You're not alone. Plenty of us have had a tough time this year. Blight, too much rain, drought, cold temps...etc. Many of us will just write it off as a partial to total loss and figure, hope, next year will be better.
Good to vent!

i am in Michigan as well and first time i have had a garden since moving from UK 4 years back i understand with the dry weather mt tomes are not goos and peppers corn big but no ears lettuce bolting but for a first time growing in USA i not done too bad(grown for 25years in UK) nice potatoes broccoli beets peas onions etc i did not have animal trouble so i cannot say but i enjoyed it this year i started late with sowing (28th april) i wrote my good and bad bits down and hope to sort them out for next year gl denn and hope we get i bit more rain to help with the garden

I am planning and planting my fall garden and not looking back at the disasters of this spring and summer. I am just optimistic about the fall and looking forward to next spring

last few weeks have been in the mid-low 60s and very very humid. It's making it hard to control molds in the greenhouse. if I leave the cir fan on to long, everything drys out, and now I have spider mites all over. I was totally pest free until a few weeks ago with some aphids, now the spider mites. not killing plants yet, but annoying.

I know that youÂre not looking for a silver lining  but, this could be a good opportunity to learn what you can overcome when things donÂt go well. Some of those puny plants could surprise you and it might not be too late to plant some fall greens. Just start thinking about what R. Lee Ermey would yell at you to do in your situation and you may be fine. Now, get back out there and win this one!
Best of luck to you!

Here's a cheesy poem which sums up the plight of my garden this year. Yes, I'm already thinking about what to do next year and chalk this year up to being a bad year (my worst in 8 years, since I've been gardening.) If it looks familiar, yes, I did post it on another gardening site.

Too wet, too cold,
Bunnies that were too bold,

No sun, no heat,
Rain that only Noah could beat,

Dear eating too many beans,
No time to make the garden of my dreams,

Tomatoes that are getting diseased,
Pollen & mold that make me weeze,

Japanese and Cucumber beetles,
Prickly weeds that feel like needles,

Too many slugs & too many snails,
Who the heck ordered the hail?

Top it off with a leg that's injured,
Makes this gardening season really absurd!

Now everyone knows I wasn't an English major in college!

Yeah, worst one here in recent memory. We can only hope for a decent fall and a better one next year.

Dave

Bad for me, too. Tomatoes stopped producing, turning brown and dying, probably from early blight that got out of hand -- it can't be from the heat. Temps have been unusually low this summer. Two New Yorker tomato seedlings have just germinated, and I'll grow them in SW containers and hope they produce before frost. Oddly, my Jupiter bell peppers are flourishing and producing as they have not in any other year -- MANY huge peppers. I attribute that to SW containers on the deck and heavy fertilization. My container cucumbers are still chugging out cukes. But everything else is shot, beans gone, limas barely blooming, Southern peas deer-eaten.

It is worst even in northern NJ. Can you imagine 6 to 7 feet tall tomato plants with only 2 tomato fruits? Beans with brown, yellow and gray leaves Âas though it is fall. All that rain destroyed my potatoes, onions. Constant battle with Japanese beetle, slug, deer ticks, squirrels, birds --which of course I lost. JBs ate all my strawberries.
However, container cucks, another variety cucks did quite well. Eggplants have couple of fruits in them. Okra, greens, potato, onions, tomato total loss.

Consoling thing is that I do not do this for living. Now I need to plan for next year.

Thanks, all, for comiserating with me. Love the poem!

It's funny, isn't it, that there always seems to be ONE thing or one particular variety of a crop that can manage to survive, perhaps even thrive, in the tough years. For me this year, a couple of things ARE doing well. Of the 87 kinds of tomatos I planted this year, my old stand-by, reliable 4th of July tomatoes look really good and are doing well where almost none of the others, not even the cherries, are doing much of anything. You KNOW it's a bad year when even cherry tomatos won't grow. I guess my bigest regret there is that I only planted about a dozen 4th of July plants (vs 2 to 3 of most kinds).

This is my first year of major gardening - only had a few herbs, a couple toms and maybe a zucchini in the past.

Spinach and lettuce did great because of the cool and all the rain, altho the slugs did take their share.

Everything is way behind, however, I am now starting to harvest pole beans and have harvested about a half dozen small, pickling cukes and a couple larger ones. Have been getting zucchini a few at a time, altho they're startng to produce more than I can keep up with now, altho I'm trying! The first dozen or so fruits rotted right on the plant, however. I have two bell peppers on the one plant I'm trying this year - could never grow one before. I harvested 4 smallish banana peppers - loads had a hole the size of a pencil erasor drilled in the side right below the "calyx" - don't know what did it because I haven't found any insects on the plants. There are about 6-8 more banana peppers growing on the two plants I have. My mini eggplants are just flowering and forming fruits now - don't know what I'll end up with.

My tomatoes are finally growing fruits and not just stems and leaves, altho out of 11 plants, I won't be getting the bounty I planned on. If nothing else goes wrong and everything on the plants now ripen, I might get 2-3 packages in the freezer for winter use besides what I'll use fresh.

That's about it for me besides a bunch of herbs I'm growing, which are all doing ok. Nothing failed on me completely (other than only 2 of the 10 the new asparagus crowns I planted coming up) but nothing's giving me the big harvests I planned on either.

I went and bought all these canning supplies too!! I thought I'd learn to can while I had all this bounty - guess I'll have to wait for next year, or buy produce in bulk because I'm certainly not harvesting enough for even one jar of anything!

Lisa

I'm going to find a local farmer's market this month and hope to buy what didn't produce for us, mostly beans and corn, or I'll have an empty winter freezer!

