I am so f*cking f*cked off with my garden

[Cappuccino]

it is horrid

I have just been out to hang the washing up - yes it is going to rain, but I am going to chance it for an hour - and it is like a rainforest jungle of horrid

there are enormous blackening sunflowers being eaten by slugs and leaning perilously over

everywhere is covered in bindweed

there are nettles in the hedge

my summer salads have been left too long (because it was cold and rainy and who wanted to eat salads?) and they look like triffids

there are frogs - FROGS - in the concrete play area, which is so wet I was paddling through it. In the centre is a sandpit I was drying out which is now submerged in water

last summer we skipped around the garden, ate breakfast out there, weeded, grew pretty bedding and planted out strawberries and blueberries in anticipation of this year

we have had four strawberries

I cannot see the raspberry canes for stuff

[charliecat]

I can completely sympathise with you.
Yesterday I was trying to sort my garden out.
Bindweed poking out from everywhere.
Yellow ones, brown ones, fat ones EVERYWHERE.
Weeds seem to flourish, flowers arent.
Shite isnt it.

[Cappuccino]

and what is the point, if you run out on the only fine day to tidy it up, and then you can't go out in it again?

[SlartyBartFast]

what can you do about bindweed.
i have it wrapped around the rake that is veyr telling isnt it. when was the last time i used that rake.

[eandh]

Dh (assisted annoyed by dd's) gave up on ours yesterday, he pulled the runner bean plants down (we have had a good crop loads in freezer) but were windswept and covered in black fly. Threw 2 hanging baskets that have got ruined by wind/heavy rain etc.

Cut all the grass and strimmed edges and swept all the paths and decking (ready for its annual 'stain' paint now)

All we have left in the borders is azeleas, roddendrums, couple of small palm tree things and a few pots around the garden that have busy lizzies/lobeilla in them and still look ok.

We don't nor mally do this till the end of Sept but everything look so tired and tatty and it does look alot better now (although a bit bare)

[sandy4]

Slugs here...everywhere...all our veggies have been eaten by slugs.

Tried out the beer in cups to drown them. DS3 found a drowned mouse in one of them & thought it was a 'poor baby rabbit' (he's 4).

[Cappuccino]

I am so glad it is not just me

[sandy4]

what to do with 4 tomatoes & poor baby rabbit? not the lunch I had in mind.

[Icanseethesea]

Here too.

We have ground elder, bindweed (just as well I put up the runner bean canes so that it had something to grow up ). Hardly any runner beans, lettuces. HAve generously fed the caterpillars with the purple sprouting broccoli, and STILL can't get out there to sort it all out, cos it's raining AGAIN!!!!!

[Cappuccino]

4 tomatoes!

I'm not even sure where my tomatoes are anymore

[igivein]

Mine's a mess too. Got it 'ground-forced' last autumn, so was anticipating lots of home grown veg from the new raised bed that goes all round the edge. Instead we're over-run with snails that skip over coconut bark and laugh at eggshells. How the hell do I get rid of them? My veg beds are just a forrest sad looking stalks. The grass is 8 inches high because everytime I'm around to cut it, it's pissing down. It's becoming apparent that I'll never give charlie Dimmock a run for her money!

[Earthymama]

We have an allotment and garden at the house.

Weeds weeds everywhere!! Bindweed is strangling everything the slugs have left. It's cold wet and windy, dark enough for me to have the light on while I'm writing this.

We had a great crop when we got back from holiday and about a week to 10 days of sun. I was tanned, relaxed and content.

It's rained for bloody weeks, I'm washed out in all senses and have started using the SAD lamp .

We've had 2 BBQs and eaten tea in the garden about 4 times.

We need a few days of fine weather to tackle the Knotweed but there is no chance of that.

Can you tell I'm fed up?

[cremolafoam]

mine too
grass last cut in early July(the last time we had a dry day) so ankle deep
flower beds and borders now indistinguishable from rest of overgrown mess
roses droopy and going black
hollyhock- rusty
two new pots of delphiniums are upended in their pots and floating in flooded patio
rocket,oregano,parsley,etc bolted and gone to seed
cabbages- riddled with slugs and snail munchings
I despair
and its back to school next week and we haven't had ONE day in the garden

[RustyBear]

We have a small oddly shaped area behind the playroom, only accessible by a path about 2 feet wide - up till last year this was permanently shaded by 3 large conifers & was completely barren - we just had the compost bin there. We had the trees cut down last year by someone who managed to let one of them fall on the compost bin, smashing it open.

What with the added light, the compost & the warm wet summer, it's now an absolute jungle out there - my MIL spent most of her recent stay pointing out that I needed to cut down the 'forest trees' growing there (our neighbour has a sycamore which seeds everywhere) & I spent most of my time pointing out that standing waist deep in brambles in the pouring rain hacking at trees was not my idea of fun, and that I was supposed to be on holiday.

I have just seized a brief interlude between showers to get out there (all of the 'forest trees' fell prey to my loppers, so they weren't that formidable) & I now have a sense of accomplishment and 22 thorns in various places....

