Sprung into food gardening with great gusto but now asking questions like ‘Why did nothing grow in my garden?’, ‘Why isn’t my vegetable garden producing?’ and ‘What’s wrong with my vegetable garden?’ Read on for 7 common fails and how you can avoid them next time.
1. My tomato plant(s) didn't produce any fruit
No tomatoes on your tomato plant? There’s a good chance you over-fertilised it.
Too much fertiliser can be detrimental to your plants. For tomatoes, it can make them grow lots of leaves and no fruit. It can also make their immune systems weak and more prone to insect attack.
For the correct fertiliser dosage, follow the directions on the label and don’t get carried away – there is a misconception that more fertiliser is better but that is not the case.
2. My pumpkin plant took over my whole garden
Pumpkin plants can grow up to 10 m long – so your plant will need a lot of space or it might end up smothering your other plants.
One easy hack is to let your pumpkin plant sprawl over your lawn, instead of your garden bed. You can do this by picking up the growing vine and placing it where you’d prefer to grow instead.
Another option is to train the plant up a fence, trellis, pallet or any other object that will send it upwards and not over your whole garden – pumpkin plants love climbing.
A great money-saving hack when doing this is to cut up old t-shirts or stockings to tie the plant to the trellis.
3. My seeds grew but now all I have left are little stumps
Attack of the garden critters? While insects play an important role in the environment – like improving soil health and being food for lizards, birds and microbats – losing your new plants to them can be very frustrating.
There are lots of insects that love fresh seedling shoots, so to help combat insect attacks in an organic way, we recommend rings of protection – which is disappointingly not a Dr Strange spell.
Here’s what to do (no magic required!):
- Cut up an old 600 ml drink bottle into rings about 10 cm wide.
- Push the ring into the soil.
- Plant your seed in the middle.
You can also use these rings of protection around freshly planted seedlings. Note that they won’t stop everything but they will make it harder for many things to nibble on your baby plants.
Instead of stumps, you might find you have a plant that looks like it’s held together by a thread around the base – this is likely the result of ‘ringbarking’, which essentially means the critter has eaten its way around the stem.
This is common with pumpkins, zucchinis, cucumbers and beans, and rings of protection can help defend your plants from this too.
4. I planted carrot seeds and nothing happened
There’s a good chance you didn’t keep the seeds moist – or just haven’t been patient enough.
Some seeds, like carrot seeds, can take up to 3 weeks to germinate aka sprout. During that time, you need to keep them moist – yep, for the whole time. Even one day of drying out can reduce your chances of a carrot crop.
A good trick is to plant them at the beginning of a rainy week so nature does most of the work for you.
5. My coriander went straight to flower
Did you plant coriander seedlings? Try growing from seed instead.
Some edible plants – coriander included – really don’t like to be transplanted, aka moved from one place to another. That means you need to plant the seeds where you would like them to stay, and not buy them as seedlings from your garden centre.
Trying to move coriander plants generally results in what’s called ‘bolting’, which essentially means skipping the delicious mature plant stage and going straight to flower, then seed.
Luckily it’s not a total loss – the flowers are edible and will attract beneficial bugs that are all-round good for your garden, and once the seeds develop, you can save them for cooking or growing next season.
Other plants that grow better from seeds include carrots, dill, zucchini, corn, beans and peas.
6. All the zucchini seeds I planted grew and now I have too many
Zucchini plants are prolific – you’ll only need one plant and you’ll probably still end up with more zucchinis than you know what to do with. The individual plants also grow pretty big.
Some people get carried away and plant lots of seeds, not expecting them all to sprout and without realising how big each plant will grow.
Unfortunately, because they’re better grown from seed – meaning you might not have much success moving an already-sprouted zucchini plant – if you’ve grown too many in a small space, you’ll need to sacrifice all but one or maybe two. And then you’ll need to get creative looking up delicious recipes for zucchini – dressings, bakes, beverages…
When choosing the plants to leave, be sure to pick the strongest and healthiest-looking.
It’s not all doom and gloom though – the ones that you have to pull out can be buried in the soil for the remaining plants to use as nutrients.
7. I have too many sweetcorn seedlings in one garden bed
Didn’t expect all your sweetcorn seedlings to germinate? While it’s great that they did, you might be sacrificing the overall health of the pack by having too many plants in the space.
Like zucchinis, corn plants do not like to be moved. So unfortunately, if you’ve got too many for your garden bed, you will need to thin out the herd to the strongest-looking plant(s).
You can have a corn plant every 20 to 30 cm, but if you’ve got them closer together than that, snip off the weakest-looking plants at the base.
Corn is pollinated by the wind blowing the stalks together, so you do want the plants to be side by side in blocks, not just in a row. Most corn varieties will give you 2 or 3 cobs per stalk.
Find out more local gardening tips
Just beginning your food gardening journey? Head to our food gardening hub for more tips and tricks.