I think compost and sweat are my best amendments. When I cant get bulk compost I buy the $1.50 bag at Ace Hardware. I can get loads of sweat by just going outside.

Don't give up, I think the only time we fail is when we fail to try. I have never had a garden that did as well as I wanted it to. I also feel that I have failed at many, many things. But I can look around and see that I am doing as well as most people, and I doubt that they are having as much fun as I am.

Larry

Hazel, you're describing most of my garden. lol And I've had some scant harvest, really, because I have nice soil from the get go. Were it not for that, it would be a complete waste. At least 3/4 of what I seeded and even the starts among them failed. Cantelope, 2 kinds of watermelon, six squash plants, three cucumber plants. 2 rows of green beans, and recently about 50 broccoli seeds. But I have 2 kinds of gourds and pumpkins surviving me while I work painfully and tirelessly fighting the squash bugs. My corn did well because that was the spot and only spot that I had enough time to amend last fall. But the bugs and birds have pretty much destroyed most of it. I know what to do next year.

I have learned far more than what I harvested. I know *some* of what works and some more of what I need to help myself next year. Really, I need soil amendments and to stand guard more.

"they all turn yellow, then brown and then shrivel and die" In my garden that is a result of squash bugs and squash vine borers. These require a lot of sweating on my part and I hate them, now.
I'm sorry about your pecan trees. Mine have had a couple of bug infestations over the last four years combined with drought stress. My huge one is dying and the rest are struggling.

It stinks when my dreams are squashed. While searching and destroying squash bugs today i was cussing under my breath and telling myself "not next year", but I ran across a heavy green pumpkin and.. maybe it'll make it the next couple of months. Maybe it'll be worth it.

I have so much to do, but I cannot get to it because I'm too busy weeding from a wet year and killing squash bugs all the time. But I need to cover the soil when it is bare. I did not in certain areas where the buckwheat didn't take hold. Next time... And I can plant moscheta varieties of squash. Next time....

bon

Hazel, First of all, you planted a garden and plants grew, so it was not a failure. Right? Okay. Just because you didn't get the results you were hoping for, that doesn't mean you or your plants failed. It just means that this year you had some success with some things (remember, plants did grow and that it a key first step) and next year your goal will be to have more success. Every year, though, some plants will do well and some won't---that is just real life.

Most sunflowers are annuals and eventually will die, so keep that in mind and, while cats damage them, most sunflowers will outgrow the damage. Extreme heat will be harder on them most years than caterpillars. Keep in mind that caterpillars will eat virtually any and every plant you grow, so a certain amount of caterpillar damage goes with the territory. I rarely kill cats because I love having the butterflies and moths around, but I will kill cutworms....otherwise, there might not be a garden at all. You kinda have to choose your battles. I generally don't even spray my broccoli and cabbage crops with Bt 'kurstaki'. Instead, I just put on gloves, hand-pick and destroy the caterpillars that damage them. I am sure my garden is full of caterpillars right now, and one reason I am sure of that is because there are butterflies all over the place today, and I am sure that around twilight the moths will come out. It is easier to co-exist with the caterpillars to the extent that we can than to try to wipe out all of them. Having caterpillars is part of the price we pay for having lots of butterflies and moths flitting around the garden. Even if you could wipe out all the cats on your plants, guess what will happen---more moths and butterflies will fly in and lay eggs and soon you'll have more cats.

Radishes are easy if you plant them early when temps are cool and thin them out within a few days of them sprouting. The reason radishes don't bulb up usually is because they are overcrowded early in their life and were thinned too late. Try them again in fall when it cools off or try them next year. With everything you grow, there will be a little bit of a learning curve, and you'll be surprised how easy gardening is once you get the hang of it.

