I don't think this tops it..but it sure was dumb..and has me mad at myself...I "think" even tho I "thought" I was careful that I might of touched my climbing hydrangea with roundup several weeks ago..it's stems have this odd colored green twisted look all the sudden..while he hasn't died..it doesnt look healthy either...I sprayed some weeds on the neighbors side of the fence that he NEVER mows...and they creep threw the fence to my side..so I peeked around...no one was looking..and put my roundup thru the fence and sprayed..I suspect that my climbing hydrangea had a arm thru the fence that I didn't notice...I am going to be really mad if it dies..this was the first year it was beginning to take off..:( Yea...dumb mistake and I could smack myself for not being more careful.

I never knew Off could do that..kinda scarey we use it on ourselves?

Well, there is my bare arbor...I soaked the cardinal climber seeds too long so they did not germinate. Then I put in hyacinth bean vine by default thinking I had no more cardinal climber seed. Then I found the cardinal climber seeds so I planted more of those. The bean vines sprouted and I decided to leave a couple in case the cardinal climber did not sprout. The cardinal climber sprouted and was looking good but I decided to leave things as is while we were gone 11 days. When I came come the vines were growing happily so I pulled up the bean vines. The cardinal climber was wrapped around and around the bean vines so it came up also. Bummer. No more vines. I stuck the cardinal climber back in the ground with plenty of water so maybe I will end up with something, hopefully before frost.

General gardening mistake: Planting sedums right next and around plants that require lots of water - dumb mistake, really dumb (but they are so easy to move...even in hot weather) Carrie

*LOL* funny stories. I love the term "brain fart" which I've had many of.

Yesterday, while taking out the trash, I picked some weeds along the way and accidently knocked over a trellis holding my pipevine. Snapped the main stem right at the root. I spent 2 years trying to get that plant to grow and 1 minute to kill it.

Edna

I did a REAL stupid thing last week!!!!
I had a few glasses of wine, and I always go out before bed and spray BUG KILLER on the earwigs.....they ate everything I planted last year, so this year I'm trying to keep a handle on it. Anyway......... the BUG KILLER and the WEED KILLER are in the same type bottle!!!!!!!I sprayed my flowers with WEED KILLER!!!!
I finally realized it when I could smell it! and freaked out!! I ran for the hose.....I spent 2 hours in the middle of the night running from plant to plant hosing them off!
I got real Lucky.....nothing seems to have died off yet!
I now keep the weed killer in the garage......so I won't make that mistake again!hahah
I didn't sleep for days! can you imagine?????

Haziemoon

I heavily deadheaded my torenias before realizing that the vaste majority of those I thought were dead flowers were actually LIVING blooms. As a partial excuse I have to said that they look very similar.. luckily these plants are such prolific bloomers, than after a week or so they were recovered.

Well, I'll just tell you the LATEST really stupid thing.

I've been digging up my plants and potting them, to bring to my new garden in Massachusetts. On Saturday. . . just before this heatwave . . . I decided to dig up 5 'Erica' astilbe (because they're my favorite plant and I wanted to be sure they got dug before I ran out of time). The pots I had were a little too small, so as I often do, I chopped off some of the roots with a sharp spade. Gave them all a good drink and promptly forgot about them in the 90F+ heat. Tuesday morning a sorry sight met my eyes. Toasted 'Erica'. The good news is that I had them protected from late afternoon sun and there are still a few spriggles of green on each of them. So I might be able to pull them back from the brink of death. Also I have three more 'Erica' in the back garden. So some of my babies may make it, inspite of my stupidity.

Patti

I let my temper (yes I have one) get the better of me.

Neighbors put their horse barn right behind our house which we placed to get total view of the valley. They had originally said it was going somewhere else.

Soooo I decided we should plant a maze to hide all the barn junk they have out. Well, 350 arbs later we have a 80'x60' maze that comes up almost to my waist. We designed it with 5 gates so we can change pathways at the drop of a hat. Hope I live long enough to see it grown. We are having fun with GD running through it. She finally figured out you can't cut through the trees.

But OMG trying to mow that thing is a killer. DH does the path and I do between each tree. Sometimes the weeds get taller than the trees. Something in the very middle is killing off my arbs and we've replanted twice so it's much shorter. I've replaced dead corners with Rose of Sharon but JB's nailed them this year.
I way over-extended my abilities but I'm still klinging to it by my fingernails. Neighbor walks by and says, Hey, it's lookin' good. I try not to growl out loud.

Thank you for letting me whine!!!!
georgeanne

Tried to grow stuff.

Round-Up seems to be commonly misused! I sprayed my newly emerging cardinal lobelia with it this spring, thinking it was a weed. It recovered and, though it grew more slowly than the untouched lobelia, they are now both equal size and blooming.

I also, following my neighbor's example, cut my Nikko Blue hydrangea to the ground last fall. Because it blooms on old wood, I thought this season's blooms were goners. Much to my surprise, it bloomed anyway. Go figure.

The moral of the story is that most gardening mistakes fix themselves, with time.

Here is a funny gardening story..I didn't do it, but my lovely children had part it in.

