Hi newbies.
If you are new to gardening and took it up for whatever reason and are down in the dumps because your seedlings are shite, your fruit trees all have shitty manky leaves and hardly any fruit, your shrubs have flowered but they all went black and moulded away, everything you put out is beset by slugs, your moles are digging huge moleholes in your lovely lawns, and the peat free compost is absolutely crap.
It isn't your fault.
It really isn't.
I've been gardening almost my whole life, I've worked in professional gardens, I've taught horticulture for years, I've had to produce plants for sale to keep various charities bouyant and this is the most miserable, wet, windy, cold, damp, dark spring I've ever known.
Paired with the new law regarding peat in compost, that the manufacturers thought would never actually happen and that they want to turn back so are hoping for your complaints to overturn the peat law, so are providing utter crap to you.
Please don't give up.
Plants want to grow.
Fruit trees will reflower next year and this year they will use their energy to grow stronger roots and more branches to carry more fruit in the future.
Shrubs will reflower, if they get a chance and you might well get a later showing.
Molehole soil makes a great addition to the rubbish peat compost so shovel it into a trug and mix it into your crap compost.
Don't feel bad that you will have to buy some shop grown veg instead of your home sown seedlings. What you might not know is that many professional growers buy in shedloads of plug plants and seedlings themselves. There just isn't the time to grow everything yourself so masses are grown elsewhere.
None of this makes you a garden failure. It just makes you a gardener with some experience. All gardeners lose plants at some point! It's part of being a grower. We just might grow more than we need in the first place because we expect certain amounts of failure.
Stay with us. This is a weird year. It will pass.