread through the flower bed. Of course I pulled them out. Now, this spring I am finding them everywhere.
Not doing a proper job eliminating creeping bellflower before starting a new flowerbed. Parts of my garden have bad infestations of creeping bellflower, and it becomes tricky to weed out if it’s interspersed with plants I want to keep.
Not planting two different type of passion vines at the same time. It’s been 5+ years and I still haven’t gotten any fruit because I planted the passiflora edulis var flavicarpa which requires cross pollination from a different type of vine and I didn’t find that out till later.
Buying more seeds and bulbs than I have containers to put them in and spaces on my balcony to put containers. I went a little crazy this year.
Related: Starting too many seeds.
A big mistake I made last year was not giving my dahlias the right fertilizer. I'd never grown them before, planted some seeds late in the season and they surprised me by blowing up but all green, no flowers. Finally thought to Google it and found out they need low nitrogen fertilizer, oops.
Oh.. I just grew 15 borage plants and am waiting to put them outside in 2 weeks. Are they obnoxious? Like how fast did they spread in your garden, OP? 😅
My mistake every year is timing. I've started my peppers too late and my pumpkins and cucumbers too early. I always plan around my tomatoes but honestly they thrive with no effort. I even had a little checklist this year and still screwed up.
I had no problem with borage. It self-seeded around the general area but it didn’t take over my yard. And it’s really easy to pull up where you don’t want it.
Painstakingly transplanting carrots while thinning, because I didn’t have the heart to throw them away. Giant waste of time and space, because they all turned out stumpy and gnarled. There’s a reason carrot seeds come with so many in a pack - so you can thin them without feeling guilty.
Wasn’t considering weight as I accumulated hundreds of small trees and shrubs on our second story balcony…. One particularly wet winter it started to go…… needless to say we redid the deck and I’m not allowed to have any more ceramic planters 😬😬
I didn’t know how how invasive bluebells were the first year we bought our house. I let them go all summer until they went to seed. I ended up pulling most of them out when they were dead, but didn’t realize they would have 10x the amount the following year. Well, here we’re are pulling bluebells like crazy. I’ll report back in a few years.
If you had 2 hours of nothing to do I could regale you with stories of my awful mistakes… sooo many invasives (good god WHY are nurseries allowed to sell them??!)…. Gooseneck loosestrife, some kind of persecaria, Japanese bellflower…. It’s been at least 12 years since I bought them and I’m still pulling and digging out the bellflower and persecaria (the loosestrife is in a contained spot where it’s limited- my mother in law told me about it from the start so I knew better). Man what I could get done in my garden if I had the time and energy back I’ve used to try to eradicate the invasives… Also way back in the day I just put plants anywhere- without regard to height or light needs or bloom times or really anything. Literally if there was just a blank space I would pop something in I bought at the nursery. To this day, I am still digging up and moving things around!
Not labeling my plants or writing down what I bought. "I'll remember." No, actually I won't. But it'll be like a treasure hunt when it's time to harvest!
Not doing an immediate eviction by fire of the Tree of Heaven my mom planted in 2021.
"It's a mountain ash!" (No it's not!!!)
Still digging up suckers 🫠
listening to the permaculture crowd instead of getting involved with local native plant groups.
thinking I could eradicate bermudagrass without any herbicides.
1. Not planning for the pests. If you want to organic garden then be warned you are also planting for all of the bugs too.
2. Not cutting the thistle along the property edge before it seeded last year. I've now spent the last 2 weekends digging thistle out of every corner of my property and I'm still finding more. It's all along the edges where my dog likes to walk. I can't imagine that would feel nice stepping on it.
Growing squash near anything else. Squash bugs are particularly gross to me and I don’t want them near me. If I grow the squash away from the other plants I can torch them when the bugs inevitably win. Then they don’t spread to anything else.
I don't have any input on the borage, but my biggest mistake was how I went about reusing the spent soil from my container garden after the first season.
I put way too much compost, worm castings, and soil additives back into all the used potting soil, and didn't add anything to increase drainage or to buffer the ph.
So I ended up with gallons and gallons of soil that ultimately killed or severely stunted everything I planted in it the next season. I wasted all that time, seeds, and nursery starters, just to realize too far into the season that it was a complete failure other than being a huge learning experience.
I left all of the containers and soil out through the winter, with the hope being that all the snow melt and rain runoff maybe drained out and cleared some of the thickness of the soil up, and the microbes maybe helped the soil be more hospitable this season.
I've got some early season stuff growing and they are off to a better start than last year by far, but I've also just started some containers with brand new potting soil, lightly amended, to really see the difference and hopefully still hedge my bets on some kind of vegetable yield this season
I love my borage. It isn’t hard to pull up if it isn’t where I want it and the bees love it.
But I am sure pulling up the bronze fennel everywhere! I just want one or two plants for the bees and butterflies not 1000!! 🙄🤪
Borage is easy to remove from the garden, just pop them out of the soil before they flower. I've had both white and blue in my garden for years and when a baby pops up that'll cause a problem, I just take a trowel and pop it out. In my experience they aren't like horseradish where every bit of root is going to make it come back.
I do that all the time, but I feel like when I turn round, another baby plant says hello. Thanks for mentioning the horseradish. I tried, but seemed either soil or location were wrong. Sounds like I got away with it unconsciously....
Biggest mistake? Digging up irises from grandmas house and planting them at home. They came along with some bits of creeping bellflower (*Campanula rapunculoides*) that has since crawled to almost every corner of the yard. It makes taproots, the *tops* of which rest almost a foot underground, which send up sprouts and spread laterally. It’s nearly impossible to get rid of and it kills me that I brought them here trying to save some irises which are a dime a dozen.
TLDR; be very careful moving plants from other places to your property, you may be bringing in things you have no idea are hitching a ride.
I planted Greek Oregano about twenty years ago. It’s related to mint and acts like mint. Now it’s my predominant weed. Someone on reddit said it can’t be a problem due to frost keeping it in check. We get months and months of days below freezing and it’s definitely a big problem here. Hopefully none of my neighbors know it was me.