For the last twenty years or so my mom had this trumpet vine on her property at the farm. It was actually much older than 20 years having been there prior to my mom purchasing the farm, it was there when Grandma owned the farm before and mom was a little girl..but for the last 20 years or so..since my parents bought the farm, the thing has been scant blooming..some flowers but not many..especially for its size...my mom always thought she was doing something wrong to it since it bloomed when my grandma lived there profusely..but since it still grew and it was always there and was grandma's before us..she kept it...a few years ago, after my children went off to college on a trip home, grandma's vine was finally blooming gorgeous and on a walk thru the yard with my mom showing my kids recent lawn improvements....she remarked how finally that vine was blooming again after all these years she just didn't know what she had finally done right but she was happy the vine was again blooming after all t hese years.....my girls, now college students began to giggle..hugged thier grandma and then with big smiles confessed....my sisters who are about 20 years younger than me learned when they were little to pull off the buds and "pop" them because they made farting sounds and as a tradition when my children came along, my sisters were still teens and they happily shared the news of grandma's farting flower and showed my girls just how to do it.....so my two girls carried on the tradition for the next decade...grandma got a great big smile on her face and rolled in the grass she was laughing so hard, she wasn't one bit mad, mystery solved she said..she said all these years I thought I was doing something wrong to my mom's vine, it would bud, but never flower, the flowers would just disappear and I never had the heart to pull it out and all along it was my kids and my grandchildren farting the buds away. Now that mine were in college they were no longer interested in farting flowers and my sisters had just begun to have thier own children who were still babies, the vine could breath relief and bloom again for a few years......can you believe 2 generations of children kept that vine from blooming by playing with its farting flowers :) My girls said as soon as they got to grandma's they would run out to see if there were any new farts to play a joke on others with...and they assured grandma that she needed to enjoy the flowers while she could, because as soon as those babies were old enough they would pass on the story of how to make farting sounds with grandma's flowes....my sisters and my two daughters confessed that bush had been known as the farting bush for those entire 20 years....one of those funny family stories that will be around for years and years....

Keesha, you have made my day, week, year!!! LOL There are so many lessons in life that could be drawn from your story, Thanks M

Well, some 15+ years ago I planted a little orchard of 14 trees in my 'Back Forty'. Sometime the following year I was tossing stuff into a fire in the burn barrel and enjoying it way too much and let the fire get big enough that it scorched the whole side off of a plum tree - the canopy, not the trunk. Tree was fine after a couple more years but I sure thought I'd killed it for a while there.

I put the burn barrel somewhere else.
GH-

I was reading some of these stories to my hubby tonight and he reminded me of our neighbor Jen's story and I decided I needed to share it with the stupid garden tricks...

Our neighbor across the street has been divorced for about three years or so..and let his lawn go to pot as a result..he is a really nice guy, but lost interest when his family moved out. About 6 months ago, he fell in love with a girl about ten years younger than him, she was just 19...and she moved in. He aplogized all over the place to everyone that would listen about his robbing the cradle and that she was so young, but begging everyone to give them a chance and accept it because he loved her. She is JUST 19 and niave....but quickly we learned to love her too..she is a big sweetheart, even if a bit naive sometimes. Late this spring, when my hubby and I pulled in the driveway she followed behind us on foot and asked what we thought of what she had done to the yard. She had pulled and piled his mountains of weeds. I am not kidding in the back yard, the weeds were taller than cars and unused lawn equipement had sat there for years and they had grown around them while he grieved his lost marriage. What was once a nice yard had become an eyesore. She had done a ton of work and we were amazed..she said her hands had blistered even with gloves because the weeds in the back were as thick as saplings. She then asked if we had any weed killer and a sprayer she could borrow. My husband impressed with her work so far said he sure did..it was even already mixed up and it was extra good stuff. He walked with her to our garage and got it for her, and I went in the house. In the meantime, my daughter called and we began idle chit chat, I heard my hubby come in and sit in front of the tube and never thought a thing of it. I talk on the phone and walk about the house and found myself near a window. I looked out, and there was that Jen out there spraying her yard away in the front. I never thought a thing about it, admiring her determination at such a young age with the lost yard. Then she happened to turn towards me and I gasped when I saw which sprayer she had. My husband had given her the roundup sprayer...assuming she was killing the big weeds around the fence and dead lawn equipment in the back that she had been complained about..but instead she was spraying her front yard randomly. I quick hung up the phone and hollared at him to go stop her. He felt terrible...she was mortified and felt young and stupid..she didn't know there was such a thing as roundup..she thought it would only kill weeds,not grass..so she was spraying every weed she saw in the front yard. My husband told her to water quickly and see what happened..he felt terrible that he had misunderstood what she wanted. He always uses granular on the lawn weeds, not liquid so he was not even thinking that way. About two weeks later, these HUGE brown smiley faces of grass began appearing in the lawn. We walked over to apolgize to them but they were laughing bout it. Being just 19 and silly..every weed she had seen, she said..GOTTCHA and after she spritzed it with "weed killer" she drew a smiley face around it... it wasn't bad enough she had sprayed weeds in the grass with roundup but she had drawn prety faces to announce she was in power now....there were dozens of dead grass smiley faces all over the front lawn for passerbys to see. My husband couldnt even look each time we left home. He felt partly responsible. I just chucked..what else can you do? :)

Keesha--those stories are hilarious! Thanks for sharing :D

Smiley faces...LoL...too funny Keesha!

MeMo

OMG Keesha! You win! I don't know which is funnier, the farting flowers or the smiley face dead lawn! Ok...the farting flowers. I'm tempted to show my kids! hee hee hee! Hey, I bet your neighbor girl would like to know about the farting flowers. ;o)

HW