Feel free to share ideas/experiments that didn’t work out and why you think it failed.
Here I threw a handful of Athena cantaloupe seeds I collected from fruit I purchased at Publix. I usually eat a lot of muskmelon fruit regularly. I plan to keep throwing excess seed into this litter box. The goal is to give this litter box so much seed that maybe I will discover a winner through sheer numbers.
I love it!
Some ideas are clearly bad in hindsight, but there are also good ideas that just don’t work. Is this thread more about failures or bad ideas?
If it’s about bad ideas, that seems more challenging to discuss.
If it’s about failures, the cantaloupe proving ground hasn’t failed yet! Hoping to hear more about this in the future
I got the idea in my head to grow a bunch of things together in a heavily shaded indoor location without grow lights in the winter. With one goal being having a go at getting some potato seed. It actually did pretty well for a while.
If I had to pinpoint why things starting going south and dying, it would be from some combination of the poorness of conditions (crowded compost) , inattentiveness (I really didn’t care to mess with them too much), and trying to transition them to the outside. It might not have helped in this case, but I also didn’t have a grow plan with early success and failure indicators defined and contingencies based on those, so I could adjust intelligently and unemotionally as the context required.
Ended up with learning and more tubers, with some hopniss transplanted to the outside and some sad rye and radish hanging on for now
Interesting idea! I am too cheap to buy an indoor growing set up and may try this in the future.
Some people may find it useful to make the distinction you made about failure or bad ideas. For me personally, I am interested in learning from the experience of others and reflecting on lessons learned.
The old saying “We learn from failure more than we do from winning” is the thing I am trying to accomplish here.
i actually love the idea of throwing tomato seeds in a bin like that just in the crazy chance that one of them lives through the winter 
I think many of us are doing similar experiments and could gain from experience sharing. That’s the purpose of this thread. I would like to encourage this sort of reporting.
I have recently failed a strawberry project.
I spent several weeks last winter shaving strawberry skins and laying them down to dry on plates.
I also bought one variety with clay pelletized seed.
I probably accumulated 1000 seeds. Not the first one germinated in my garden by direct seeding.
I kept the water routine going exactly like I would germinate carrot seed. I buried the seed like I do carrot seed, about 1/4” deep.
I just did a quick research on this, and it appears strawberry seeds need light to germinate. I believe this is my problem.
I have failed to keep a number of banana plants alive. I am starting to think it’s always the same reason: I have been overwatering them. I’m going to test with a current pup whether letting the soil dry out completely before watering at all is a good idea.
Oh, but I think I killed my Dwarf Namwah in a different way: I was excited to see if it had survived the winter, so I uncovered the mulch before the last frost date. There was a tiny bit of pale growth starting up from the corm, so it had survived. Then we got another frost the same day. That tender new growth may have been all the energy the plant had left to sprout, because it didn’t grow back after that. It had a very small corm when I covered it to overwinter last year, so it may not have had that much stored energy to work with.
I did manage to keep that Dwarf Namwah alive for all of last summer, so I think I watered it appropriately for hot summer temperatures. My hypothesis is that I need to avoid watering in spring, when the corm is small and the plant isn’t growing very quickly.
I do not even know where to start … there were so many, and still are, and will be
I will start from the biggest two (please note that this is my personal experience, and anecdotical evidence, so it might be entirely different from yours).
First - assumption, that someting “grows like a weed” or “grows everywhere”. So many commonly known as a weed plants did not want to grow in my place. For instance, it took me a couple of years to get the very first … mullein, that grows by its own in highway ditches a mile away. What people consider easy to grow and even invasive, not necessarily be that easy in particular place. Plenty of plants considered being invasive or weeds failed me (I wanted to grow them for biomass or mulch). Over the years I have finally found a few that work.