Cucumbers can be very tricky because they are prone to disease and have many pests that bother them, particularly cucumber beetles. I had to try a couple dozen different varieties to find the ones that grow best for me in my soil and in my growing conditions. Does that mean we have perfect cucumbers all the time? Nope. Some years the weather and pests are against you, but most years we have tons of cucumbers. Growing the right variety makes all the difference. I grow cukes mostly for pickling and can 100-200 pint jars, and also some half-pints of relish, every year. (Obviously we don't eat that many pickles, but we give away tons of them as gifts.) New cucumber varieties come out every year, but I tend to stick with the same old, same old reliable ones that have done well here in the past. The most reliable pickling cuke I've ever grown, and a variety I grow every year, is County Fair. I'm in trouble if this variety ever is discontinued because it is incredibly disease-tolerant and pest-tolerant. I usually grow Littleleaf H-19 too, and sometimes Lemon Cucumber or Marketmore. Eureaka and Endeavor have done okay, but have not performed as well as County Fair.

Catnip, parsley and cilantro from seed are not that hard. They all self-sow themselves in my garden. So, read the package directions carefully and make sure you are planting them at the right time of the year and be especially careful about not sowing the seeds too deeply. Growing from seed is a skill you develop, and it isn't easy. It certainly involves more than making furrows and dropping seeds into them. Every single thing you raise from seed has specific needs with regard to soil temperature, soil moisture and the depth at which the seed should be sowed. Some seeds need sunlight to sprout, so I just scatter-sow those on the top of the ground. No one starts out with some magical talent to grow things from seed---you just keep working at it until you get it right. Like so many other things in life, once you master the skill, you'll wonder why it ever seemed so impossibly hard.

Pumpkin plants can be very disease-prone, particularly when there is a lot of rainfall, mist, fog, and high humidity. Some years they are slow starters and other years they aren't. Always plant more than you need and want because then when you lose a few, there's plenty left. This has been a decent year for pumpkins at my end of the state, but they were slow to get going because we didn't have enough rain (roughly 6" from January through May). They are doing fine now because lots of rain fell in July and I expect we'll get a good harvest, but they were so slow to grow in early summer that there was a point where I thought the drought would defeat them. One of the worst problems you can encounter with pumpkins (other than the SVBs and squash bugs that we have discussed endlessly all summer) is that sometimes disease strikes and starts killing the leaves, which leaves the developing pumpkins exposed to too much sunlight when causes sunscald that ruins the fruit. So, watch your leaves carefully for the development of diseases and treat accordingly. If you can save the leaves, you can save the pumpkins themselves. Your description of the flowers yellowing and browning and falling off could indicate a lack of pollination or some sort of fungal disease. If you have plentiful amounts of pollinators active in the garden when the plants are flowering, it is more likely to be a disease issue than a lack of pollination.

Having pecans falling from trees in August is very common and there are many reasons it happens. I've linked an article that describes it really well. We have native pecan trees and I don't spray them, so usually when my pecans fall from the tree prematurely, it likely is pest damage---pecan case bearers. Moisture stress and poor nutrition also can cause pecans to fall prematurely.

As a gardener, your garden will be a perfect dream on some days---mine is darn near perfect from mid-May through late-June, and then reality (in the form of pests, drought or too much rain at once, and diseases) and a nightmare at other times. It goes with the territory. Still, I'd rather be in the garden on any given day than be anywhere else on earth---whether it is a dream or a nightmare on that day. Even on nightmare days, I know that the dream days will return.

