Not joining GW sooner ... and hesitating to get my hands dirty. I wish I had at least planted one veggie last year and learn hands-on. Got too caught up with virtual research. :)

Installing my 1200 gallon Koi pond under a Mesquite tree :( It drops LEAVES, POLLEN, SEED PODS for 3 months straight ;(
On the other hand it shades the pond in the Summer :)

Hmmmm...now I always thought you wanted a pond to be in full sun...no?

Biggest gardening mistake...let's see...Not buying a bigger house with more room so I could plant more fun things! Sorry, that's all I could come up with under such short notice... However, once I get older, I may change my mind and say this is the best thing I ever did...hehehe! :0

easy

hmmm...has to be letting my husband get his way (gotta love him) and having queen palms planted in the back yard. and now i am the one that gets stuck taking care of them since he doesn't have the time.

Not planting trees my first year of gardening!!

Not letting all of this dang Bemuda grass die last year. It is just hateful stuff. Bane of my existence.

We have this tendancy to go to a nursery and see all these awesome trees and plants. So we buy this neat stuff, of course more than we went for, get home, then wonder where the heck we're gonna put it....so overbuying. Gotta go with a list and stick to it.

When we bought our house in late 1988, we found a neat vine growing in the west yard. "Cat's Claw", Macfadyena unguis-cati. I thought how neat, so I watered it, babied it, fed it. In the following years I have pulled it, dug it, chopped it, stepped on it, cursed it... and it is still spreading. I put up a six foot block wall in March, and by May it came over the top from my neighbor's yard. YIKES! This may be the "Kudzu Vine" of the Southwest.

LOL, jimdaz, the vine at my place was - IS - mile-a-minute. It'll be here with the roaches - and the gol-danged Bermuda - after we're all vaporized.

My all-time biggest mistake is the same as Usha's: not planting trees the day after I got here. There were some, but not enough. This year, so far I'd have to say I overbought like annellis and did too much "virtual gardening" like DH. But my *biggest* this year was not moving all the hot, crunchy gravel this spring and putting down sod and trees outside my renovated garage (the one that's never seen a car in the 19 years we've been here). Fall?

Not making a grove/orchard of apple, peach, lemon, orange trees when we moved here almost 18 years ago. Now it's even easier to avoid since there is no longer any real room (nowhere I want to rip up to make room or nowhere that it would look good integrated into our real desert vegetation) and maybe we won't be here for 18 more years so we likely will get little fruit for our trouble.... blah, blah, blah...

Trolip, you are right -- my pond is not under the mesquite but close enough to make those few months a bit of a pain. Oh well, water under, uh, into the bridge, er, pond :)

hmm... too many to list... I've earned my green thumb by conversion from a black one... this years biggest mistake was not watering the corn enough... I ended up with dinky little corn... another of my notorious mistakes was believing that I could make fuchsia grow here, and I bought it in the summer, the dumbest plant choice ever... oh, and putting in all sorts of nice pond plants when I had a destructive koi... he has recently jumped to his death and I put plants back in the pond... a sad story yes, but I've gotten over it, it was a real shock...
Brittany
I'll come back with more mistakes, don't worry...

One of my biggest mistakes, at this house, was in not removing all of the eucalyptus that were here when we moved in and putting in something else that would now be nicely maturing. Instead we have huge trees that make a huge mess and cost us a huge amount of money to keep trimmed. We're seriously planning to have one of those that are left removed this winter(If we can afford it). It's one of the limb-dropping variety that never should have been planted in a city yard. We have removed 8 eucs over the years and still have 5 left, only one of which I like.

Brittany, your post made me laugh... and remember more of my mistakes:

Not watering the Passiflora Frederick enough and ending up with hollow fruits AGAIN!

Planting MULTITUDES of plants that the rabbits just loved chowing down on -- now at least I try to find things that are supposed to be not so palatable...

Pond plants too - Duck weed by the cupful that the fish ate all of in just one day! Any marginal that grows above water gets eaten by rabbits so far... still looking for something they won't eat from the edge of pond.

Sorry to hear about your koi - but the way you wrote it was also pretty entertaining....

And Judy you reminded me that I have a couple smaller trees that have not been properly pruned over time and could be so much prettier if I'd been more on top of them...

Interesting thread...

Hehehehe....I feel you pain with the Cat's Claw Jim. I've been trying to get rid of it for years to. Thought I had succeeded about 2 years ago, but low and behold, I'm seeing it crawling up the fence again this year. So will have to dg up some of my ornamental plants, pot the up, and start digging and trying to kill again. Cat's claw was a great idea when I first planted it. It covered a wall that the sun hit, so you weren't blinded by the reflective lite when sitting on the patio. But then the shade tree's matured, and it hardly bloomed at all, so I wanted to remove it and put things in that area that bloom nicely with the limited sun available.