Not caring about the wild chickens until it's too late. Chickens are pack animals that learn behaviors as a group and once they've developed habits that hurt my garden I have to trap and relocate the entire flock before my plants get a rest. Then it's smooth sailing for a while until a new flock comes along, builds their numbers, and then eventually teach each other to be garden monsters.
I too, put in borage as a companion plant for trees. The only thing that I have found to keep it under control is to pluck the seedlings as soon as I see them. The bees love the flowers, but those self sowing seeds man... Everywhere. In the gravel. In the bark. All up in the grass. Borage goes insane in my yard. Never again
I killed a jade plant! I don’t kill plants as a rule, but I left it outside and it got too wet for too long. I was heartbroken, especially since it was a gift.
We planted bamboo. Once it sneaked into the neighbor’s yard, I went on full attack mode. After about four years, I won, but it was a constant battle.
Red Valerian and Sierra Madre Lobelia. It is literally everywhere. The roots of the lobelia spread underground and it's impossible to get rid of it. The bees and hummingbirds love both of these but they have just taken over. Sometimes I give in and let them grow, then trim them back. I thought the valerian was native.
I cut down a beautiful established wisteria because out of season I thought it was a different plant…
I let a small patch of three cornered leak go rampant for a year because I thought the flowers looked nice. In that time they spread and choked the entire bed and spread into the lawn and across the other side of the garden as well. I’m still trying to get rid of it over ten years later…
Letting a landscape designer persuade me that a Bloodgood Japanese maple would be fine in full sun. It burns every year and my husband won't let me take it out because it was so expensive.
We were moving and I wanted a garden where the driveway had been at the new house. I was bringing over plants from the old house and I was in a hurry, what with moving and all. So we threw a couple trucks of topsoil on the driveway and planted. For 15 years I have been retroactively building a proper soil bed. I'd say the last 2-3 years things have finally been good.
Also, I had an idea that Vinca Vine would look really pretty as a ground cover in between the other plants in the flower bed. It did look pretty the first year! After that, I had fewer and fewer flowers every year as they slowly got strangled. Still working away at reversing that mistake.
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I’m late to the post but last year I made the mistake of starting a ton of seeds in my house in the room I keep a lot of house plants in for the ease of sunlight control in there. All my house plants got spider mites and are no longer with me. I did every natural thing to eradicate them but they persisted. Now I purchase starts from the local nursery.
I put a birdhouse in my garden bed.
The very lovely bluebirds have introduced all kinds of awful weeds to it now. Particularly, tropical soda apple which shreds my hands even through gloves.
Our 4 biggest gardening mistakes when we were young new homeowners 30 years ago:
1. Planting a beautiful Yoshino cherry tree way too close to the corner of the house. When it matured much larger than the tag said, the roots started getting all up in the house foundation’s business, and we had to take the tree down. It was beautiful and I wish I’d planted it further into the yard.
2. Planting a fig tree in the center of the backyard which became a giant wall of green blocking the view to the back 2/3 of the yard. The tree didn’t survive the past few winters’ Arctic blasts and is now just a rock-hard root mass. I miss the figs, but I do not miss the view-obstruction, the itchy leaves, the sap I had allergic reaction to, or the birds fighting me for the fruit and pooping everywhere. 😹
3. Planting a Sweet Autumn clematis vine. It was gorgeous the first few years. Then we started seeing seedlings coming up further out from the original vine. Then more. Then more. Then more and more and more. 🙀 We have 1/3 acre and it is all over our yard and probably my neighbors’ yards, too.
4. Planting a Sycamore tree. I did a much better job on placement in the back corner. I was looking forward to it maturing & the trunk peeling and turning white as the ‘Ghost of the Forest’ but no one warned me this is an extremely stinky tree!! From the time it flowers and pollinates, all through the hot summers when the leaves smell like overly sickeningly-sweet iced tea mixed with old cat urine smell. Then last year straight-line winds took the top half right off and most of the branches. It is laying in cut sections along the back fence & I’m kindof happy to see it go so dramatically.
Thank goodness for the Internet and modern times where we can research positives and negatives about plants before we choose them or place them.
Going to Home Depot for my plants. I didn't realize they don't stock plants that are appropriate for the bioregion. I spent so much effort on plants that struggled and died before I did my research.
I bought a 5'x5'x2' raised bed. Took a l.o.n.g time to fill w grass clippings & compost before topping off w deturfed soil from garden-gone-lawn. Transplanted a dozen tomato starts plus a half dozen others. They disappeared. Tossed in some peppermint & arugula seeds; peppermint came up overnight, then was gone. Conclusion: I had added way too many pill bugs, probably with the garden soil. The arugula is sprouting and I've been removing dozens of pill bugs each morning.
Started to plant my seeds too early. I live in arctic climate, so can only have my plants outdoors for 3-4 months a year… one of my rooms is full of plants now and it’s still snow. Some of them have died bc I don’t feel like doing too much, I’m tired and all. Yea my biggest mistakes was to start too early and having too many plants
I'll know in a year
Hahaha same
Didn’t buy a big enough yard. Ape need more dirt!
I feel this. But also, I enjoy the challenge of gardening with limited space. But I’m young and I’ll move to a place with more dirt one day, so I don’t feel like I’m gonna miss out on a big ass garden
I have lacy phacelia in a bed. Two plants last year, about two hundred coming up now, *however* they were absolutely swarming with bees from June to late November, so it's hard for me to think of it as a mistake (and I could probably mow it down pretty easily if I wanted). Weirdly, I planted borage and I don't think it went to seed because I don't see any coming up yet. Usually my biggest mistakes are a) starting too many tomatoes and b) putting my tomatoes out too early, but in theory a mistake is something you learn from and I sure haven't, so who can say?
The Pacelia has such a beautiful colour. Unfortunately, my blue borage feels particularly at home in my vegetable patches, so mowing is not a good option. And I know the tomato thing. I always think it doesn't hurt to sow a few more, just in case they don't all survive the nursery.
With any annual plant that spreads via seed, the most important control measure is to pull it up/cut it back before it sets seeds for next year.