Second - direct seeding when trying to regenerate land. I have wasted plenty of seeds trying to direct seed into my sandy soil, in a hope to save myself work. In practice, without any preparation or care, nothing really grows. One of the biggest disappointments were so-called seed balls inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka, unfortunately making them was a lot of work, and the result was none. Over the years I have learned, that in order to start growing anything in my soil, the easiest method is to mulch it with any organic matter that is available and to use transplants preferably.
In the vegetable garden - I constantly have problem with growing brassicas: mostly cauliflower, broccoli and autumn cabbages. This might be due to a fact that my soil is dominated with funghi and brassicas seem to prefer bacteria dominated soils, but this is just my guess.
Potatoes from TPS are a failure in my garden. I tried them for three years and in that time produced a total of two seed balls and about a quart of very small potatoes. Growing them form seed just isn’t suited to my climate. I found them easy to grow and they do beautifully early in the season, but all the flowers just dry up or the fruits abort before maturing seeds.
On the plus side one of them remained feral and keeps coming back from tubers missed during harvest, but they still only get the size of a ping pong ball, at most.
Maybe you could grow potatoes from true seeds as biennials that you have to overwinter indoors? You could save those tiny tubers and replant them. Maybe then they’d make seeds, and you could plant those again, and maybe eventually get one-generation-to-big-tuber plants in a later generation.
That’s something I’ve considered doing. I’ve heard it’s common for potatoes to only set tiny tubers in the first year. I figure I still want to breed them to work in my soil, so that seems like a way to do it that may work.
I’ve heard that elm oyster mushrooms are highly beneficial as mycorrhizal fungi for brassicas. And they’re edible. Maybe next time you plant brassicas, you could try planting elm oyster mushroom spores along with them?
Of course there’s also putting sugar or something like that into water when you water your plants, which I believe feeds the bacteria in the soil and helps them multiply more.
The year I rented a lot from the township that had just been plowed under sod, and I got free township compost to ammend my soil from the recycling center where everyone can take their garden clippings (and most take their lawn grass…). I used same to hill up my potatoes. And the plants got HUGE! Like I had never seen, waist high plants! I was all excited. Until I went to dig them and there were no potatoes, not one!
Apparently the compost must have been high in nitrogen and the plants made loads of green instead of tubers
From what I understand that, even in the best situation, that is just what they do. So, after two years you just end up with a new potato but still to propagate it each year, your back to saving tubers. I just ain’t got time for such things. When someone breeds them to produce an actual crop and reliably make seeds, in one season, I’ll definitely take notice.
Closest I ever seen to that is in the one video of Julia’s potato patch. Looked like she actually had some potatoes to eat AND seeds, from seeds, but I think it’s due to her climate being much more friendly to them than mine.
For the mullein, did you buy seed or collect from plants locally?
This idea is attractive to me. I do not see biennial as a negative for my situation. The biennials that I have been playing with (carrots, beets, parsnips, and onions), grow when my heat loving plants cannot grow. I am not much of a leaf eater. If I don’t want to grow leafs, what else is there to play with in the mid to late fall and winter? If I can figure out how to make TPS fit into this structure, to some extent maybe, I have no problem with that.
That’s a painful lesson! Maybe the gem we can takeaway from this experience is maybe we should diversify our soil amendments, not too much from one source, especially new or untrusted sources.
My first year gardening I bought bags of cos manure from a hardware store and mixed it into my beds. I struggled that year to grow anything. I wonder how much my failure rate that year had to do with the composted, bagged cow manure.
Thanks Emily, in my veggie garden a mushroom that grows commonly is Stropharia rugosoannulata - so called wine cap mushroom. It is edible and quite delicious. There might be a problem to introduce other one, since it is very well established. As to bacteria, I use compost teas prepared with addition of molasses, there are billions of bacterias in them, but forest habitat and its soils always tend to steer towards funghi domination.
Austin, I have tried both. I have bought some seeds, and I have collected plenty from vicinty of my homestead. These are very tiny seeds, so I believe I have sown tens of thousands to get my first mullein plant. Since then, it self-seeds, but there are usually 2-3 plants near the location of the very first one.