WOW...I never thought I'd here you post such news Dennis. Your one of my garden gurus Dennis. I don't expect you to have garden problems Dennis.

If you got troubles what chance do I have to grow most of my food? Sure, I fail lots of times, but I don't know much. You know a lot and still fail - makes me shudder.

Well, all we can do is keep at it or eat the crap food they sell in the stores Dennis.

"...I'm going to find a local farmer's market this month and hope to buy what didn't produce for us..."

My problem is that lots of what didn't produce for me, didn't produce for the local farms either! Well, obviously, they have MORE, but not as much as usual, because they're having a bad year too.

I discovered today that my tomatoes have late blight. Sigh. They were doing so well; after a VERY slow start and then all the rain, they were starting to grow big and put out fruit. Now, I will probably have to rip them all out. And two of the local farms I buy from have already ripped out most of their tomatoes.

I too am just looking ahead. I'll be trying my cold frames again over the winter, and I'm thinking ahead to spring.

Dee

one persons junk is an others treasure.

i live in a high mountain valley in central Utah. 5500 feet.

we usually get a frost in late May and one in early sept.

we have not had a frost her since last April.

it was cool and the hot weather plants were slow to stat but it got hot (for us 90 degrees) the last of June and i am now getting tomatoes.

another think about this location is there is a lower valley to our west and there is a low range of mountains between us.

any clouds with moisture seems to gather in this valley and one our of three afternoons we get a thunderstorm.

not a lot of rain but maybe as mush as .05 inches.

i also have 550 toms. i should get plenty production between now and frost.

also we cover for the first fall frost and we sometimes get two more months. i hope.

we do have a plage of grass hoppers but the only thing they are after is my pole beans and if i treat them with diatomaous earth every week they seem to shear better.

i stand a chance of having a very good year.

we also have a 40' by 48' green house that extends our growing season.

it is not the best year but we are doing well here.

our potatoes look good.

the winter squash is doing well.

i will have a good crop of sunflowers.

i planted way heavy because of our short season here.

i started my corn in the green house and i have been eating corn since the 24th of July. here in Utah that is almost imposable.

well i am happy with things considering the fight im am having with the field bindweed.

WM

Sorry to hear things went poorly for you denninmi. I've found your suggestions in the past very helpful especially since you garden not all that far away.

Things have been slow over on the SW side of the state because of the cooler weather, also, but critters have been less than last year....that was a huge problem then. Trapping and a neighbor who is a good shot helped alot with that. Unfortuantely, a new critter(s?) is causing some trouble....13 lined ground squirrels aka gophers. Guess it is time to trap some more which I don't enjoy. We had only six corn plants grow in 8 rows planted by 50 students....and I know they planted more seed than recommended. The gophers or something else tunneled through the area and ate/took most every one. A replant germinated successfully but the plants are still small. The cool July did not help at all. Not sure if there will be a corn harvest or not.

I garden at two sites about 15 miles apart. The rain certainly has been splotchy over this way, too. I'll work at one garden in the sun and dry sand and come home to find that a major storm hit at my home...with clay loam...just the reverse of what I'd order. My gardens are much smaller than yours and can be easily watered if need be. And the past few weeks they definitely needed it. Hard to imagine how dry they would have been if the weather had been warmer.

I'm looking to put in some fall crops this week. It doesn't seem like it is time for that since the hot days of summer did not come yet. But I'm ready to try another round of peas, cabbage, and broccoli to go with the beets, carrots and onions put in today. If it finally warms up I may have to rig up shade cloths.

On a positive note, one garden has awesome zinnias and marigolds. Today I saw three hummingbirds darting around from one zinnia patch to another. Very fun....much better than looking at the scrawny corn and green tomatoes on plants with dead lower leaves.

Just send me some RAIN!! I have not had rain for 5 weeks. I am watering for about 6 hrs. a day and I can't keep up.

Keepitlow wrote:

"WOW...I never thought I'd here you post such news Dennis. Your one of my garden gurus Dennis. I don't expect you to have garden problems Dennis.
If you got troubles what chance do I have to grow most of my food? Sure, I fail lots of times, but I don't know much. You know a lot and still fail - makes me shudder."

Keep the faith, my friend. Aside fromt the weather and animal issues this year, a lot of the reason for my own personal garden problems is simply a lack of time, because I am now doing a lot of long-neglected semi-major to minor home improvement chores around the old household, and that takes up most of my free time this year. But, it's been well worthwhile, and my goal is to get all of that done this year and just keep the garden at a manageable level, so that next year I can have a good time in the garden again.

Dennis
SE Michigan

Damn, Denni,
Sounds like there's more than enough pain to go around this summer, whatever part of the country we're in. I posted something similar last Wednesday after getting drenched for the umpteenth time. Today I finally saw a ripening Sungold cherry. A little bit of felicity.

Rain? Rain? Who wants some rain? Come to Louisville...

We got six-point-five inches in ONE HOUR yesterday morning. Oh yes indeedy, my 'maters are watered. Along with a whole lot of basements, and cars up to their roofs. Husband spent the day pulling up soggy carpet at his place of business. (our house & belongings are on high ground, though, and came through fine.)

My first huge ripe tomato(Yoder's German Yellow) has been ruined by bushy-tailed TREE RATS. Haven't even had the chance to have ONE yet. I keep spraying Repels-All, which usually works, but it keeps getting washed away with all the rain. Blossom end rot everywhere, weeds are VERY happy.

But I'm going to stop the Tomato Whining now and enjoy the eggplants,'Buckingham' zukes, and little 'Thumbelina' carrots (all grown in containers). Cubanelle peppers are doing OK, and 'Little Lucy' red okra is a productive little cutie. Always a silver lining somewhere...