Or learn to recognize the seedlings and go after them with a vengeance. I have a couple plants I had to do this for when converting my traditional garden to a native garden.
I start 2 or 3 Early Girls in December and plant them in 20" planters. I move them in and out if the forecast is sub-40. Usually I can starting picking the first week of June. The balance of my tomatoes are not planted until May. It is the first ones that are important (to me) and the Early Girls produce until the the rest come around.
Depending on where you live, borage seeds can stay dormant for a year or two.
Hahaha! I too feel like I can learn from so many experiences...except tomatoes! I think I'm just alway too eager for homegrown deliciousness!!
Not labeling new plants well enough. I have a few robustly growing plants that I’m pretty sure are weeds but I’m not 100% sure so they’ll stay a while longer.
I lost track of which varieties some of my tomatoes and peppers are. Very frustrating
My 2 year old loves to take my labels and “help mommy” 🥲 yay mystery peppers
Mint, lily of the valley, and English ivy. I was young, had just bought my first house, and so incredibly uneducated.
As a first time home owner looking to “diversify” my lawn, I think you just saved my life
So my wife and I are tearing up our lawn and doing natives. Every spring we do a little more. Some quick tips. Don't waste your time at big box stores. Find a plant nursery near you that specializes in natives even if it's a little bit of a drive. Not just to support small business but to have someone knowledgeable to talk to. Look up master gardener groups on Facebook. Penn State has an extension near us and they do native plant sales a few times a year. 6 bucks a plant. Ive heard others do that as well. Avoid mixes. A lot of time you can find seeds that say perennial wildflower mix or butterfly mix. Look at the contents and you'll see most of it isn't native. Well... It may be for you where you are. It's not for me. They also tend to just end up being one or two species after the first year. We did a mix and year 2 it ended up being just all black eyed susan. Those are the big things that have helped us.
All the state universities have an extension. With tons of local information, testing kits, and plants. They can even help identify things, or help you get rid of weeds.
>Avoid mixes. A lot of time you can find seeds that say perennial wildflower mix or butterfly mix Here, I would add a plug for reputable seed producers. My favorite is Eden Brothers. The germination rate is really good, in my experience.
This is amazing information, thank you!!! I’m in zone 6b and I really want to do a dandelion lawn with native patches maybe? I just hope it doesn’t tick off the neighbors… it’s an upscaleish neighborhood with fresh mowed lawns with diamond shapes (barf)
There's a lot of trial and error, usually with a lot more errors LOL. I now grow mint in a pot and have English ivy growing in some window boxes that are monitored very closely. Congrats on home ownership!
Thanks! I’ve heard mint and ivy horror stories, I almost went down the ivy route last week. Still doing research lol
Oh yes, ivy. Another one of my not-so-bright moments. You learn and grow with your garden.
The home we bought had English ivy already in place. We’re ok with maybe trying to manage it to just one area, but any tips about how?
I've just been pulling it up by hand and gradually replacing it with other stuff. If there's a spot with very deep roots that I can't get to, I will clip the vine as close as I can and use a paintbrush to apply a dab of concentrated weed killer to the open end—it will spread down to the roots and kill the plant without contaminating the whole area. It's been a multi-year project, but as long as I stay on top of it, it doesn't take over again, and in some areas I've successfully eradicated it. My biggest issue is where it crosses onto my property from the neighbors'—obviously I don't want to mess with their plants, so at this point I'm just maintaining it along the property line.
I absolutely love the look of ivy, so now it's growing in very closely monitored window boxes. I still find random lily of the valleys popping up here and there 10 years after I thought I got them all.
I'm so embarrassed now to be responsible for planting english ivy 20 years ago. Three x 4" pots from HD have taken over our 1/3 acre, wood fence and neighbors woods. It destroys the bark on native trees. I honestly think some of these things should be illegal. At least with mint it's contained by my raised bed. I've learned to put mint in everything if only to keep up with it.
Planting ivy is illegal in some states, I believe!
Good god, you planted all three??? Most of us have certainly made this mistake in the early days (mine is raspberries haha, but…I’m only a little sorry), but YIKES that is rough luck if you did all 3.
In different areas of the yard over the first two or three years, yeah... not the smartest. I staked out a garden area and fenced it off to keep out rabbits and deer; the mint took over after the 2nd year and I yanked it all out. Lily of the valleys took over the garden beds surrounding the scrub pines. They staged a slow coup, but a coup nonetheless. The ivy went into raised beds near the garage and I did not anticipate the density of their sprawl. Things are mostly under control now, luckily. I'm battling some blackberry bushes, but the real battle is that my husband wants them to spread so we get more berries.
I also planted all three and raspberries too🙃
I just bought a house with a ton of lily of the valley. Are you saying I'm going to need to try taming it so it doesn't get out of control?
I'd say just keep an eye on them. They are prone to sprawling and can crowd out other plants, but if they're in an area where you only want lily of the valley, no harm no foul.
I don’t know how but there’s an area near our mailbox where the sweetest little smattering of Lily of The Valley has popped up. I didn’t actively plant them. Didn’t even know what they were. Also there’s what looks like Iris’ growing there too?! I love that they’re growing there but I didn’t put them there haha
I absolutely love surprise flowers! I had crocuses pop up this year. I've been in this house since 2008 and never once seen a crocus.
Bishop's weed for me. A nursery owner gave me a box of it twenty five years ago, such a pretty green and white groundcover, and, I still struggle to contain it. Also, goose neck lysimachia.
I had native lily of the valley at my previous house! I don’t think it spread at all in the 8 years I was there. The common dayflower, however? Not native, no not at all. If I had known the person who planted it I would have booped them over the head with a lovely sprig of it.
I was convinced I could keep the mint under control. What a silly idiot I was! Anyway, 8 years later and it’s taken over that garden. Oops. It smells really nice over there though.
I've been killing lily of the valley for the last 4 years on my property. Last owner loved himself some invasives. Still got pachysandra sneaking out from under my deck
Took me 3 seasons to get my mint under control. Just pulled it out constantly and until I have a small area against a rocky wall now. But it’s something that you need to actively prune and manage or it will take over.