DS has just returned from a month in Europe, so once Reading festival is over I will turn him loose in there - he's very good at the 'hack and destroy' gardening techniques.

[maidamess]

I said to my dh yesterday, this is the least amount of time we have ever spent in our garden.

He blamed the weather..but it is a shit tip out there.

We had the builders in recently and where they stored their stuff are huge yellow mossy patches, bare bits of earth with no lawn at all.

I have a huge sunken bit on the side where a pond used to be and now its dipped again.

I hate it! I started a thread on here about doing up gardens and it was suggested i contact the local horticultural college to see if some student wants to take it on as a project.

[Pannacotta]

Agree its all a bit grim, awful weather, far too much rain.
Maidamess I think that sounds like a good plan about the local horticultural college, would be interesting to hear if that works out for you.
Cappucino can you just do some weeding/ tidying up to make things look nicer and to make you feel a bit better? Perhaps pulling out the bindweed and taking out the sunflowers and nettles?
How about getting some nice flowering plants for pots which will brighten up the garden at the mo, eg dahlias/sedums etc?

[misi]

www.greengardener.co.uk for slug control. they supply nematodes to water in and they kill slugs and snails for 6 weeks at a go, totally harmless to kids and other animals.
bindweed, do not pull it out as this encourages the roots to go deeper and spread more. if you can, unwrap the bindweed from what it is strangling and wrap the stems around a twig, then use something like a glyphosate weedkiller that kills roots as well as foliage. continue to apply the weedkiller to the stems completely die off and then either burn or place in the bin, do not compost as even the tiniest bit of live stem can start the whole process again and infect somewhere else. you can only really encourage bindweed to move on to your neighbours you will never eradicate it but you can reduce it a lot.
same treatment for ground elder, bunch up, tie up and douse in glyphosate, do not compost. be thankful you do not have japanese knotweed, it is nasty and is a notifiable plant to defra, my cousin's neighbour has it and my cousin is ''scared''!!
nettles are good for the garden if you have a small space for them. butterflies and bees love them and they encourage the bees to come into the garden and so pollinate other plants like you toms and beans. also, if you cut some down every so often and chop them up, place in a hessian sack and suspend in a bucket of water, it makes great liquid fertiliser (add in a dollop of horse shit and you will be laughing ) or treat nettles as a crop, great in place of spinach, rich in iron and other nutrients with many medicinal properties.

[Cappuccino]

great bindweed advice there thanks

however it is still too wet to go out there

if you saw my thunderstorm thread last night... well I have only just dried out and I only went out for half an hour

[ChopsTheDuck]

My toms are actualyl doing ok, but they are in a mini greenhouse thing. I've had to bring my chillis and peppers back in because they were drowning and my basil has been eaten by slugs and snails.
I'm so glad that I didn't bother forking out for bedding flowers this year. Left it to go to weeds now, cannot be btohered.

Quick question, doesn anyone know, will my hanebeneros grow any bigger now they have changed colour? Some are teeney!

[BigBadMousey]

Glad it's not just me then .

I just took a trip up the garden to se what was going on and all is not good. Bindweed and slugs everywhere. I have one runner bean plant (there were 40 ) and that appeared to be covered in huge black beans. On closer insepection I realise it is not heavy with any type of vegetable but covered in huge fat black slugs (many then took flying lessons in the direction of the adjacent field). My outdoor tomatoes have blight, I must have dreamt putting 20 kale plants in becasue there is no sign of them now. My sweetcorn is being a real trooper though and has started flowering even though it is only 18 inches high. Onions and shallots are drying in the potting shed but they got so damp I've lost most of them to rot.

I thought that at least I would have full water butts but no - the taps on two of them have cracked so they have leaked all over my rhubarb swamp bed.

Blackcurrants cropped well though .

I feel very sorry for all the insects and those animals that rely on them. The poor swallows are going to get hungry on their way home I guess .

[Pannacotta]

We have done ok in some ways, decent crop of raspberries, rocket going like the clappers, cartots and radishes also ok and the toms are plentiful though v green.
But it is v depressing, its chucking it down here right now - again...

[misi]

I will sound a bit smug here but I have seen so few slugs and snails this year I am baffled as the one and only application of slug/snail nematodes I applied late last year seems to have had success beyond the makers dreams!! I also have a pond though, no frogs or toads but plenty of common newts who also like to eat the slugs that live under the surface of the soil and are not harmed at all by the nematodes. I have just ordered some ant nematodes as my garden is over run with them instead

[kbaby]

Really peed off too.

My borders have had most of the annuals eaten by slugs(even though I did put pellets down) tried the beer but no good either. So they now look bare. All my pots look worn out and the plants look like they do in late autumn not august. The hanging baskets I am going to throw this wekend as they are nothing more than bare brown twigs.
I am fed up with it and am gutted I spent all that money and time on flowers back in may only for them to look terrible by july.

[Earthymama]

the weather forecast is good for the weekend here in wales so I should be planning an assault on the rainforest that is my garden and allotment but I'm going camping to Glasonbury instead.

I hope it's fine for all the MN gardeners and things look more hopeful in the sun

[SlartyBartFast]

may be a good place to take your woes