Its a terrible year for me as well. I had such high hopes too. But the freeze then drought has taken its toll. In fact this morning I was walking around like I always do & had the thought to rip it all out & start over.

I totally agree. Moon, I would be concerned that you have aster yellows on your cones. Maybe not, but it's worth checking out.

My gardens are basically trashed (in my own critical eye) but the good news is that I get to start over and there are now empty spaces where there once was none.

I'm encouraging everyone to update their member pages and want lists so we can help eachother out and rebuild where we need to.

I just posted over on another forum that I was ready to rip out and plan for some fall plantings and what to do for next year. My annuals look so spent and I am struggling to keep perennials alive. This next week shows no promise of rain and temps 95+ with over 100 Heat Indexes. I just can't work outside in that weather. Because of the lack of rain I am afraid to keep using the well water since we need it for household use also. The good Lord must have a reason for the lack of rain and the heat although I am having a hard time figuring out what it is. Keep cool everyone......

Lynne

I'm in the Carolinas too. This has been a bad year for gardening for me also. It should have been my leap year for the perennials but I am struggling to keep them alive. Looking at pictures of this time last year(we were dry last year but no where near this year) everything looked so lush and gorgeous around this time. Like Lynne I've been planting for our fall season and just trying to keep everything alive. Adele

Yep...I am chalking it up to the late freeze we had...then the 20 inches of rain in a few short days...now we are in a drought...aak!

Some things are doing great (normal), while others are acting strange...

Yes, it's been a weird year, a hard year for the garden. I'm in NC too, and between the freeze and the drought, and now this hideous heat, I'm ready to throw in the towel and take a rest. Keeping everything watered is a challenge, and it seems like I've been playing catch-up all season. The plants are stressed now, and it is just too HOT to go out there after work. Ugh! Can't wait for fall!

Discouraging year here, too, close to the VA-NC state line. Relentless heat and drought are taking a toll on plants and making me so cross and irritable I've gotten on my own nerves. When I go out to move the hose, I grab a few seed heads, staying outside no more than 10 minutes, then back inside to dry off. Thanks to heavy mulch (because it was free!), I haven't lost any plants, but I can't get out there to enjoy them and just fool around for hours flitting from task to task. Even the summer sown Sweet William and foxglove are taking their sweet time growing.

In the strange category, I have blooms growing out of the top of my coreopsis yellow sunburst blossoms. Never heard of the yellow aster disease-sounding thing bakemom mentioned but will research it. I won't even mention the vegetable garden. If it grows, the deer beat us to it and tromple the rest, unless the groundhogs get there first.

I do have a bright spot, though, and that's the celosia plumosa, mixed colors. Those plants are nearly five feet tall and about 3 feet wide. Without winter sowing, I would never have known they would grow that big. My store-bought ones, pre-WS, hovered around a foot tall at the most.

Another side effect of the heat and being inside is that I'm doing more research on plants and my wish list has grown way out of hand. I think I'll be embarrassed to post it. But it's not my fault. It's because of all those beautiful photos y'all post.

Same over here. I mean besides the usual problems, bunnies, insects. It's just *weird*.

I have the exact same issue with a lot of tomatoes- splitting in rings or spirals. Never seen it before. :(

The biggest berry harvest this year came not from the ones in sun - but from a scraggly set in deep shade under a thick spruce, tangling up all my hostas. Which didn't bloom, by the way, either. o_0 Not saying the harvest was bad, by any means - it was great! Just... abnormal.

A ton of plants are stunted, and a number of them hardly flowered. :( Still others are happily in 1-gallon pots and nearing 5 feet tall. Not exactly sure how much of this is my fault, though, a lot of it is things I'm not familiar with, I'd just tried them this year. ;)

Honestly, anyone have an answer/reason for this 'Ring Around the Tomato'?

Hopefully after the ground dries out - probably next week - I'm going to start digging potatoes. First year trying it, we'll see what went well, wrong, and what I altogether screwed up then. ;)

I to have noticed the strangeness! My giant sunflowers are not giant, my lupines stayed small but lush no blooms at all! My creeping lemon thyme did not creep, My tomatoes are slower and are setting less blooms, my morning glories are giving me one or two blooms at at (when previously I had oodles!) My mornarda are doubled ( I don't know if thats weird for you but for me yeah it is!)

I guess the saying is true: "There is a season for everything" and this just happens to be the season for strange gardens!

The Garden Pooter!