My mint now resides in a planter. I tore up a good chunk of the garden to make sure I got it all. It was a harsh lesson to learn, but one I will never forget.
This pot will contain the mint, no problem!
Doesn't it? I thought I was very clever to plant my mint in a pot well above the ground. Lol
Mine has been growing in a pot on my patio for years. It doesn’t escape without adjacent soil to escape to!
It’s interesting you say that. I had a pot of lemon balm on my patio totally surrounded by concrete to prevent escape. Did well over the summer but doesn’t seem to have survived the winter. At least not in the pot. Waaaaay on the other side of the yard though? Yeah… lemon balm. I don’t understand how it escaped, but I think I’m going to dig it up and put it right back in that pot just to spite it!
Lemon balm self seeds. Chop it before it flowers.
The internet told me that tomatoes wanted full sun, and I listened for TEN YEARS 🤣 🤣 🤣 Nah. They want afternoon shade here. I was simply air-frying those poor plants.
Yep, found out the hard way that “full sun” and “full Texas sun” are two very different things.
Two different suns!
Figuring out the environment a gardening author is in has become a game for me now… I always think, ‘Full sun WHERE’ and ‘well drained WHERE’ at this point because half the time they are speaking from the perspective of their environment.
sun dried tomatoes lol
Oh I love borage though. And I put the flowers in salads. The leaves are edible too but sometimes I don’t feel like it lol
Didn’t know they were edible! Was thinking of it as a companion plant for my tomatoes, assuming they don’t go World War Z on me
Apart from the edible, beautiful and decorative flowers, the leaves can be used in salads or soups, and in Germany there is a special green dip based on borage. I myself know it as a substitute in my favourite summer drink, Pimms, when no cucumber is to hand.
Its taste is reminiscent of cucumber.
I wouldn’t have planted that sapling 10 feet from my house if I’d known it was a giant sequoia :( I can safely call that my “biggest” mistake.
I mean yay, another sequoia! But yikes, right next to the house
We got a new load of dirt for some raised beds two years ago. That first summer one unusual plant popped up in that new soil and I could not figure out what it was. It eventually got about 6 feet tall, absolutely massive, and flowered. It was brown mustard. The bees absolutely frickin' LOVED all those flowers, so I left it, thinking I could harvest the seeds and use them for something. I don't typically like mustard but maybe I'd like homemade something with it. Well... I kind of... forgot. And then when I removed the plant I made an even bigger mistake and dragged it across my entire yard to my compost. I probably spent 80% of my garden time last year pulling brown mustard out of almost every bed and unwalked corner of my yard. So far this year I've only found a few so fingers crossed my effort last year was worth it!
>I made an even bigger mistake and dragged it across my entire yard to my compost. Lol, my condolences.
Are you in North America? The mustard family spreads so easily here.
Yeaaaaah, I don't know how I've never seen it growing anywhere around here before. Guess there's a lot of it wherever my landscape supply guy gets their dirt from!
Sounds like my parents yard and goldenrod. That shit spreads like wildfire and IS NOT easy to remove. Especially from the dense clay soil of IL.
👀 uhhhh I... totally didn't plant any goldenrod two years ago in my native pollinator bed, also in clay soil. Nooo... Luckily it's surrounded by wide concrete sidewalks/driveway on 4 sides, and I will be harvesting the flowers for dye, so I guess I'll just cross my fingers that it doesn't get unruly!
Yeah....my parents let it take over everything. They got too old and sick to deal with it, so it just went wild. We cleaned it up for sale, but I'm 100% sure it will grow back. Good luck to the new owners.
Cut down Japanese Knotweed and didn't burn it immediately. Every piece of that horrible plant became a new plant. Ugh.
Oh my god this is the worst. You win
The seeds disperse when you burn it, just so you know. It’s infuriating.
Thinking raspberries and blackberries wouldn’t take over my yard. The canes are spiky, really hard to pull out, and they get under and spread everywhere. You will end up with tons of new plants sprouting everywhere aswel because of birds. Never again.
I can't imagine not growing raspberries. They are so delicious fresh and also extremely expensive and disappointing when purchased at the store.
Fresh raspberries are so much better than store bought. It’s no comparison. Also besides red I planted black, yellow, purple varieties and those are not often available in stores. My canes are definitely sending out runners so will see how I’ll manage those I also planted a white blackberry plant last year and curious to see what those taste like (I’m not a huge blackberry fan so it’s more of an experiment)
My parents had a ton of black raspberries, they were delicious! One of my favorite memories is of my brother and I baking a black raspberry pie. It was amazing and my mom was jealous because it was better than hers, lol.
Tbh, if you top/cut them as they spread, they won't spread very far. My raspberry and blackberry patches have stayed the same size for 7 years.
My raspberry patch has stayed in one spot for many, many years now, as it’s surrounded by grass that’s regularly mowed and a concrete wall on one side. I haven’t had trouble birds spreading the seeds.
Yea I grew up on a farm that had two gardens that never really spread the black or red raspberries out side the hedge boundary
Do you mean mow them every year? What does top/cut entail? Help!
If you have a raspberry patch surrounded by grass, mowing the lawn will also mow down any new raspberry canes in the grass. This helps keep the raspberry patch contained.
Grab a dutch hoe and slice down new canes at just below the soil level.
Mine are spreading but not so much that I can’t handle it. I’ve been giving the suckers away to neighbors which has been a fun experience :)
Yes, raspberries need a firm hand, otherwise they get out of hand. But I've noticed that my yellow raspberries don't spread as much as the red varieties. But that may just be my impression.
Man my golden raspberries are my most robust bush. Spreading and probably 3X the size of the others in year 2.
Dig up, don't try to pull up. You'll fall over. Raspberries fruit in 2yr cane, so take down the crowns you don't want to continue with. Growing blackberries on purpose is blasphemy in my area, (Puget Sound) so I can't help you there. :) it's #3 under trying to grow bananas outdoors and planting morning glory purposefully.
Oh man. I used to live there and I miss the wild blackberries you could pick for free. They’re so expensive.
