Hi Guys, I am a 3 year Gardner that used to travel and have had bad luck with neighbors you name it. I have grown beautiful tomatoes , marigolds etc. Armature stuff. Now I have been back home for 2 months and have grown 4 sunflowers the smallest at 5 ft bloomed and all the flower fell off due to excessive rain so is all that's left is the face with green sides. I can post pics. My pepper plants are in my front yard facing west ( noon and after sun) have holes in the leaves like they are being eaten. I thought it was slugs and put out yeast and sugar water add drew nothing but ants. The same goes for my back patio where my sunflowers are growing in a large pot with my green peppers. My peppers are like vines and are chasing the sunflower up its stalk. But I can see ants crawling.All of my leaves even my cherry tomato plant started showing signs of discoloration of leaves and that's a hung planter.My snap peas came up beautifully got about 7 feet and died from the root up. All seeds were bought online or home depot. online seed is hit or miss for weeds but I tend to my garden. I use cow manure as well as miracle grow plus fertilizer, as well as use dead foliage. Weeds are killing me, roundup is not helping Please help me!!!!!!!!!!

Hi and welcome! First of all, we've *all* had a first garden. Gardening is a labor of love. Like relationships with people, in your garden you'll have good times and tough times. If you watch and learn from your plants, you'll have more good times. :-) One of the beauties of gardening is that you never stop learning. There are lots of gardeners who know far more than I do, and even they are still learning. So never be embarrassed to ask for advice! One thing that most every new gardener has to learn is to plan for the mature size of the plants. It's hard to imagine a tiny seed growing into a plant taller than you or a vine 15' long in one growing season, but it happens! 3. Tangerine Pimiento Sweet Pepper - Yes, you should thin them now to a 12" minimum spacing. They won't be able to produce peppers while they are competing with each other for water, sun, and nutrients. Don't pull since they are so close together - you might damage the roots of the plants you want to keep. Instead, thin by snipping off the stems of unwanted plants just above the ground. Keep the biggest and healthiest-looking plants. 4. Tomatoes - You should thin these, too. Tomatoes need at least 2'-3' between them, because if they are healthy, most types will grow into BIG plants. You also need to figure out what you're going to do about support (stakes, cages, trellis), or if you're going to let them sprawl. If you're going to let them sprawl, they need even more ground space. If you are going to use supports, you should install them as soon as you can after thinning the tomatoes. Pinching early tomato flowers is one of those things gardeners argue about. Most commonly, the advice is that you should pinch flowers off small plants that are still in cell packs or small pots; once the plants are settled in the ground (or a large container) you don't need to pinch any more. Since yours are in the ground and several inches tall, I don't think you need to pinch. 11. - 15. Heirloom tomatoes & peppers: Sounds like a nice selection! See above for spacing. If your heirloom tomatoes are planted too close together, now is the time to move them. Tomatoes tolerate transplanting well, especially if you bury them deeper when you transplant. Earthboxes or other self-watering containers are especially good for peppers. If peppers undergo water stress they make fewer and smaller fruit; self-watering containers keep a constant moisture level. (Large sweet peppers are pickier than small, hot types.) If you use an Earthbox, four to six - no more than six - peppers per Earthbox work beautifully. 4-6 little pepper plants may look lost in an Earthbox now, but they will fill it completely in a couple of months, trust me. If your heirloom peppers are too close, maybe you could get another Earthbox or other SWC for some of them? 19. Weeds: Unfortunately, you will need to keep up with the weeds. They are small now, but they'll overrun your garden later and out-compete your vegetables for sunlight, water, and nutrients. You can pull or hoe the weeds - be careful with the hoe around your veggies, but a hoe is definitely much faster than hand-pulling for clearing paths between rows. I do everything possible to avoid weeding, because it is my least-favorite garden activity (especially in July and August!). A deep mulch around your veggies is the way to go. Many weed seeds need light to sprout, and a thick layer of mulch blocks the light. It also holds in moisture so you don't have to water so much. Even with a thick mulch, you'll need to weed some, but the mulch will make a huge difference. Mulch also helps keep dirt from splashing onto the plants, which is important for tomatoes and melons. The most troublesome weeds are grasses and other weeds that spread underground or resprout from the root, because they will come right up through the mulch. Your best option is pulling them immediately, every time they resprout. If you are diligent, you can eventually exhaust them. (They have to expend energy to resprout; if you pull them before they have time to recover that energy from the sun, eventually they get too weak to sprout again.) For paths/walkways, put down several layers of newspaper or a layer of cardboard (e.g., old shipping boxes) and then mulch on top of that. The paper or cardboard is really hard for weeds to push through, and can block some - not all - of the grasses and root-spreading weeds, too. Don't put it right up to your veggies, though, because sheets of newspaper or cardboard block some of the rainfall. Good luck with your new garden!

I am having a similar problem ... even no flowers !! It had been very hot, but now a little cooler for the past week or so. Why ?

Leslie, I almost always get beans in summer until it gets really, really hot so I think it is likely you'll get something as long as your temperatures don't get insanely hot. Unfortunately, you live in the insanely hot portion of OK, but still, all it takes is a little rain shower and a cool night here and there and the beans will produce, albeit perhaps more sporadically than they would in April or May. This year, in April and May, they likely would have frozen. I planted pole beans for summer production and saved all the bush beans for fall. We'll see how that works out. Last year I planted both for summer and had a hard time keeping up with the harvest. I did just plant some purple hyacinth beans for late summer color. I wish all the varieties of edible beans would bloom and set beans as well in the summer heat as purple hyacinth beans do. I planted some southern peas for summer legumes, and will plant more when I get through digging potatoes, although some of the potato beds are just going to get flowers planted in them.I planted a lot of potatoes this year, and don't want to fill all that space with beans. Dawn