I don't know anyone who started out with a perfect garden, and I don't know anyone who just automatically knew everything they needed to know about growing stuff when they first started out. Most of us knew precious little---but you don't stay at that beginner stage for long---you grow (pun intended) beyond that stage. Even good soil often needs improvement, and then there is a learning curve with regard to knowing exactly what to plant...and when, where and how to plant it. The terrific thing about gardening is that you learn as you go, and you never stop learning. I was blessed to grow up not only in a family full of farmers and gardeners but also in a suburban neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s where almost everyone grew flowers, fruits and veggies. Some folks had chickens, meat rabbits, sheep or goats. I think I learned a lot by osmosis but I also learned some things "not to do" just by watching people doing them and seeing the results they got (or, more accurately, didn't get). Still, gardening on my own in my own little backyard garden after I grew up, got married and we bought our first house was a rude awakening. It turned out that gardening and landscaping seemed a lot harder to me at that point than it had seemed when I was my dad's garden helper. You never stop learning no matter how long you've been gardening and no matter how well you understand the natural world and how it functions. I'm constantly trying new varieties, new growing methods, etc. My best gardening friend turns 92 in a few months and he still can dance rings around us younger whippersnappers. I want to be like him......still enthusiastic about gardening, still trying new things, and still being excited about planting time every spring even when I am old enough to be considered a well-seasoned gardener. We had another gardening neighbor, now deceased, who gardened for as long as he was able to sit in a chair. At an advanced age, he'd carry a folding chair out to the garden, sit in the chair with a hoe in his hand, and hoe out the weeds. He always had an incredibly beautiful and productive garden, and probably had forgotten more about gardening than I'll ever know. Did these older gentlemen have some sort of gardening gene they were born with? I don't think so. I just think that by the time I met them, they had been gardening for decades and knew everything they needed to know about growing plants that were beautiful and bountiful. Everyone is a beginner at one point, and if you stick with it long enough, you'll be one of those well-seasoned gardeners answering the questions of the young and new gardeners.

Remember that soil improvement is an ongoing process. We started out with dense, highly compacted clay that broke every garden tool we owned. We just kept plugging away, breaking tools and amending the soil until it finally got to a state where I think it is pretty good soil. However, because heat eats compost, you never stop improving your soil. If you stop adding organic matter to the soil, it will revert to horrid clay in just a year or two in our climate. It is very hard for most gardeners to make enough compost. I have huge compost piles, but have huge gardens too, so there's never enough compost. Remember that you can grow compost crops (I grow lots of stuff just for compost) and cover crops/green manure crops. I am extra, extra, extra careful about bringing in any outside materials at all because of all the issues in the last 10-15 years with killer compost, which is compost, including composted manure, and mulch, contaminated with persistent herbicide residue that can survive in the soil for a couple of years at high enough levels to kill broadleaf garden plants. While it has been a problem since around the year 2000, it seems to me that it is a bigger and bigger problem every year. Never bring something into your garden if you are not positive that it never, ever, ever had any of those persistent herbicides applied to it. We even are seeing herbicide contamination in purchased bags of compost or composted manure because it has gotten into commercial bagged feed sold to animal owners. Most of my compost nowadays comes from grass clippings from our property (though not the clippings from down by the road where both the county and the utility companies often spray those herbicides to keep down the growth alongside the road or beneath the utility lines), autumn leaves, and vegetation I've removed from the garden or that I've grown especially for the compost pile. If herbicide contamination were to hit the soil I've been improving for 16 years now, it would be devastating. Because we feed our chickens purchased feed that may have been grown in fields sprayed with those persistent herbicides, I don't even use our chicken coop bedding/manure in my main compost pile. I put it on a cold compost pile I'm using to fill in an eroded area of the property and never actually remove that compost and use it. Better to be safe than sorry.

If you don't have a naturally-occurring population of beneficial insects you can buy and release them, but it normally is not necessary. If you have a healthy garden and avoid the use of broad-spectrum pesticides that will harm the beneficials, they will show up on their own, but they won't show up unless you have enough pests for them to eat. Once they finish gobbling up all the pests, they'll move on to another place----they have to do that in order to survive. I plant an Insectary Mix of seeds to grow plants that attract them, and usually can find beneficial insects in my garden in any month of the year, except when snow or ice are on the ground....so I always try to have some winter blooms or at least a bee feeder or butterfly feeder set up for them all winter. If you live in an agricultural area with heavy pesticide use, it may be more difficult to keep beneficial insects alive and well. If you live in a municipality where they go crazy spraying a broad-spectrum pesticide to kill mosquitoes every summer, their spraying may kill your beneficial insects. You just have to plug away and keep trying. Normally, the beneficial insects just show up as needed.