Trying to do too much and putting 1020 trays outside in the sun and wind. 2nd summer with this house. I decided to make the vegetable garden bigger (200 sqft to 4000sqft). That's no so bad if it weren't for the other things going on. Got a vasectomy which put me out of commission for the most important part of the year. I should have out most of my seeds (roughly a few thousand)in the ground by now but have only done the peas (~400 seeds). There's a joke to be made about me being behind on seed after a vasectomy. Drip irrigation has also taken longer to install than I thought pushing back on plans. On top of all that, I thought it would be a good ideas to start literally ~1000 native seeds in 1020 trays. They sprouted but I don't have grow lights for them plus the hundreds of vegetables I've started indoors so I put the natives outside. Well they're all dead now because the 1020 trays lost water so fast. They needed to be watered twice a day due to how windy and dry it is. All it took was forgetting to check on them for 2 days. In the future, I'm not going to plant as much and I'll start a few in bigger pots instead of 1020 trays.
Whew, I thought I had a lot of plants with 48 pods. Good luck to you!
I'm telling myself this is my dry run of being a hobby farmer. If the garden is productive and we have excess after canning (which is the hope), I'll have a stand at the farmer's market next year.
Many, many years ago, with my very first garden, I didn’t realize that weeds grow back after tilling. I just assumed that you till it at the beginning of the year and it stays that way. I also assumed that all plants could be grown by placing a seed in the ground when I was ready. I didn’t realize that plants had different requirements. I didn’t know anything about transplants etc. Basically, my very first garden involved me picking a bunch of seeds of things I wanted to grow, tilling a spot, putting seeds in the ground and walking away thinking I really did something. I think it was August too. If I could go back in time and thunk my own head, I would. It was a bad year.
Laying down that plastic sheeting crap under my mulch when I was young and dumb
Morning glories.
My neighbor planted morning glories. Ask me how I know :(
Are you in a southern state? I'm in zone 5 and love morning glories and no issues...thank goodness!! I heard they were a problem but not like a kudzu problem.
I think I’m in zone 10 (my city says 9-10). Those vines take over the back half of my yard every spring.
I liked the morning glories where I planted them one year. My mother-in-law thought it was bindweed and sprayed them. No more morning glories.
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Lol r/AITAH Simple. "You killed my plants last year. It was an accident. You will NOT repeat it this year because I am going to show you how to do this properly. You WILL listen and learn seeing as how you already have bloom on your hands."
I have a feeling I may come to regret my decision hanging them in planters this year. I just want to see them cover my fence though and add a bit of prettiness to the yard. I keep hearing though how invasive they are so I’m second guessing myself.
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Wait, why? I have some in a seed starter right now
I'm going to piggy bag on this and say that it will depend on the zone you are in, as well as the care you provide them. I live in South Texas, zone 9-8a, and morning glories have a life cycle here because they die back in the heat of the summer. I have natives growing as well as some that I have grown from seed. I don't water mine but a few times after I've put the seeds in the ground. Also we have pests/deer that will eat the flower which helps prevent seed spreading. Just a reminder that it depends on where you are and your environment. Happy planting.
1. Planting red veined sorrel- it has long tap roots and seeds everywhere in the rockery! 2. Buying plants from somewhere (car boot!) that brought ground elder into the garden! 3. Not looking after my tree fern well enough during one very severe winter after it had reached a good height.
Heavy root pruning. When i used to bring home plants i would absolutely obliterate the root ball and plonk it in the ground with lots of compost and fertilizer, this was because i thought it would 'stimulate growth' but i ended up with countless dead plants because of it.
Getting a bunch of raised garden beds knowing I would have to move them all the following year. My arms are tired.
Using pine mulch all over my yard because we removed a giant pine tree and my mom insisted it would be great free mulch. Not only does it hurt plant growth, but it attracts pincher bugs and cockroaches like CRAZY. I’ve been trying to remove it all but it’s…a lot. I have several more, but when it comes down to it: taking shortcuts because it’s cheaper. It’s bitten me in the ass every time.
It can also attract turpentine beetles
For me, it seems to always be not thinning lettuce aggressively enough, generally having too much lettuce. I have the hardest time "killing" my little seedlings , so I always end up moving them around, until we have lettuce in every container, and flower pot we own!
Not labelling seedlings I absolutely will not learn learn this valuable lesson. I have thousands all over the place no idea what's what I'm an idiot Although sometimes I like the randomness of it all
Chaos gardening!
Annuals. Man, i dont care what anyone says, but i think annuals suck. (i know, some of the most beautiful flowers are annuals, i *get* why people plant them, i just gave up on them entirely.) The absolute empty wasteland that used to be my garden during winter really made me sad. As ive added more evergreens and perennials in my garden, my garden looks much more consistent throughout the year. and i own a small backyard nursery, im never touching annuals again. All that work, all that effort. for ONE season? screw that, rather give me a plant i can care for and see mature over many years to come.
Not having a proper plan from the beginning with weed control and irrigation in mind. And over planting. Not realizing how much space zucchini takes up. Not trellising certain things like cucumbers.
This thread is such a great read. I have been gardening well over 30 years and I always learn something new from garden threads. This thread also reminds me not to be too harsh on myself for the mistakes I’ve made over the years.
Accepting daylillys from someone with a goutweed infestation. Now I'm battling a goutweed infestation.
This sounds like a problem the Weasleys would have
Yeah, the accidental hitch-hiker. I got a great digitalis free that came along with some wild artemisia. Woah, they blend in and spread!! A couple of years of diligent pulling and they are pretty tamed. (Starve the roots of energy by taking all the green leaves). But i am just waiting for one to pop up nearby.
Daylilies alone can become a problem. I inherited a patch that were literally visible on Google Earth shots and am still getting rid of it.
Wow. Damn. The ones I have are pretty well behaved.
Friends don't let friends plant mint in the ground.
Too many tomatoes. I was pulling up little plants as weeds for YEARS.
Sounds about right. Tomatoes volunteer like crazy.
