I can hear that you're very frustrated, but I don't understand why you want to take such drastic measures, lol. Though, I have thought about scrapping the whole thing from time to time. I'm a first time gardener. I have to tell you that we had snow on May first, lol, so it sounds like we have similar areas. If your squash are otherwise healthy, you shouldn't get flowers until now anyway. Spray the evil bugs off with your garden hose and then give em a real good spray with soapy water. I was a little freaked out over a few different kinds of good bugs in my garden (ex: pill bugs eat compost). Are your cucumbers small because they've just formed? Or do they need to be pollinated? If they're healthy, they'll just keep producing more cukes until a few get pollinated correctly and one grows to full ripeness. If you planted in mid-May, most tomato varieties won't be ready to produce yet, lol. I have two romas that are two feet tall. Every other plant is four feet tall or taller, but those romas I started a bit later (mid-May, btw) and haven't started their real growth yet. One of them has decided to keep up with the Joneses and is trying to produce, and that has it's own set of issues. Overall, if your leaves are green, you're doing just fine. Toss a bit of compost on those squash and get rid of those bugs. One word of caution is, if those little bugs you found are squash bugs, I understand they'll saw right through your stems, so you should take immediate, decisive action. It doesn't sound like them from your description. IMHO: you're doing just fine, you're entering the home stretch, don't give up just yet. Grace, Carolyn P.

I've got about 40 un-germed, and tossed a couple yesterday that I really didn't care if they did germ or not, but glad I hadn't given up yet on the Siberian Iris, which just barely sprouted this weekend. I'll re-use the soil in my container-plantings in a bit. Disappointment: Poppies. All DSd, but not a one coming up. ~$50 worth of seed down the proverbial toilet, I'm afraid. I'll leave them in there til June or so, but will WS a pile more Zinnias to fill that bed. There's only a pile of weeds growing in there. I'm so down about that cuz I had SOOOOO many gorgeous choices in there...from greens, yellows & purples, pink, salmon, rose, & red (poofies), to Lauren's Grape, Hot pinks, pastels, whites (regular style). I did WS a few Giganteum, and HOSd those a couple weeks ago, and they are doing ok, but the rest are totally MIA. The bed is big- probably 60 x 6 easy, and there's no way that a few giganteum HOSs will be enough in there. C'est la vie. Although I really would love to try again, I'm not going to make that type of 'investment' again, knowing the odds are probably not good. Maybe I can find some trades next season. :(

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

It could be the weather this year or planting times because we've had some hot weather early. I plant lettuce, radishes, and beets in November and grow them over the winter. The lettuce and radishes are finished now and the beets are still looking okay for a few more weeks but I consider all of those winter crops in San Antonio.