My First Garden Let Down

I was so excited to have my first garden this year. We sectioned off a 30×30 piece of the property. We put in posts and lined it with fencing. I had bought a rototiller and started my seeds.

I was so excited to have my plants grow and I was looking forward to harvesting all the homegrown produce! My seedlings were growing and they were doing awesome. They were getting taller and I would bring them outside every warm sunny day we had.

I was being such a responsible gardener, or so I thought. Every morning I would wait for the weather to warm up, bring my plants outside and set them on a picnic table. At night I brought the plants back inside and watered them. My plants were getting taller and taller every day. I would get so excited every night to see how big the plants were getting.

This is were it started to go down hill. The weather was really crappy here and it was raining almost daily. The temperatures weren’t getting very high and my poor plants were stuck inside. I don’t have warming pads or heating lamps. So, my plants weren’t getting the necessary sunlight and turns out I was over watering them too. A few times I forgot to bring them in the house before my son’s baseball and it was too cold for them. My poor babies started to wilt. The leaves were turning brown and they were falling over.

I stopped watering them and only put them outside on days when I knew it was going to be at least in the 50’s. My tomatoes are completely dead and I am going to have to buy plants in order to have any to harvest.

However, the silver lining is that the plants that weren’t growing before started to come alive. I now have small pepper plants, basil and lavender.

Here are what some of my living plants look like:

This process has taught me a lot and I know what I will do differently next year. I am not giving up! I still have a lot of seeds and some of my dying plants I will try again.

Are you having any trouble this year growing plants? What have you had success with and what haven’t you?