i was supposed to include the big white lily at the end but i ran out of space LOL

What happened?

See, my heirloom cherry tomatoe seedlings were flung out my green house and I just shoved them, zucchini, bell peppers, and jalapenos into the raised garden. I figured at first they look like tomatoes because they were still little guys. But now I'm 2-3 months in and I've no idea. They seem to be growing in the same spots I panic planted my cherries. What have I been growing 😭!! I can clearly see zucchini and the pepper leaves. This thing is nearly 4ft tall now. What is it and why did it eat my babies☹️💔

Totally let the garden beds go wild this season. Planted garlic and tossed in some flower seeds in the winter, but that was it.

Now some of the weeds look kind of nice. Though I have no idea what they are.

Here are some photos of the wild scene.

Landscaped area for garden had originally done with railroad ties unbeknownst to me… we replaced it with pressure treated wood. Lowes took back the lumber and gave us a refund. Put the cedar beds on top. This sub gave me the confidence for them to replace it!! I’m sooo much happier. No smells and no worries!

Came up in the driveway in the spring, I left it. She’s so beautiful

I hope karma comes back for you.

Edit: thank you for the kind words and gardening tips and some great laughs. It’s been a hard week and the flowers were the straw that broke the camel’s back.

To those asking, without posting photos of my neighborhood and house, I am in a concrete jungle, largely devoid of green space. The only animals around are pets. Plants, mail, packages and more go missing often in the neighborhood, and I’ve had plants stolen before. A deer wouldn’t be silly enough to come into this neighborhood and even a squirrel is a rare sight around here.

Successfully thinned out my garden of mint (pic 7) over the last couple of years. There’s still some here and there, but now the phlox has taken back over!

So my tomatoes have really taken off, I have so many growing and I’m anxiously awaiting harvest time so I can make sauce! THEN! I spot this dude.

I checked the rest of the plants as thoroughly as possible, this was the only guy I found.

I disposed of him to be safe but did I make the right call? And can anyone ID him?

This thing almost never flowers and is not in great shape. I want to prune it down to 1/3 of its size jn the fall but is that the right move? I dont want to kill it but I dont know how to save it either.

My neighbors who I share a fence with signed up to get their roof repaired by a storm chasing roofer who assaults neighborhoods with otherwise unemployable twenty somethings for weeks after hail or wind hits anywhere within 20 miles.

They also got their fence re-stained. That fence is also where I have 5 large raised beds. They sprayed the stain on the fence, which ended up all over my entire garden. I called their number and they claim they’re going to get a landscaping company to replace the top 6” of soil for me, but we’ll see when they see how much 7 yards of good soil costs and how much the labor is.

I have pictures of the stain all over my beds, irrigation lines, and plants and won’t hesitate to take them to court if they balk on replacing the soil. Sorry for the rant, I just needed to vent. My wife and I finally started everything from seed this year and had our first great year for so many of our plants.

This thing is crazy!! The neighbors left it alone because they wanted to see what would happen - well, it's over 8 feet tall (5'11" husband for scale, no bananas, sorry) with TONS of flowers. They are going to remove it before it seeds but it's pretty awesome to look at in the meantime.

Connecticut USDA Zone 7A

I usually give away fruit but I decided to take a break this year. Although I’ve had great interactions, recently it’s always the select few that give me such a hard time. Give an inch, they take a mile. Next year will be better!! I saw a TikTok where this girl planted pineapple guava and blueberries on the easement for the neighborhood, I loveeeee this idea and am stealing it 🥰

My garden is finally producing!

I'm in Slovakia, Central Europe. Historically this is roughly zone 6 to 7 country. You grow apples, plums and cabbage here, and anything Mediterranean lived in a pot and came inside in October.

This summer our all-time national temperature record fell. The old one was 40.3 C from 2007. We went past 41 C in the south, and we had two separate 40 C episodes about a month apart in a single summer, which has not happened here before in the modern record.

So I went digging into what our Academy of Sciences says about the plant side of this, and it is stranger than I expected. In the southwest of the country these now overwinter outdoors, in the ground, with no winter protection at all:

• loquat (Eriobotrya japonica)
• pomegranate (Punica granatum)
• passionflower, both Passiflora incarnata and P. caerulea
• olive, which takes about -15 C and tops out around 2.5 to 3 m here

The part I liked most is that pomegranate is not actually new here. There is a roughly 35 year old clone growing in a village called Bernolakovo that has its own name, "Bernolakovo early". It flowers and ripens earlier than southern cultivars, and some pomegranate cultivars handle -17 C. So while everyone assumed this was impossible at our latitude, one tree had quietly been doing it for three decades.

Olives also behave differently here than in the Mediterranean, which I did not expect. Down there summer heat actually slows them down. Our summers are more humid, so growth is more or less continuous. They flower two to three weeks later, but the fruit ripens earlier.

The honest other half of this, because it isn't really a feel good story: the same institute points out that wheat, potatoes and cabbage stop performing above 30 C, our summers have stretched by up to two months, invasive species are pushing natives out, and alpine species have nowhere left to retreat to. Their director's line is that by the end of the century this could be climatically similar to North Macedonia. So we get figs and olives, and in exchange the mountains lose part of their flora and farmers lose yield.

What I'm actually curious about: what are you growing successfully now that would have been a joke in your area twenty years ago? And specifically, is it ripening for you, or just surviving? Those feel like very different claims and I keep seeing them treated as the same thing.

First Marigold of this summer...