Bad, bad, sorry plant year

Me and my black thumb-yes, black, not green-learned some lessons this year, which proved to be tough on plants.

When it rained, it RAINED too much, flooding my poor neighbor's basement and making a long-standing flood in my garden, causing my tomato plants to turn their leaves yellow. And then, for some reason, some of my tomato plants got disease-like brown spots on them, while the others remained spotless. When the damaged tomato plants finally started growing beautiful tomatoes, the squirrels decided to be especially destructive this year. You'd think they could finish the tomato they started, but no, they had to nibble a little on each tomato, yet nibble enough so that the many tomatoes were beyond me cutting off their portion and using the rest. I tried hot pepper powder, applying it diligently, but even that didn't work this year. There are apparently some squirrels who had some spicey tomatoes and zucchini.

I thought we'd try new plants this year besides tomatoes and hot peppers, so we planted a strawberry plant, cucumber plants, basil, rosemary, and zucchini plants. We got one big zucchini which I proudly fried up for dinner before the squirrlies discovered them...they grow on the ground so this was a super easy pick for them. The zucchini plant also grows extremely large leaves and vines and kind of takes over the garden so it needed a lot more room than I thought it did. The cucumbers did end up being a success and will be a repeat next year!

to be continued...