For everything that plagues a garden, there is a solution. Often, though, there is not a quick solution or a guaranteed one. We all just keep plugging away and if one solution doesn't solve a problem, then we find another one. Gardening is a lot of work, but it is a labor of love. Patience is required. Because we are dealing with nature, we have to learn to follow nature's cycles and to understand how every part of the natural system relates to all the other parts.

You also have to be understand that our climate is an exceptionally difficult one and in order to achieve the garden success you want, you will need to develop ways to work around whatever weather/climate changes you face. This year, at my house, we had our last freezing night 4 or 5 days after I had harvested my first ripe, red tomato. That is just so wrong, but with a highly erratic climate like ours, I've learned to work around the weather in order to get the results I want. I spent far too long trying to work with the weather, but as the weather has become increasingly erratic, I finally wised up and started working around it in order to get the results I want. Every climate, of course, brings different challenges to people who garden in it, but having our last frost or freeze in the first week of May the last few years when our "average last frost date" is March 28th has just about driven me stark raving mad. However, rather than letting it defeat me, I have just learned how to keep planting on time and then work to protect those plants on the occasional late cold day or night. If I were to wait until the first week of May to plant, then the weather will heat up too quickly and plants, like tomatoes, that stop setting fruit well in high heat, will be shut down before they even can begin. Depending on where you are located in Oklahoma, you'll have different kinds of challenges and you'll have to figure out how to work around them. We can change lots of things in our gardens and our gardening practices, but we cannot change the weather to suit us.

I have poured tons of blood, sweat and tears (more sweat, though, than blood and tears) into my gardens over the decades, and it has been worth every single bit of it. I don't think that anyone is born with a green thumb. I am fairly sure we all are born with flesh-colored thumbs. It takes a lot of perspiration and effort to turn a flesh-colored thumb into a green thumb.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Falling Pecans and Limbs

Thank you for all the info! It's a lot to think on. I really appreciate all the time you put into helping me out.

On the day I posted this topic, I was just sad at the thought of not getting a single pumpkin. The vines are growing. The male blossoms open and are visited by bees every morning. It's just the females that form and then turn brown, wither, and die. They are Connecticut Field. Maybe those aren't best for my area? I love fall and October and pumpkins--it's really my favorite time of year. And I often see sunflowers in fall décor. I had this vision of the patch of sunflowers looking so pretty next to the pumpkin mounds. AND..I'm such a dork. I really didn't understand how sunflowers work. I do now. AND I've found the seeds.

Thanks again Dawn, bon, and Larry!

This is the off year for pecans. They produce a large amount of nuts every other year. A google search can explain better than I can.

Hazel I too have felt like a complete failure since my garden does not meet my expectations and definitely does not measure up to others gardens in my area, BUT
I leaned here on GW oklahoma that I am learning my area, weather, water, pests and timing.
Everyone here is so encouraging I just keep at it.
I made pickles this year with my own cucumbers and I thought that would never happen! summer squash was a sad story. I learned.
pumpkins or winter squash I too have lots of blooms opening closing shriveling but maybe we will get one, there is still time.
keep at it even if its just one
kim

Thanks, Kim. And congrats on your pickles!

I think I might have a second chance with my yellow squash. There's some tiny babies that are developing. Now that I'm learning what the good bugs and bad bugs are, I think I have a better chance. For awhile, I let some squash bugs live on my plants because I thought they were assassin bugs! Seriously! They don't even look alike to me now--but they did 2 months ago!

