Gardening Disaster Stories
If you missed the article yesterday, I shared my personal favorite gardening disaster story, involving 26 muskmelons and a bunch of rascally raccoons. Read it at http://www.roanoke.com/columnists/hager/wb/312663.
Here’s another story of mine that comes from early in my gardening years, when I came across caterpillars devouring my parsley plants in my herb garden. I had made a butterfly garden in one part of my yard, and enjoyed it thoroughly, but like many new gardeners, had neglected to provide food for the caterpillars.
Spotting them on my parsley plants, I quickly reasoned that Kroger sells parsley, but not butterflies, so happily let them munch their way through my parsley. But, I thought, why not be proactive next year and give them food in the area I want them?
Great idea, bad execution.
I bought a packet of parsley seeds and broadcast seeds all over the bare spots of the butterfly garden, then patted myself on the back for taking care of the butterflies in all stages of their life.
What I didn’t realize is that the birds were going to eat up all that seed, which then came back to ground to plant itself, with the addition of fertilizer, if you get my drift. All over my back yard. And my front yard. And my side yard. And the neighbor’s yard…..Hundreds of parsley plants volunteering absolutely everywhere.
My first reaction was horror. My second was to remember that, although parsley is a biennial, it doesn’t overwinter in the part of Ohio that I lived in, so this was a very temporary problem.
I decided to accept the parsley, enjoy having enough for both the caterpillars and myself, and point out to my neighbors that they got an edible without doing any work. My neighbors were good sports and it didn’t hurt that the best view of the butterfly garden, and all the visiting butterflies, was actually from their property.
And, I learned that planting parsley in your butterfly garden is a good idea, but you should start plants indoors and put transplants in the garden, not broadcast an entire packet of seed.
So, what are your gardening disaster stories? I know you have them! Share them and I may use yours in a future gardening article.
August 12, 2012 - 2:11 PM
Alright, best gardening disaster ever, let’s do this…
So once god was working overtime thinking about the best possible way to get a future that involved terminators and video games, the mid 90s, etc. Long story short, earth. He got the basics out of the way and even made a few humans, but earth was still all minecraft and so he told them, “Look, stay in the gated community, everything will be fine, sit on you hands or whatever, but don’t screw with the apple tree. It symbolizes all sorts of stuff you don’t need to worry about in your patio garden existence. I have to go finish making everything and fight Zeus and Odin and other summarian gods and stuff.” Which is really kind of a set up if you think about it, I mean, “Eat anything, even the talking animals like Derek the lion, who is being totally cool to you because of the community guidelines of this garden, but don’t eat the Apples, they taste like forbidden knowledge.” point is you’re going to eat the apples and god probably had a pretty good idea about this but I’m sure some 8th dimensional elder god was threatening existence or whatever and he got sided tracked.
So, to summarize, Adam & Eve, worst garden diaster ever.
Did I make the cut?