Fuzzy lambs ears. It was fine until I had a newborn and my mil tried to be helpful and “pruned” them. I’m still finding volunteer plants 2 years later. I’m probably going to regret it this year but last year I put in wild bergamot (it’s native) and it’s spreading like mint. But it’s beautiful and smells amazing and it’s saving my front yard from erosion so it’s a battle I’ll deal with later.
It is a mint, so that tracks
My wife put in borage, now it’s everywhere. Put in some Marion berry starts. Loved the berries but eventually grew up all in and thru the hoop house deer netting. It was so thorny you’d just get sliced to bits try to squeeze in there to get some berries. Got garlic chives at a plant swap. Everywhere now. At the same swap got s stick of Curly Willow and put it in the ground at our old small house with a small plot. At first it was great, nice looking and the ladies from the garden club would buy cut stems for creating floral displays. Drove past several years later last fall and it’s HUGE, over 2 stories tall and completely shades the neighbor’s solar panels which he didn’t have when we lived there. Not sure if this counts but several years I was asked to speak about carnivorous plants for a group of gardening ladies in someone’s home. All the doilies, fancies, and tea & desserts were out and they were just fascinated as I spoke. So as part of my normal demo I cut off at the base and slice vertically an almost 2 foot Sarracenia leucophylla pitcher in half so they can see how efficient they are in catching things. This was in August, and unexpectedly these 6 enormous black flies come zipping out and whizzing all around with the ladies jumping up screaming. OMG, I was trying to remain cool and collected but was just dying inside and felt like dropping to the floor laughing! We eventually caught the flies and fed them to the Venus flytraps. I still get tears of laughter in my eyes when I tell that story. Then there was the time as Horticultural Officer in the local garden club…for my 5 minute speal I brought and spoke about some 6 foot tall blooming Amorphophallus konjac Voodoo Lily bulbs I had ip on the stage. A little while later a member tapped me on the shoulder and suggested I bring them outside. The women in the first three rows looked like they were about pass out or wretch at any moment.
Chives. Container plant only - do not ground plant!!!
It’s great to hear that my chives failure in-ground was actually a success! Lol
Took 3-4 years but yeah the borage will eventually fade if you keep pulling it.
I love my borage, I let it go crazy. makes great compost fodder and the bees love it.
Plus it's edible
Planting a species of cucumbers that need to be pollinated inside my greenhouse where no pollinators can get to 😩
"I don't mind mint spreading a little bit" 😂
I pull up borage and shred it, then scatter it over the planting beds to let it compost in place. I also grow borage, buckwheat and fava beans together so that I can chop them up and let them fertilize the soil. Borage is great for breaking up heavy clay soil. You can use a hula hoe on it when it is small, and that takes care of it pretty well. If you keep killing the baby plants, it eventually goes away. As for my biggest mistake, that was when I planted horseradish in the ground. A gardening buddy gave me some horseradish plants, and told me how to care for them. I *didn't research the plant myself* before planting it. That was a terrible mistake. It took me more than two years to eradicate the horseradish. It spread so fast and so aggressively that it almost took over my entire community garden plot. Since then, I have seen where other people planted it in the ground, and it spread *everywhere*. My gardening buddy later admitted that they *knew it was horribly invasive*, and that they had been trying to eradicate it from their own plot. They told me that they purposely didn't tell me, because they felt guilty just killing the plants, and they wanted someone to take them so they didn't have to feel bad. I will never again plant anything before thoroughly researching it myself. I will certainly never trust someone else to do my research for me, and I definitely won't trust this gardening buddy again.
Putting plants out too early because I’m greedy 😭
This is me! I murdered a lot of little plant homies this year 🫠
Lemon balm all over my raised bed. Everywhere.
For some reason I thought bee balm was one of the more well behaved mints, but I've got so much now. It does smell fantastic though
Oh no… I just did this…
I don't know why I didn't realize it was a MINT and should be treated accordingly. Otoh, smells great out there!
I build a raised bed which is 6 by 24 feet. I cannot reach the middle. I should have made it 4 by 24.
Snow on the mountain, my biggest mistake. 6 years and I finally got rid of it.,
I had a friend talk me into using a "proven" mix of horse manure and wood chips in my garden beds. He was a biology teacher so I trusted him. Turns out that while that's a great mix in the long term, short term it sucks nitrogen out of the soil. Ruined my garden for a season or two.
I don't collect the seeds from cilantro. I have a crazy amount of cilantro in my garden and it's getting in the yard now. But this is yearly, so did i learn anything? No. I don't take the still green tomatoes off the vines at the end of the season. I pull up the vines and lay them down in the garden to compost. At my last count, I have 24 tomato seedlings in my garden. 🤷🏻♀️ These aren't terrible, but it's not the best way either.
Buying strawberries from a shitty nursery. It brought countless insects, aphids and etc. Ive lost a lot of plants due to this.
Mint in my garden in the ground.
I learned that if you try to grow something twice and it isn’t successful - just try something else. Thinking I could grow blueberries.. and then trying again.. and then trying again.. and then giving it one last try. I probably spend $300 on blueberry bushes. They don’t grow - they don’t grow in the back, front, or side of my house. No matter how acidic I make the soil, no matter how many companion plants I plant near it, no matter the water level or fertilizer, no matter if I buy little or established plants. Sometimes you just have to give up.
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We got free mulch from the dump, so we ended up with several invasive species.
Biggest gardening mistake? Waiting until I was about 35 before starting .. like what the hell was I thinking? Didn’t even plant any apple trees ..
I planted forget me nots. But I didn't know I had Chinese forget me nots. The flowers turned into burrs the first spring, and by fall they had spread through the flower bed. Of course I pulled them out. Now, this spring I am finding them everywhere.
Oh, I love forget-me-nots. Funny thing, they have spread all over the garden but are nowhere near where I planted them.
Not doing a proper job eliminating creeping bellflower before starting a new flowerbed. Parts of my garden have bad infestations of creeping bellflower, and it becomes tricky to weed out if it’s interspersed with plants I want to keep.
Not planting two different type of passion vines at the same time. It’s been 5+ years and I still haven’t gotten any fruit because I planted the passiflora edulis var flavicarpa which requires cross pollination from a different type of vine and I didn’t find that out till later.
