The Garda Dibble and Digz garden gloves.
Who doesn’t enjoy getting free things? Especially gardeners at springtime.
You like freebies, right? We hope so, because here’s your chance to get something for nothing! To celebrate the arrival of Spring, we’re giving away some goodies to help you get the season started. Five lucky readers will receive our Garda Dibble seed planting garden tool and a pair of Digz nitrile-coated stretch knit gloves. How to enter? Between now and 11:59 PM EST Sunday, March 30, post a comment below describing your best success story with growing plants, as well as lessons learned from that experience—if any. We will select five winners at random and send each one a Garda Dibble and Digz gloves. Good luck!
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My favorite thing is sprouting avocado seeds like my grandmother taught me. She had these tall gorgeous plants that were avocados from like the 1960s! Pretty awesome. My best success has been replicating that process since she passed. Helps me feel she’s still with me. It’s taught me that there is so much beauty in life. It’s taught me not to be wasteful. It’s taught me that the ones we love can still live on through beautiful little moments like that. They are gifts. And along those lines, just this week I started sprouting a pineapple top bc I just thought it’s so gorgeous I would hate to throw it away. I thought of my grandmother and said to myself “I bet this is doable”. I googled and confirmed it was! She’d be really proud, I know it! 🙂
Growing oaks, hickory and walnut from collected nuts has been a learning experience. Learning to deal with the squirrels digging up the nuts, nipping the shoots and eating the yearlings.
I was skeptical that my own saved seeds from my heirloom tomato plants would be as good as newly purchased seeds each year. I finally decided to test it…my seeds vs the store bought….well, guess what? I had as good or in some cases better germination rates with my own seeds!
It opens up the door to purchase different types each year, so my collection grows.
I am able to pass along many of my own saved seeds, bringing gardening for me….full circle!
Stacey
My best success story comes from last year. I had my first vegetable garden in over 20 years. I had seed packets which I primarily accumulated over the past 10 years, mostly from fall and winter clearance sales. Not thinking they would have a high viability rate, I planted them very thick. Boy was I wrong! But when thinning the radishes, turnips, carrots, and beets, I saved what I pulled out to thin. I rinsed them all carefully and sautéed with garlic, Olice, oil and a splash of balsamic vinegar and had the best baby greens ever!
This year is very successful so far, even though there is still snow on the ground. I have started a lot of seeds such as tomatoes, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, peppers, and many more non root vegetable varieties in recycled k cups. I now have hundreds of seedlings ready to transplant into larger containers until it is safe to move them outside to cold frames!
Hope to win the Garda Dibble, I have plenty of seeds to sow directly in the garden!
I’ve been gardening ever since I was a child. Learning how to cultivate different things with all their different quirks. Every year sunflowers usually are my greatest success because of their beauty and ease of growing.
My best gardening experience is growing a sweet autumn clematis. I dug it up from the front yard of a house a friend was renting (it was a seedling) and I love free plants! I learned to look around and try free plants or seedlings because it is fun to try and if it dies it doesn’t cost any money.
My Best Gardening Experience was the year before last I wanted to buy new flowers and garden. At that time I did not have a lot of money because I wanted many flowers for my front English Garden and my two urns that flank the front door. So I went to Lowe’s and went in the back to the wayward lost and left for dead plants. These where reduced by an extreme prices. I got plenty of flowers for my English garden and I got two Red Geraniums to put in the urns by my front black door. Now these geraniums only cost 25 cents each and from the time I planted them they never stopped growing and blooming. Giving me Joy each time I seen them. They filled out the urns and started even cascading down the urn. Even at Christmas they Proudly looked Lovely with my wreath on the door. So I suggest to Everyone to go in the back and find these plants and give them some love and they will give you love back. Your Giveaway is Wonderful and would make gardening easier and a pleasure I would Love it. I am also going to Share it. Thank You !!
Best garden experience yet–
Growing lush, tender leaf lettuces, edible flowers and herbs groing and thriving on my back porch in the middle of winter! (Even in the snow!) I had incredible salads all winter long!
My success story are hollyhocks! My “fail” were rabbits nesting in my tulip beds. {Although I don’t consider it a fail. Beautiful animals and birds are always the best garden art!}
My best gardening experience is working alongside my Dad in the garden.
My best success story was when we tilled up our front lawn and planted an edible landscape. Hauling in trucks of compost and buying a chlorine filter made our new lush landscape thrive.
My best success story was successfully growing lavender rose bushes.I had no prior experience with roses, and they got several diseases but I managed to fix the problems and the bushes lived for years.
My best gardening success was growing tomatoes against a south-facing fencing and leaning large mirrors against the fence to reflect light back onto the tomatoes, worked great.
My best gardening success has been growing roses and grapes from cuttings taken from plants belonging to my grandmothers. Having fruit and flowers is great, but feeling connected to past generations is even better.
One of my best success? Plants that come up on their own in the compost pile…they tend to be hardier and bear excellent fruit.
