garden fail friday: coulda bean a contender; dirtypillow death bed

since i missed last week’s garden fail friday i’m posting two this week. first up: contender bush beans.

about half of them came up the correct way, while the other half behaved like ingrown hairs, sprouting long stems and growing leaves without ever completely popping up out of the soil.

fail #2:

i knew watermelon seedlings hated transplant but i wasn’t expecting this one to totally kick the bucket, and with such gusto. this corpse is a blacktail mountain watermelon, a special open-pollinated variety bred in northern idaho in the early 80s (here’s a great article about them from northwest food news.)

a while ago it looked like i wasn’t going to have space to grow melons at all this year, but then i cleared out a large new bed (the failed “wild area” from last year.) i spent hours digging out all the weeds, excavating huge rocks, adding lots of compost and finally building up some lovely dirtypillows for the melons to nestle in.

off to the side i planted sunflowers, then a triamble/shamrock pumpkin plant, then moon & stars watermelon seeds, then orangelo watermelon seeds, then this blacktail mountain plant. the seeds haven’t come up yet. i had high hopes for watermelons this year but it looks like they might all be fail.

i already replaced the dead plant with a zucchini, and now i’m thinking i might dig into a different dirtypillow and try direct-seeding another blacktail mountain. they have a short enough DTM that it could work.