The experts will answer soon but in my opinion, peas are sensitive to temperature and you have to plant them at the right time. In some climates they are hard. I would say insects or mites are the reason you can't grow squash and also cucumbers.

Thank you, Helen. That would make sense as even transplants seem to suddenly die. And I know I have problems with squash bugs.

I was doing some reading online and learned that spinach, lettuce and okra, three of my best performers, like or at least can tolerate soil that is more alkaline than what most other vegetables can. So that may be part of the issue too.

I called the OSU extension office today regarding soil samples. Next stop - craigslist to see if I can get any composted manure for free!

How many trys are you basing this on. Cucumber transplants are easily beaten up by wind and hot sun if they come from a sheltered area. Usually I can grow cucumbers but sometimes the squash bugs move there after they kill the squash. Squash is just too much trouble for me. If I liked it better I would go to greater lengths to grow it. I like yellow crook neck but I bread it and fry it, I might as well have French fried potatoes which are equally greasy but easy to grow.

If you are planting peas directly into the ground, the seed may be rotting. "Peas will grow in cold soil, but don't germinate well in cold soil," said Kip on Victory Garden a few years ago as he transplanted his 2-3 week old snap-pea seedlings into the ground. I've done that ever since and now get great pea harvest. You can search this site and bring up past discussion on the details. And Dawn has given some good info on carrots, the "Diva" of the garden.
My first thought was pH. If your potatoes have scab, that is an indication that your soil is too alkaline. But the only way to know for sure exactly where it falls on the pH scale is to get a soil test.

I agree with Dorothy that the soil test will be the best indicator of what's going on in your garden.

With peas, you didn't mention if you are growing shelling peas to eat as green peas or edible podded peas. Shelling peas don't produce that well for me here and I don't bother growing them. Usually, by the time they are starting to produce well, they are burning up in the heat. Edible podded peas produce great some year and not so great in other years, and it is all about the weather. Often, our springtime weather does not stay cool enough long enough for peas to produce much. In those years when the spring weather see saws from hot to cold and back again, the peas don't know what to do. They don't sprout well in cold soil, but they grow well in cold soil and cool air temperatures if you can get them to sprout.
I start them inside like Dorothy does and have much more success from edible podded peas like Sugar Snap and Super Sugar Snap than with green shelling peas. I try to get my peas in the ground in March and mostly harvest them in May, though in some years with a longer, cooler spring, they've produced well into mid-June or even later. Usually, though, as soon as June heats up they give up and I yank them out and replace them with summer peas (cowpeas, crowders, purplehulls, black-eyed, zipper or lady peas).

I'm not sure why Swiss chard and kale aren't doing well for you. They both are pretty easy here, and I do have fairly alkaline soil and water. It might be the timing of your plantings.

Cukes and squash both suffer from many pests and many diseases. It can take a while to find varieties with flavor you like that also resist disease and pests. Growing them under floating row covers helps, although (unless you plant gynoecious varieties) you will have to lift the row covers and hand pollinate them.

Because I have virtually unlimited space, I normally don't use row covers on any of the cucurbit family veggies. I just regularly sow seeds for succession plants so that I always have new plants coming along in case disease and pests get the current plants. 2013 was a great cucurbit year here because we didn't have cucumber beetles. I think I saw 3 or 4 the whole summer. Some years, I see 3 or 4 per cucumber or squash flower.

Usually, when you are getting hit-and-miss results in a garden, that's fairly normal. Everything we grow has specific conditions they like and in which they thrive. Not every plant type will be happy in the same year.

As for carrots......it is all about the soil temperature. In order to have them growing when the soil and air temperatures are best for them, we have to try to get them to sprout in soil that really is too cold for good germination. Sometimes you can get around that by putting black plastic over your soil to pre-warm it so you can get the carrots off to a good start.

I can fuss over soil preparation and seed-sowing and get a poor stand of carrots, which just really ticks me off......and I can take leftover carrot seeds, toss them into the beds underneath the tomato plants (before the plants are mulched) and the carrots will come up everywhere in the tomato beds and serve as a living mulch. I think they do it just to show me that they are the boss and will grow when they want where they want no matter what I want.

It might not be that there is any glaring deficiency in your soil, but you won't know without a soil test. It could be the soil holds too much moisture and drains too slowly or it does the opposite--holds too little moisture and drains too quickly. It could be there is something in your soil eating seeds before they sprout, or just after they do. It could be that you need to tweak the timing of your plantings. With our erratic spring weather, sometimes it is hard to get the seeds in the soil at the best time for them.

I had trouble getting beans to grow for a couple of years. after having grown them successfully for many years.They'd sprout and disappear, so I knew something was eating the bean sprouts. Eventually I caught one of our cats eating bean sprouts, and then another two cats doing the same thing. So, now I cover freshly seeded bean rows with row covers so the cats cannot eat the freshly sprouted beans. Being cats, they think the row covers are cat blankets and like to lay on top of them....thereby crushing the young bean plants. Sometimes the problems you encounter with a type of plant in a garden are oddball things like that. A couple of years ago I blocked the cat gate into the garden with a piece of plywood so that they could not go into the garden unless I am in there with the main gate open. That seemed to put a halt to the cats dining on bean sprouts because they behave better when I'm out there with them. The downside is that since the cats aren't always in the garden, more field mice and voles are in there and that attracts snakes. Sometimes you just can't win.

Thank you Dawn for your well thought out and informative as always post! I have been trying to grow the edible podded peas but have not tried starting them inside, so will do that this year. I picked up a package of Sugar Snap yesterday at Home Depot.

I'll keep trying the kale and swiss chard. It could be partly timing - they do seem less able to handle the cold than spinach, which seems to actually thrive in the snow lol!

Dorothy, that was interesting what you said about potatoes having scab - my potatoes have a lot of scab. Another indication that I have alkaline soil. Well, I should know a lot more soon. I wonder how long it takes to get a soil test back.

Shelley,

You're welcome.

Swiss Chard is an odd duck, so to speak. When the seedlings are tiny, they are not very cold-tolerant and can be nipped back by freezing temperatures and frost. However, larger plants that are well-established can be amazingly cold-tolerant. I know I have had it survive temperatures down into the teens as well as temperatures in the 100s. Much depends on how well-hardened the plants are to cold temperatures in the fall when the freezing temps and frost start hitting them. One year (and it may have been a year with a warm winter), I had Swiss Chard plants live for 18 or 20 months before they bolted and went to seed. In the year when the first cold blast of winter hits suddenly instead of us having a long, gradual cool-down, even normally cold-tolerant plants can be unhappy. With Swiss Chard, I never know how they'll react. They seem less predictable than some other cool-season plants.

The stores here now have kale and collard plants in the garden centers, along with some cool-season herbs. They also have bundles of onions. I feel like it is slightly early for these, but not terribly early. Much depends on whether we're merely enjoying the typical January thaw before bitter cold weather returns or if the weather pattern has changed and maybe we'll get to go a week or two without ice and terribly cold wind chills.

Usually you get soil test results back pretty quickly except during their busy season. You probably are a little bit ahead of the busy season.

Some old-timers taste their soil to see if it tastes sour (acidic) or sweet (alkaline). I'm all for hands-on gardening, but don't think I'd like to taste my soil.

On a gorgeous sunny and warm day like today, it is so easy to get excited about spring planting. If I had anything in the ground now, it likely would have blown 2 counties away this afternoon. I'm not so crazy about the wind, but if we have any unsound limbs on trees, we'll find them on the ground before this day ends. I guess that is one way to know which tree needs some dead wood trimmed off of them.

Dawn