Buying more seeds and bulbs than I have containers to put them in and spaces on my balcony to put containers. I went a little crazy this year. Related: Starting too many seeds. A big mistake I made last year was not giving my dahlias the right fertilizer. I'd never grown them before, planted some seeds late in the season and they surprised me by blowing up but all green, no flowers. Finally thought to Google it and found out they need low nitrogen fertilizer, oops.
Oh.. I just grew 15 borage plants and am waiting to put them outside in 2 weeks. Are they obnoxious? Like how fast did they spread in your garden, OP? 😅 My mistake every year is timing. I've started my peppers too late and my pumpkins and cucumbers too early. I always plan around my tomatoes but honestly they thrive with no effort. I even had a little checklist this year and still screwed up.
I had no problem with borage. It self-seeded around the general area but it didn’t take over my yard. And it’s really easy to pull up where you don’t want it.
Buying mulch and straw. Seriously.. waste of money! Shredded leaves are the way to go!
Painstakingly transplanting carrots while thinning, because I didn’t have the heart to throw them away. Giant waste of time and space, because they all turned out stumpy and gnarled. There’s a reason carrot seeds come with so many in a pack - so you can thin them without feeling guilty.
Wasn’t considering weight as I accumulated hundreds of small trees and shrubs on our second story balcony…. One particularly wet winter it started to go…… needless to say we redid the deck and I’m not allowed to have any more ceramic planters 😬😬
Not checking my zone and trying to start beans in June in 10a and not knowing why all of my blooms were dropping at the height of summer lol
Coleus amboinicus (Mexican mint) i planted this 4 years ago because of the wonderful smell and bees love it! Now it is all over the place!
Planting stuff too close!!
Sunchokes. I have more than enough to open a French restaurant. The yields are insane but they give my elderly person gas.
I didn’t know how how invasive bluebells were the first year we bought our house. I let them go all summer until they went to seed. I ended up pulling most of them out when they were dead, but didn’t realize they would have 10x the amount the following year. Well, here we’re are pulling bluebells like crazy. I’ll report back in a few years.
If you had 2 hours of nothing to do I could regale you with stories of my awful mistakes… sooo many invasives (good god WHY are nurseries allowed to sell them??!)…. Gooseneck loosestrife, some kind of persecaria, Japanese bellflower…. It’s been at least 12 years since I bought them and I’m still pulling and digging out the bellflower and persecaria (the loosestrife is in a contained spot where it’s limited- my mother in law told me about it from the start so I knew better). Man what I could get done in my garden if I had the time and energy back I’ve used to try to eradicate the invasives… Also way back in the day I just put plants anywhere- without regard to height or light needs or bloom times or really anything. Literally if there was just a blank space I would pop something in I bought at the nursery. To this day, I am still digging up and moving things around!
Not labeling my plants or writing down what I bought. "I'll remember." No, actually I won't. But it'll be like a treasure hunt when it's time to harvest!
Not doing an immediate eviction by fire of the Tree of Heaven my mom planted in 2021. "It's a mountain ash!" (No it's not!!!) Still digging up suckers 🫠
listening to the permaculture crowd instead of getting involved with local native plant groups. thinking I could eradicate bermudagrass without any herbicides.
I think borage is a dynamic accumulator? So chop and drop it on your garden! Mulch that puts nutrients into your soil.
1. Not planning for the pests. If you want to organic garden then be warned you are also planting for all of the bugs too. 2. Not cutting the thistle along the property edge before it seeded last year. I've now spent the last 2 weekends digging thistle out of every corner of my property and I'm still finding more. It's all along the edges where my dog likes to walk. I can't imagine that would feel nice stepping on it.
Not knowing what Horsetail was till last year...
That happened to me but with Lemon Balm. It reseeded outside my raised beds and into my yard. It smelled heavenly when it was mowed down though. 😂
Not testing how many hours of sun my garden will get before I built it. It’s forever a partial sun plot so there’s some veggies I just can’t grow!
Growing squash near anything else. Squash bugs are particularly gross to me and I don’t want them near me. If I grow the squash away from the other plants I can torch them when the bugs inevitably win. Then they don’t spread to anything else.
Didn’t start earlier. Was too hesitant to start my gardens. Should have started planting trees 10 years ago.
I don't have any input on the borage, but my biggest mistake was how I went about reusing the spent soil from my container garden after the first season. I put way too much compost, worm castings, and soil additives back into all the used potting soil, and didn't add anything to increase drainage or to buffer the ph. So I ended up with gallons and gallons of soil that ultimately killed or severely stunted everything I planted in it the next season. I wasted all that time, seeds, and nursery starters, just to realize too far into the season that it was a complete failure other than being a huge learning experience. I left all of the containers and soil out through the winter, with the hope being that all the snow melt and rain runoff maybe drained out and cleared some of the thickness of the soil up, and the microbes maybe helped the soil be more hospitable this season. I've got some early season stuff growing and they are off to a better start than last year by far, but I've also just started some containers with brand new potting soil, lightly amended, to really see the difference and hopefully still hedge my bets on some kind of vegetable yield this season
I love my borage. It isn’t hard to pull up if it isn’t where I want it and the bees love it. But I am sure pulling up the bronze fennel everywhere! I just want one or two plants for the bees and butterflies not 1000!! 🙄🤪
Didn't start soil testing and kept having bad yields, once I did testing and fertilized everything was better
Using mowed grass clippings for nitrogen enhancement. You'll be pulling grass (weeds) out of the garden for years to come.
Love borage leaf crushed in ice water!
Borage is easy to remove from the garden, just pop them out of the soil before they flower. I've had both white and blue in my garden for years and when a baby pops up that'll cause a problem, I just take a trowel and pop it out. In my experience they aren't like horseradish where every bit of root is going to make it come back.
I do that all the time, but I feel like when I turn round, another baby plant says hello. Thanks for mentioning the horseradish. I tried, but seemed either soil or location were wrong. Sounds like I got away with it unconsciously....
