Each year, as the garden season winds down, it’s a good idea to assess how your garden grew. Hopefully, everything you planted was amazing but things don’t always turn out the way you hoped.

Sometimes flowers do not grow and thrive. And sometimes you’ll struggle with diseases and pests. And of course, you might over-plant and regret the excessive amount of growth.

The best gardeners will learn from each mistake or failure so that next year’s garden will be even better. Here are some ways you can learn from your own failures this year.

Related: How to Wrap Up The Garden for the Season

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5 Quick And Easy Lessons From Your Garden Failures…

Lesson #1-Start with A Garden Analysis

Before you can learn from your missteps in the garden, you need to analyze what worked and what didn’t. Spend some time working through each garden area. Determine what grew well and what you struggled with.

Why do you think these problems occurred? Knowing the why can help you come up with solutions. What could you do to prevent the problems from happening again?

Now make yourself a list of the problems that you need to work on next year. This is not to beat yourself or your garden up. It’s to help you make wiser decisions so your garden can be better than ever.

Lesson #2-Do Some Research

It never hurts to do a little bit of digging to see if you can get answers to your questions. If you had a disease in your garden, what was it? Are there some helpful solutions that you can find to control it? You can start with a good gardening book or talk with other gardeners you know.

Finding out how others handle the problem can help. But remember that not all resources are created equal. When researching a problem, I like to start with a quality resource such as Sunset’s Western Garden Book. Next, examine how garden companies and garden experts solve the problem. Finally, take a look at how other gardeners solved the issue.

One of the best resources for learning to handle garden problems is to talk with local garden experts such as a Master Gardener. They’ll have a better idea of the issues that are common to your climate and garden zone and will be able to make suggestions based on that. So reach out to your local Extension office and ask for help.

Lesson #3-Flowers Can Fail

Did you have any flowers that failed to grow and thrive in your cutting garden, flower pots or beds? I had several growing issues this year that you might be able to relate to:

Diseases:

Zinnias are my go-to flowers for summer-time bouquets but this year they were hit with powdery mildew. Consequently, I got very few flowers for cutting. My peonies also struggle with this disease so my research will focus on ridding myself of this problem or at least minimizing the spread.

Under Performers:

I planted foxglove for the first time this year. The first blooms were beautiful but the subsequent blooms didn’t grow very well. The flowers had weak stalks that easily fell over and they didn’t produce enough flowers to use in any bouquets.

Crowded Plants:

Cosmos grew abundantly from last year’s seed drop. Too abundantly. Despite my thinning and giving away transplants, they were too close together and so the flowers were small in size and difficult to harvest…I was unable to reach over the front flowers to get to the back of the bed.

So what flower fails did you struggle with this year? Did they get over-watered, produce no flowers or get eaten by deer? It’s best to recognize that some flowers just won’t do well in every garden. Can you find solutions to the problems or find alternative flowers to try next year? Instead of getting discouraged, learn to let go. Foxglove just might not be compatible with my garden and that will be okay.

Related: How to Create a Cutting Garden

Lesson #4-Gardening Is A Continual Experiment

Each growing season is an opportunity to experiment with new plants. They might be perennial shrubs or annual flowers. Maybe you’re trying new flowers in your cutting garden or new herbs in your kitchen garden. Each time you plant something new or create a new growing area you can learn something valuable to improve your garden.

Even when an area or plant has problems, it’s an opportunity to learn more about this wonderful hobby. And the more you learn, the more excited and engaged you become, which can help make you a better gardener. Even people with “black” thumbs can improve over time when they try new things.

Here are a few experiments that you can learn from:

• When you create a new garden area, weeds are going to rule the day. In my new Kitchen Garden, I didn’t cover the bare areas with anything to prevent weeds. I was hoping that the plants would grow quickly and spread to minimize weeds. I battled weeds the whole summer long. Lesson: Cover the bare ground with mulch to reduce weeds.
• Don’t overbuy plants at the Nursery in spring. We’ve all done it. Gone to the garden center to get a few flowers for our pots and come home with a truckload. Unfortunately, you can end up with too many plants to get into the ground all at once. Some of them will end up dying because you didn’t have the time to get them planted. Lesson: Plan several trips rather than one “buy everything” trip.
• You planted something without really knowing it’s growing habits. This can create havoc in your cutting garden and flower beds. My “mistake” this year was planting Borage. It’s a pretty herb that the bees (especially bumbles) love. But it has to be staked up or the branches fall over and break. And it’s one of the most prolific re-seeders I’ve ever had. In early August, I pulled up the plant because it looked so bad. Not long after, I noticed a massive amount of new starts. They completely took over one section of my herb bed. Yikes. Lesson: Be sure to do some research on plants before adding them to the garden.

Related: How to Create a New Kitchen Garden you will Love

Lesson #5-Write Things Down So You Don’t Forget

One of the best things you can do to help improve your gardening skills from year to year is to actually keep track of the things you’re doing in the garden. Let’s face it, our memories are a thing of the past. Whether due to aging, too much information or not being organized, it can become difficult to remember what and when we planted. How much we spent. Or the ideas we had for next year.

You don’t want to make the same mistakes twice, so keeping an annual garden journal is the perfect way to track your activities and thoughts. There are so many ways to journal your garden activities. You could jot things down on a calendar. A nice blank notebook works well or you could purchase a fancy journal on Amazon.

I’ve tried all three of these techniques and over the years I came up with my own format for keeping track of annual garden activities. I created an Annual Calendar/Garden Planner to use each year when I track my garden activities. You can get a copy of the planner for yourself by clicking here: The Annual Calendar & Garden Planner.

As many gardeners will attest…Gardening Grows On You! So while your fledgling efforts may feel like failures, they are actually opportunities to learn, experiment and grow in your gardening efforts. These lessons from garden failures can be a springboard to improving next year’s garden. Before you know it you’ll begin to have those amazing years where your garden will be perfect…at least for the moment!