Bakemom and I are getting the same heat/drought that you are seeing in the Carolinas. I water like crazy but a lot of stuff is frying but some stuff is still looking pretty good, and melampodium and verbena bonariensis are still thriving, trying to swallow up everything else. One tomato is pretty much fried but the rest seem OK. The tomatoes taste good, though they look pretty deformed this year, and the bugs are eating as many as we are.

Early in the year I was plagued by rodents (field mice, bolrd, chipmunks), they pulled up everything as I planted it. Finally they seem to be gone, thank God for Rid-X.

Moonphase, how old are your echinacea with the weird prong coming out of the crown? Did you start them from seed? Could they be doubles, like Double Decker or Doppelgangers? Those supposedly look like normal echinacea for the first year or 2 then form the double flower in a few years.

Karen

Karen,my cones are from 3 yrs. old to wsd last winter.I am so disappointed because I have so many that are effected with this strange what ever it is..This looks like little UFOS coming out of the cones and some are bright green,,wish I had a camera.Even my purple ones have converted to pinkish green.I will look up aster yellow.Does this mean I will have to pull all of these up and destroy them?I may as well let the finches feast because I do not want the seeds from them this yr..o well.. BUT
my red bed is absolutely gorgeous.I have a new yellow and orange bed that is looking good too but most will bloom next yr. in that one..
The humidity is horrible here in Ga. too.I have to snatch seeds in late evening..
My tomatoes are hard this year and when cut,they have some hollow places,maybe lack of water causing this?
I am on well water so do not water often,but we had rain for days before this heat wave hit..
my gardens are mostly a flop this yr.I am ready to start cutting most of it down and just not collect seeds this yr. from many..:-(
moonphase

I think some of your coneflowers might just be double deckers! That would be a good thing! I hope so.

Karen

Here is a link that might be useful: Double Deckers

moon: good pics in plantfiles, too, and info in comments says it can take several years to show doubles.

Karen

Here is a link that might be useful: plantfiles

It has been strange here in z4 too. Many of my spring blooming plants are setting out a new set of flowers (coral bells, pulminaria) Some of the roses are doing the same thing. Very strange. ellie

Yes, it's happening here too, one white Nicotiana volunteer grew a stalk about a foot tall, and then it made some things that weren't buds, in clusters on the stem. A normal nico is growing right next to it in the tub, and blooming beautifully, but I notice there is a distinct lack of fragrance from it.

My Echinacea also have some funky things growing in the cones. Of course, having their petals eaten by the JB's added to their sad look.

My beautiful Asclepias Tuberosa looks pittiful this year, it has fewer blooms, and big spaces where it should have lots of foliage.

My yellow Pear tomato gave up the ghost today.

On a brighter note, I have Rudbeckia Goldsturm growing everywhere it wants to, it actually looks good, adding color in unexpected places.

Oh well, there's always next year, and I plan to make a lot of changes in the beds as soon as the cool weather hits, but it must be done quickly because the snow seems to take me by surprise every fall.

Good luck everyone, and aren't we the lucky ones who WS and can plan and grow whatever plants we want. Think about all those seeds you already have in your stashes; personally, I have 2 large cookie tins filled to the brim. It's going to be an exciting winter!!!

Mary

Nope not double Deckers.I do have some of those and they look good.How can a single lavender and Ruby pink giants that was planted last spring turn into double deckers???So that is not the case with the weird things I have.I am going tomorrow and getting a camera so I can show some of these strange green things,The whole flower is green and is supposed to be pink Ruby Giants.Last yrs plants looked wonderful.I did trandsplant some of these but not all.
O well.
I pulled out 2 huge lavender nicandra today.I tried that plant and I sure don't like it.It was thriving and getting taller each day.Some of you may like that one.I tried chinese lantern last yr and didn't like that one either,yet I did plant one plant of it in my orange bed.
I have several in my holding bed that I do not know the name of-so guess I had better go ahead and get a camera.
Thanks for trying to help me identify my weird plants but once I post a photo-well that will show you what i have been trying to describe..
moonphase

Here we lucked out bigtime in June and early July with 3 different "episodes" of the most wonderful, fantastic weather I've ever seen in my life - daytime highs in the low-to-mid 80s and nighttime lows 57°-63°. It was so perfect. *sigh*

That all changed towards the end of July and for over a week we've been stuck in our usual soupy mess - highs in the 90s, lows in the 70s, with hellishly-high humidity. The weather people on TV apparently don't have much else to do except yammer on about the heat index. Weatherguy says it's only going to get worse for at least another full week.