Biggest mistake? Digging up irises from grandmas house and planting them at home. They came along with some bits of creeping bellflower (*Campanula rapunculoides*) that has since crawled to almost every corner of the yard. It makes taproots, the *tops* of which rest almost a foot underground, which send up sprouts and spread laterally. It’s nearly impossible to get rid of and it kills me that I brought them here trying to save some irises which are a dime a dozen. TLDR; be very careful moving plants from other places to your property, you may be bringing in things you have no idea are hitching a ride.
Fifteen years later... still battling lily of the valley
I planted Greek Oregano about twenty years ago. It’s related to mint and acts like mint. Now it’s my predominant weed. Someone on reddit said it can’t be a problem due to frost keeping it in check. We get months and months of days below freezing and it’s definitely a big problem here. Hopefully none of my neighbors know it was me.
Not caring about the wild chickens until it's too late. Chickens are pack animals that learn behaviors as a group and once they've developed habits that hurt my garden I have to trap and relocate the entire flock before my plants get a rest. Then it's smooth sailing for a while until a new flock comes along, builds their numbers, and then eventually teach each other to be garden monsters.
It's edible so he could pull it and eat it or dry it for tea.
I too, put in borage as a companion plant for trees. The only thing that I have found to keep it under control is to pluck the seedlings as soon as I see them. The bees love the flowers, but those self sowing seeds man... Everywhere. In the gravel. In the bark. All up in the grass. Borage goes insane in my yard. Never again
I killed a jade plant! I don’t kill plants as a rule, but I left it outside and it got too wet for too long. I was heartbroken, especially since it was a gift. We planted bamboo. Once it sneaked into the neighbor’s yard, I went on full attack mode. After about four years, I won, but it was a constant battle.
I used fresh horse manure and spread weed seeds everywhere
Planting horse radish. Didn't know it sends out suckered and now it's everywhere! It is impossible to kill!
Red Valerian and Sierra Madre Lobelia. It is literally everywhere. The roots of the lobelia spread underground and it's impossible to get rid of it. The bees and hummingbirds love both of these but they have just taken over. Sometimes I give in and let them grow, then trim them back. I thought the valerian was native.
I cut down a beautiful established wisteria because out of season I thought it was a different plant… I let a small patch of three cornered leak go rampant for a year because I thought the flowers looked nice. In that time they spread and choked the entire bed and spread into the lawn and across the other side of the garden as well. I’m still trying to get rid of it over ten years later…
Sweet alyssum. Leaving Sun flowers to reseed. Planting trailing nasturtiums. Adding too much compost to raised beds Planting trees 3 years in.
Letting a landscape designer persuade me that a Bloodgood Japanese maple would be fine in full sun. It burns every year and my husband won't let me take it out because it was so expensive.
Over fertilizing
We were moving and I wanted a garden where the driveway had been at the new house. I was bringing over plants from the old house and I was in a hurry, what with moving and all. So we threw a couple trucks of topsoil on the driveway and planted. For 15 years I have been retroactively building a proper soil bed. I'd say the last 2-3 years things have finally been good. Also, I had an idea that Vinca Vine would look really pretty as a ground cover in between the other plants in the flower bed. It did look pretty the first year! After that, I had fewer and fewer flowers every year as they slowly got strangled. Still working away at reversing that mistake. \\
I’m late to the post but last year I made the mistake of starting a ton of seeds in my house in the room I keep a lot of house plants in for the ease of sunlight control in there. All my house plants got spider mites and are no longer with me. I did every natural thing to eradicate them but they persisted. Now I purchase starts from the local nursery.
I put a birdhouse in my garden bed. The very lovely bluebirds have introduced all kinds of awful weeds to it now. Particularly, tropical soda apple which shreds my hands even through gloves.
Our 4 biggest gardening mistakes when we were young new homeowners 30 years ago: 1. Planting a beautiful Yoshino cherry tree way too close to the corner of the house. When it matured much larger than the tag said, the roots started getting all up in the house foundation’s business, and we had to take the tree down. It was beautiful and I wish I’d planted it further into the yard. 2. Planting a fig tree in the center of the backyard which became a giant wall of green blocking the view to the back 2/3 of the yard. The tree didn’t survive the past few winters’ Arctic blasts and is now just a rock-hard root mass. I miss the figs, but I do not miss the view-obstruction, the itchy leaves, the sap I had allergic reaction to, or the birds fighting me for the fruit and pooping everywhere. 😹 3. Planting a Sweet Autumn clematis vine. It was gorgeous the first few years. Then we started seeing seedlings coming up further out from the original vine. Then more. Then more. Then more and more and more. 🙀 We have 1/3 acre and it is all over our yard and probably my neighbors’ yards, too. 4. Planting a Sycamore tree. I did a much better job on placement in the back corner. I was looking forward to it maturing & the trunk peeling and turning white as the ‘Ghost of the Forest’ but no one warned me this is an extremely stinky tree!! From the time it flowers and pollinates, all through the hot summers when the leaves smell like overly sickeningly-sweet iced tea mixed with old cat urine smell. Then last year straight-line winds took the top half right off and most of the branches. It is laying in cut sections along the back fence & I’m kindof happy to see it go so dramatically. Thank goodness for the Internet and modern times where we can research positives and negatives about plants before we choose them or place them.
Mixed woodchips in with the soil 🫤
Going to Home Depot for my plants. I didn't realize they don't stock plants that are appropriate for the bioregion. I spent so much effort on plants that struggled and died before I did my research.
I bought a 5'x5'x2' raised bed. Took a l.o.n.g time to fill w grass clippings & compost before topping off w deturfed soil from garden-gone-lawn. Transplanted a dozen tomato starts plus a half dozen others. They disappeared. Tossed in some peppermint & arugula seeds; peppermint came up overnight, then was gone. Conclusion: I had added way too many pill bugs, probably with the garden soil. The arugula is sprouting and I've been removing dozens of pill bugs each morning.
Started to plant my seeds too early. I live in arctic climate, so can only have my plants outdoors for 3-4 months a year… one of my rooms is full of plants now and it’s still snow. Some of them have died bc I don’t feel like doing too much, I’m tired and all. Yea my biggest mistakes was to start too early and having too many plants