Easy

I hate cat's claw so much because of my long battle with the stuff, that I've actually butted into people's plant purchasing and suggested something to take the place of the CC they are about to buy.

My biggest mistake? Thinking that I would be able to handle school, work, and a garden all at the same time. But it's a fixable mistake, so it all works out.

Kathleen, thank you very much for finding that funny :) I put it in there for everyone's enjoyment... I did the same thing with the duckweed, I think it took about 2 hours and every last piece was gone... I also thought that I could handle an accelerated bachelors program for nursing, hospital rotations, and gardening... my poor garden has suffered this year... the only thing I have growing is eggplant and basil... (besides zinnias, marigolds, and lavender out front) nothing else needs my attention regularyly... also not thinking in the spring, when I planted a lot of this stuff and it was nice out, that I should pay more attention to what will end up in full sun in the end... too many other things on my mind to worry about a silly thing like SUN *tut tut*
Brittany

"One of my biggest mistakes, at this house, was in not removing all of the eucalyptus that were here when we moved in and putting in something else that would now be nicely maturing."

Well, now that you've mentioned that, I have to say my all-time biggest mistake was *planting* two of those buggers. Never again.

"...also not thinking in the spring, when I planted a lot of this stuff and it was nice out, that I should pay more attention to what will end up in full sun in the end... too many other things on my mind to worry about a silly thing like SUN"

Hmmmm. Funny, you'd think we'd remember from year to year that hell arrives shortly after the honeymoon of spring. I did the same thing. Planted the prettiest bed of dusty miller, celosia and bacopa. It was beautiful! It's now an ugly mass of wilting and crispy stems and leaves. A few dusty millers may survive, but I have to think of something else for that bed come fall.

Well, I just made this mistake last weekend. I went out to California to help my sister landscape around the pool. We planted birds of paradise, canna, banana, queen palms, pygmy date palms, agapanthus, and philodendron. On Sunday I sat back and looked at my work. Then I realised that this bed was against a south facing wall and it gets FULL sun all day. The philodendrons are getting burned already. I got so wrapped up in creating a tropical look that I broke one of the basic rules of landscaping: Know the exposure of the site. I had some strange idea that the plants would provide shade for each other. Well, in 5 years they might but right now they are all just babies. I hope she kept her receipts.

LOL, daizy, wait till your sister visits you next!! I wouldn't do any landscaping while she's here if I were you.

hahaha... that's a good idea... and I'm glad that I'm not the only one who has made that mistake... it's like, every winter I forget how hot and roasted everthing gets...
Brittany

Noooooo!!!! You mean I have to think about summer even during winter!!!! Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!!!

Here's an easy way to remember summer when we're planting in the balmy days of winter and spring: When you're deciding what to plant in sunny spots, turn on the oven and when it's pre-heated, stick your head in. It'll only take a moment...

LOL... well, then I'd die and I wouldn't have to worry about any of these things anymore...
Brittany

BIG MISTAKE...I have learned my lesson this year about thinning my vegy seedlings. I promise that next year I won't have a 40' x 40' watermelon patch, nor will I be harvesting 20-30 Zuch's a day, nor will I be buried alive under the weight of the attack of the cucumber, who by the way might be closely related to the rabbit!

LOL, Brittany - let's just work at another form of visualization, shall we?

And you, Tommy, stay outta the kitchen!

Closely related to the rabbit...hahaha... yeah, another visualization would be great.. I can't go into my garden without feeling like I'm in an oven... a 40' x 40' watermelon patch... yikes, that's a little overzealous, like my mom wanting to plant eggplant, and now we have 6 huge bushes that have taken over the garden and we're harvesting a ridiculous number of these guys a day...
Brittany

I'm like many of you in that I see a plant I like and buy it. Therefore, my yard has one of many different kinds of plants. At this time in my life when things are so hectic, I would like to see a more organized space. Not that I don't lover my onesies, but I think a group of most plants makes a better statement.

Virginia, I have to agree with you. My new resolutions are:

1) Never visit a nursery right after watching a garden show, reading a gardening magazine or going on a garden tour. ;O)

2) Never buy a plant unless I know exactly where I'm going to plant it. ... And where it's most likely to live.

3) Try harder to come up with an overall plan to integrate what I have with what I want.

4) Try for more perennials and fewer annuals. (I call this last resolution 'buying vs renting'.)

5) Spend more time developing edible landscaping.

Now let's see if I can *keep* these resolutions...