I think I've made more garden mistakes than I can remember, but the classics:

Many years ago, we bought our first house (in Alaska) in the fall. All winter long I stared at this ugly half-dead looking shrub next to the front porch and couldn't wait to replace it with something more showy come spring. When I removed it I couldn't bear to kill it so I planted out on the farthest reach of the property and forgot about it. Weeks later, I found the perfect early bloomer covered in lovely yellow flowers and planted it. Imagine my dismay when I realized the shrub I bought was the exact same shrub I pulled out! Yep, Potentilla fruticosa. Beautiful spring flowers - ugly every other season!

Planted many bulbs and tubers upside-down, including peonies, elephant ears, and sprouted potatoes (and didn't learn for several years that you can cut the potatoes up!)

Left Round-Up footprints in the lawn after spraying out a new bed. Perfect size 8 dead spots alternating across the yard!

Thanks, piper, for starting this thread. It should prove to be good for a few chuckles.

Don't ever decide to dump the old container of Quaker oats out for the birds. Birds don't eat oats, DEER eat oats. I had an entire herd of 10 - 12 shouldering each other out of the way on my patio trying to get every last oat. They then decided to have my hostas for dessert.

Okay, the oats for dinner, hostas for desert story is hilarious. Last summer DH got a terrible case of poision ivy on his legs. I sat in front of him, that evening and gently petted his poor ravaged legs . . . and then rubbed my eyes. The next day I had the red scaly eyes of a lizard. No kidding. It was horrific.

My wife thought that a small clump of bamboo would lend a nice touch to my 1/2 acre wildflower garden. I now have a lovely 1/2 acre bamboo grove and no wildflowers there.

We decided that a small Liriodendron seedling growing at the edge of the sunny garden would make a nice shade in the summer. Just paid $1800 to remove a 30" diameter tree from the front of our house and now see the sun again in the mornings for the first time in 15 years. Have started to replant the garden which mostly died out for lack of light.

George

I once place a 4 inch pot of spearmint on the ground near my pond. It burst the pot, escaped and is now growing vigorously 18 ft away.

LOL, apparently the only funny stories are the ones which caused you pain at one time!

A 1/2 acre bamboo grove is a nice whoops, and had to laugh at the round-up footprints!

My father did something similar.... we were getting the yard ready for my brother's wedding. He decided the clover in the lawn would have to go, so he got some weed killer. Unfortunately it was a general weed killer which sort of killed clover but did a much better job at killing grass! Just in time for the wedding we had huge patches of yellow dead grass. It took all summer for the clover to grow in and green up the bare spots.

I have two so far this year (with I'm sure more to follow)

I did some last minute lasagna gardening: leaves, compost, sheep manure and other various items. At the last minute, I swept up all the sunflower hulls under my bird feeder and did a layer with that. Mistake. Now I have the nicest batch of sunflowers coming up all in my cabbage garden. Apparently birds don't get all the seeds.

My other mistake was using Scott's Premium potting soil (with slow release fertilizer and wetting agent) to pot up my seedlings. They all stunted, turned yellow and stopped growing. I wasn't sure if it was the soil until I transfered the seedlings to Promix.

The pots on the left were transfered out of the Scott's and into Promix last night. The ones on the right were transfered five days ago. The very green eggplants on the right in the lower picture look exactly the same as the ones on the left before they were transfered and had looked that way for weeks. Next time, I listen to the pepper forum when they say again and again to use promix to pot up your seedlings!

Whoops. Live and learn :)
Bellatrix

aside from the usual learn by experience mistakes, i'll offer this one.

a dear friend moved to north carolina a few years back. she left right before tomato season and kept saying how she would miss the gifts from my garden. so being a decent friend, i thought i would surprise her and send her tomatoes and peppers and such. well, i picked the nicest, ripest, juiciest tomatoes and packed that flat rate box and mailed them off priority.

hmmmn, wasn't thinking at all, i suppose. by the time she got them and opened the box, it was a combination of tomato sauce/juice and a good bit of fruit flies.

boy did she scream and hollar at me...what didn't i send green, or almost ripe, etc., etc., etc., wrap them in newspaper and send. here i thought i was doing a very nice thing - giving her a taste of home. i still laugh about it.

maryanne

I grew up in Massachusetts, where vines are a rare and somewhat special thing--so, probably, you can guess my mistake.

We have an electric/phone company right-of-way at the back of our yard, and the birds sitting on the lines frequently leave seed "presents" with their droppings. Some of those were bittersweet vines and wild grape.

I let them grow for years before I realized they were killing all of our shrubs and trees.

my mistake this summer was spraying a spider i found in my zinnias. i was watering and noticed two leaves were sewn together with spider webbing. i carefully peeled them apart from a distance and spider legs came out. standing back i watched a brown recluse emerge with a white egg sack/ball. i ran inside for the first spider killing spray i could find. the only can that would spray was a roach ant killer that when sprayed kind of gave off a mist. normally bugs don't bug me, but certainly a brown recluse had no place in my garden. i was also afraid that the babies would hatch and decide to stay. so i sprayed the spider and eventually killed it, but the spray misted all over my plants. i was familiar with burning plants so i quickly watered the leaves.
apparently not well enough. luckily the leaves on the zinnia burned, and i didn't kill everything in the garden that would have sucked up the poisoned water. so now in my perfect row of zinnias, there's a huge chunk missing lol

also, my MIL is a beginning gardener. i've helped her a lot including, that she planned to grow tons of zuccinni, squash and other viney plants under these little dee protective tents. there's no way everything could grow under there. also, she read the zuccinni packet incorrectly and instead of planting them 4 to 6 feet apart, in her little tiny bed she planted like 50 4 to 6 inches apart. needless to say much thinning was needed.

Reslider, are you certain it was a Brown Recluse? I've never heard of them hanging out in flowers. Outdoors, they're usually found in woodpiles and under rocks.

I enjoyed this thread, Piper. Hope you get your Model A. (I never cared much for Studebakers, probably because my first boyfriend had one.)

The year I planted my first seed I carefully cultivated what I thought were my dahlias. Wrong. When I proudly showed them off to my German neighbor she sternly informed me that they were weeds.

I'm still making mistakes. This year I planted an anchusa at the front of my border. It grew to be five feet tall. Plus it was rough looking, and the blooms were invisible from ten feet away. Out it went last week.

I planted a small three trunk crepe myrtle in front of my dining room window. For three years, I babied that little girl, with lots of water and lots of organic fertilizer. This year -- the third year -- the leap (of the sleep, creep, and leap year cycle) my sweet crepe myrtle grew two feet and produced the most abundant blossoms I have ever seen. Last night, in rained very hard and long. The abundant blossoms filled with water and one of the trunks of my pretty tree cracked in half, because it was so top heavy. I should not have pushed for such quick growth. What a stupid rooky mistake!