Disappointment

I've been quiet. I know!

I could blame it on a lot of things, such as the three weeks of working from home because of damage to my work building by the Brisbane floods in January. Or I could blame it on the frantic sewing I've been doing to get (too many) costumes ready for the Jane Austen Festival Australia that I will be attending in April.

But really, my quiet on this blog has been due to my recent failures making me feel miserable and very non-bloggy.

In the garden it has been one disaster after the other.

Gardening failures make me feel sad, droopy and
used up like this horrid little mushroom...

I got but one cob of corn from 8 plants and that was a slightly deformed cob with a strip of no kernels on one side.

I got only one zucchini from 3 plants before they all started dying from bad powdery mildew. I might have been able to save them had Rhys not mowed over the healthiest trailing one "by accident".

Then the powdery mildew moved to my white petti-pan squash which had been doing so well up to that point. And from there it moved to my rockmelon and watermelon plants.

My sunflowers all met an early death due to the awful weather.

Only a few of my carrots survived whatever was eating the seedlings off at the base (cutworm perhaps?).

My leeks were going nowhere at a very slow pace.

Miniscule onions (pulled up prematurely)
make me cry as much as the normal sized ones do....

I managed to kill my beautiful strawberry plant that had been so lush and healthy when I bought it.

Even worse, I managed to kill the chocolate pudding fruit (black sapote) tree which had been gifted to me by Christmas by my sister in law.

All the bronze fennel seedlings I neglected died in two short days, as did the tomato seedlings and roly-poly carrot seedlings I had bought from Bunnings on a whim.

My Loganberry plant was looking ready to give up the ghost. I don't think it liked being in the full Summer sun all day.

The holes in this leaf
leave a hole in my heart....

A marigold plant I had bought from Plants Plus to keep away the bad pests was eaten by... bad pests. (Nasty little grubs which chewed into the flowers like mad).

I discovered that the plants I had been nurturing, thinking them to be the gypsophilia I had planted, were actually common weeds.

The lavender I had planted by the front steps got a disgusting mould problem and died.

My Tigerella tomato plant seemed to be offering up one last fruit but it was a mutant tomato, with a tough skin just like a cracked old leather couch left in the sun.

Taking a 2nd place for making me miserable (narrowly beaten by the powdery mildew), was the infestation of bugs, grasshoppers and leaf hoppers which left holes in everything. EVERYTHING!


All in all, it's been terribly disappointing and has, of late, dulled my enthusiasm for gardening and not given me much blogging fodder.

But don't despair! I picked up the pieces and got to gardening today...