I'm still very disappointed about my pumpkins. NONE of the female blossoms open. They just shrivel up and die. I can't find much about that specific problem online. It's mostly people saying the blossoms aren't getting pollinated, but mine aren't even reaching that point. The only things I can find are that (1) it is possible I've over watered them. But I don't think so. Then again, I get very confused on watering and I know I tend to overwater potted plants. But the plants look wilted and it's hot and I think they need water. and (2) I've over fertilized them. I read something about how too much nitrogen can cause the plants not to produce fruit. It's just so frustrating.
I'm with you, IF I can just have one pumpkin by Halloween, I'll be happy (at this point.). If not, I'll be taking my kids to Orr Family Farm or TG Farms. Fun places, but I want to grow our own.

I had the same problem with watering and learned to only water in the morning if it was dry and wilted. Wilting during the heat is normal apparently but goes not indicate dryness. Since I have been following that advice my tomatoes and cucumbers have been a lot better. My sad squash is a sacrificial plant to keep squash bugs away from the other squash area. so far so good.
kim

Hazel, It does not necessarily have to be overwatering---it can be uneven watering/rainfall where the soil swings back and forth from wet to dry. Sometimes when that happens, the plants won't set fruit because they aren't sure they can support fruit. While you cannot control the rainfall, you can ensure the soil stays evenly moist by watering it before it gets too dry.

When pumpkin plants that are healthy, growing in full sun and have abundant green and healthy foliage just refuse to set fruit, there is a reason they don't----and generally it is because there is something going on that indicates to the plant that it will not be able to mature and ripen fruit----it could be too much shade, uneven moisture, etc. It can be very hard to figure it out.

You can try to force pollination by carefully clipping off the end of the still-healthy female bloom and then hand-pollinating by transferring pollen from a male flower. You cannot really force a flower to open, but you can carefully remove the end of the flower to give you access to its inner parts. You can use a q-tip, a small watercolor paintbrush, etc. to transfer the pollen or you can pluck a male flower from the plant and dab the female flower with the male flower to transfer the pollen.

If you have very sandy soil that is low in organic matter, it could be that your plants have root knot nematodes and the nematodes harm them just enough that the plants think/know (well, I'm not sure if plants think or know but somehow they understand if they aren't healthy) they cannot mature fruit, so they stubbornly refuse to allow the female flowers to open and be pollinated. When you pull up your pumpkin plants at the end of the growing season, check their root systems for the galls/swellings that would indicate the presence of root knot nematodes.

All large-leaved cucurbits can wilt in the heat of the day. That is normal. They are transpiring more water during the heat of the day than they can afford to lose, so they wilt temporarily as a reaction to that. That sort of wilting doesn't necessarily mean they need more water. It means they are hot. If the wilting you're seeing goes away overnight, it is a heat-related/transpiration-related wilt. If the wilted leaves do not recover overnight, then either the plants are too dry and do need to be watered ASAP or there's something else going on----like squash vine borers, perhaps. Plants also can wilt because they are overwatered and the soil is too wet, so keep that in mind. You want soil that stays evenly moist, and not either extremely wet or extremely dry.

You're certainly not the first person who ever has experienced this, and often it corrects on its own when the weather conditions moderate, but the problem now, of course, is that it already is mid-August so if any pumpkins are going to have time to mature, they need to hurry up and set.

For what it is worth, the only time I've ever had trouble getting cucurbits (squash, pumpkins, cukes, gourds) to set is when it was a very wet year and the soil was too wet for them. They still set fruit for me even in the hottest weather most years even if they are fairly dry, but if they are too wet, they don't want to play ball.

Finally, remember this---the reason that plants flower and form fruit is to produce seeds to guarantee that their species will survive after they themselves are long gone. Often, plants that are growing in lovely, fertile rich soil and lots of moisture are sort of lazy---they are living the good life and might begin to think they'll live forever. Consequently, they are not worried at this point about the survival of their species and don't get around to flowering and fruiting. Let them feel threatened though--by too much heat, too much cold, too little rainfall and irrigation--and they will begin to feel like they might die so need to flower and set fruit in order to perpetuate their species. So, if you are being a very attentive gardener and have been letting them live the good life, ignore them for a while and let them understand their days are finite and they need to set some seed for the next generation.

Dawn