We've had good thunderstorms about every two weeks this season with loads of lightning, too, and I think this probably has a lot to do with everything around here being so lush & green. The ditches and roadsides are filled with more color than I can ever remember seeing; oodles of flax, white yarrow, orange daylillies, prairie mallow, thistle, Queen Anne's Lace, comfrey, angelica and others I don't know.

Usually by August things in the garden are looking pretty worn out, but not this year. Especially the corn, which is now 9' - 10' high. A couple of nights ago on the news they were talking about reports of 11'-high corn. That's just crazy-big.

My tomatoes, peppers, squash and cukes are loving it. The dewpoint has been in the 70s so every morning a thick fog hangs over. The dew's so heavy that it hasn't been burning off until late morning and the plants are just going wild. I planted late cucumbers and zucchini at the beginning of last week and am shocked & amazed by their size already!


It stormed for a good part of last night (with more on the way for tonight) and is nice and cloudy out right now. I'm hoping for intermittent drizzle or showers all day - otherwise I'll have to venture out into the "sauna" and mow the yard.

Same here! This is my first "real" year gardening, and I'm about to give up. Outside of vegetables (and my wall of mg) none of the ws annuals made it. I have one lil petunia that keeps trying too bloom, and it just started a week or two ago. There was one other, cant remember the name right now that put up one bloom then keeled over. My sunflowers (the mamoths) range from 1ft tall to 6ft tall, only 3 out of like 24 are 6ft tall, making for a very uneven sunflower house. My cukes aren't growing, they just finally had a small growth spurt this weekend, and some mole or ground hog decide to dig a huge tunnel under my cuke tunnel!! My pole beans are just starting to grow. No zukes showing yet, only 2 summer squashes. My toms aren't ripening, I thought they were just starting, some were going yellow, but today they're brown mush. My Yellow pear tom stopped growing and went backwards, it only sits 3-4ft tall. I've gotten about 10 toms from that. Gave up on the broccili.

It's weird, we got warm weather early this year (been above 70 since end of April, more like above 80, into 90's w/ 100+ heat indexes!) I would've thought things would've grown early w/ the head start and the heat lovers would be going nuts. But it's like everything is just starting to grow, in AUGUST!! My cocks comb is just starting out, well I have one that's 2ft tall and hasn't bloomed, but a few others have (at 4 in tall!) I bought a bunch of young perrenials this spring, they have done NOTHING! Haven't grown a bit!. 1 out of 6 Calla Lily bulbs came up, no blooms from that yet either.

The only good things have been my daylilies. All the ones I planted last year gave me, and still are giving me a great show, even the majority of the ones I bought this spring gave me a nice show. And the lovely morning glory foilage that is finally covering my ugly wooden retaining wall, just wish it had more blooms to go w/ the foilage. If I wanted all green I would've planted Ivy!

So I guess I should chalk it all up to the weather? I just assumed it was me. Ehh...I still blame my crappy soil!

The freeze this spring killed the leader buds on most of my trees, so now they have 2 leaders, but they are doing ok other wise. Now, the weather is just barbaric. Temperatures have been in the upper 90s for the past week, and yesterday it went over 100 a few times. todays high is 100 and heat index of 115. Its supposed to get even hotter tomorrow too!! it so humid outside its almost painful. its 98 degrees right now with a heat index of 112 degrees. But my plants actually have been thriving in the heat, as longs as i am keeping them well watered.

I agree with Bakemom that it might be a virus. I had this in my coneflowers a few years ago. They had to be pulled up and destroyed to keep from spreading to other plants. I don't think you want to wait for them to set seed as they might infect the plants close to them.

We are in a drought with little rain since early June. I had some annuals that bloomed on very tiny plants, 1 inch nemophila with a quarter inch blossom, and 4 inch monopolis with lots of tiny blooms. The nemophila was hilarious but I rather like the short delicate monopolis.

One of the great things about winter sown plants is that if you don't like them just toss them as it costs little to plant them originally and if you are like me you still have some in jugs to fill that space in the beds.

Warning, that one Chinese Lantern will spread. It took me years to clear my bed.

Bobbie

Bobbie,thanks for the info.I was afraid of that and I will pull them.So far it is effecting only my coneflowers.Thankfully,I have them planted in several beds and through out my cottage garden,so I will still have seeds to ws and replace them next yr.When it cools down to about 90 tonight-I will venture outside..lol and destroy my mutant UFOs...
moonphase