Garden Update - Oopsie Daisy!

Lest anyone reading this believe that I've got amazing gardening skills - this is a post with the not-so-successful attempts in our gardens. I'll have another post in a few days of the stuff that's growing well!

First off, here's what happens when you don't pull weeds for an entire Spring.

Top Right: Empress Wu Hosta
Bottom Right: Hosta
The rest: weeds!

An assortment of color and texture - weeds

We take good care of our weeds!

Strawberry patch under netting, weed patch to its left

Those are some impressive weeds! Some of it's stinging nettle, which I honestly considered encouraging it to border the bed as a way to discourage Max from bothering the berries.

I'll start off the updates with the things we tried for the first time and seem to be failing at: cauliflower and brussel sprouts.

The brussel sprouts and cauliflower have been great food to something (Sweetie thinks it's deer). All that remains are the stems. They're pretty sad looking but I'm not pulling them until they're dead. I'm curious if the cauliflower head will still grow without the leaves, and if so then I'll just cover the head with the leaf of something else to protect it from the sun. I can already see the brussel sprouts forming in the forks so they're staying in the ground until they either produce fruit or die. I'm optimistic by nature :-)

Brussel sprouts - most of leaves
chewed off but the buds are there!

Cauliflower -
one naked, one almost there

This year, we also started stuff from seed for the first time. Of the things I planted seed for, rosemary was the only thing that never even sprouted. I've heard it's a finicky plant so I'm not terribly surprised about that.

The radish has already come and gone, and what did form into a radish was delicious. I don't know why, but it didn't occur to me that root vegetables should have the soil loosened as deep as I expect the edible root to grow. So about half of my radish crop didn't form bulbs, but more like fingers or yarn. I read how to prepare the leaves as a way to salvage something from this lesson but I never got around to it and the leaves turned to compost. Oh well.

The only radish picture I have past seedling stage

The lettuce is doing great, other than one container of lettuce mix that something is getting a good meal off of. Again, Sweetie thinks it's deer. She said she'd noticed tracks in the garden. I suppose that may also be what's eating the cauliflower and brussel sprouts.

What's left of the lettuce mix

Free dinner for the wildlife, only one of my charitable contributions!

The flowers aren't going as well as I'd hoped. The alyssum is flourishing like crazy but everything else is pretty lackluster! Out of the 30 or so snapdragons I planted, only 4 have turned into discernible plants. In the row of nasturtium, so far there are 3. Some other plants are growing, and they look like intentional plants, but I don't know what they are yet.

Snapdragon

Unidentified, lol

View from corner