I like to plant sunflowers (and other flowers) among my crops to attract beneficial insects and the offer food to my bees, which reside in their hives near the garden. 2 years ago I added goat manure to the beds for the first time, and that year I had the largest, most gigantic sunflower you ever saw! It grew up amid the cucumbers, and some of the cucumbers used that sunflower as a trellis–those were the easiest cucumbers I’ve ever picked. 🙂
I like to experiment every year – this last year for me was lettuce (I’ve never had much luck growing it before and I think I’ve finally figured out why – it loved the shady spot I put in this last summer and finally over wintering pepper plants in the house for the winter without additional light or heat. With the big propane shortage this year my house has been between 50-65 degrees all winter and they actually survived to date… The big transition of going back out into the garden will be the fun part of seeing how well they produce and how big the plants will get.
My best garden experience has been with garlic. It was the first item that I have ever planted in late summer/early fall. It was amazing to watch it begin to sprout in February, harvest scapes in late spring, and then harvest the bulbs themselves in summer. It was so satisfying to get two crops from a single planting.
I have always loved growing tomatoes. I learned to dig a large hole and replace half the dirt with manure and compost. This will feed the plants all season and the plants grow large and abundant. It’s also important to pinch the plants and limit the branches for larger fruits. I love expire mentions with heirloom varieties and learning to save seeds. This plant has always been my most successful and most anticipated harvest of the season.
My best success is growing zucchini the last two years. I had never tried them and the first year the bugs took them over. The last two years I’ve used diatomaceous earth around each plant and it has worked like a charm!
I think my biggest lesson was in starting my own seeds, be patient with pepper seeds! They don’t germinate as fast as the rest of the seeds do so I tossed the soil and started over only to realize it takes longer than say tomatoes or lettuce ect… Too eager to see them sprout, I mothered them just a little too much! Success would be when we figured out a trellis system that could hold up to all the tomatoes we plant after many experiments. This year I’m starting seeds that I saved from my own garden last year and they seem to be doing just fine! I do something different every year just to keep it interesting. I would love one of the garden Dibble since I plant a large area every year, thanks for the opportunity to win! Happy Gardening 🙂
The best flower garden I ever had was the year we ended up with a lot of bad hay that we couldn’t feed. I took the bales apart and piled the flakes around the flowers and in the pathways. The only weeds/grass that grew was the stuff that sprouted from the seeds in the hay and was very easy to pull out since it wasn’t anchored in soil. I learned that Ruth Stout is right about the benefits of thick mulch.
We dug up part of our lawn and put in five raised beds – best decision ever. I can’t eat the lawn but I sure can eat those veggies every summer. 🙂
our 10 strawberry plants turned into 20 or more …and they produced strawberries during the drought last summer! such a wonderful first experience for my daughter who considered the strawberry bed her project 🙂
I learned that the rabbits in our yard love going after things I plant. We had to try a couple different set ups to protect our veggies!
I think one of my best successes with gardening has been growing enough tomatoes and peppers to preserve for the year. But the lesson I have learned is that it’s EXHAUSTING to put all the veggies up during the summer, but so worth in later in the year. Thanks for offering this giveaway- looks great!
My favorite gardening experience is tending to the raspberry bushes and tomatoe plants and then eating the wonderful fruit. I especially like the raspberries we have since they bear fruit in early summer almost through to the early to mid fall. Yum Yum I can almost taste them now!
I had heard planting castor bean plants can sometimes keeps moles away so I ordered a packet of gibsonii castor bean seats online from Amazon. They sprouted beautifully and have done a pretty good job ridding us of moles. This experiment has been successful in another way too. My first generation of plants has produced their own seeds which dropped around the parent plans. I just noticed today several have already germinated…Bring on round two! 🙂
Last year I planted butternut squash inl with my flowers to increase the size of my garden. I am forced to have my garden next to my house as there is a bikepath along my back yard.
I’ve had good luck in gardening with both veggies and herbs before. However I just moved to the high desert of Arizona from the very rainy island of Kodiak Alaska. Not sure how this will go but am trying hard to cover all bases including dealing with the dreaded ground squirrel. Maybe I should let you know at the end of the season!
Had the best luck with planting tomatoes in pots/buckets on the patio last year. While we tilled, fertilized and planted a large plot of corn along with other veggies and looked forward to the harvest, the weather (rain, drought, then rain) did not cooperate. The corn did not mature and the other veggies were sparse.
The only silver lining was that the tomatoes planted in buckets on the patio were delicious, and we were thankful we planted them seperate from the other veggies.
Will always plant additional veggies in buckets from now on, as they seem to always produce.
I loved starting my own veggie garden. I have great success planting my own tomato plants and saving the seed from the heirloom ones. I have learned not to plant carrots in my garden. They do not grow well in the clay soil, no matter how much I hope they will grow.
My 2 year old tiny Myers Lemon twig is now a tiny bush and has a lemon growing on it. Have it stationed in a spot where (hopefully) the lemon will come to fruit!
I’ve learned so much in the past ten years of having a garden, working the different parts of our acreage with different kinds of soil. Clay soil is impossible to grow onions in. My most recent successful experiment has been working with snowpeas. It was not a blistering hot summer last year and I worked hard to keep them picked. As a result I was still picking them off the vines when the frosts came in October. Great for stirfrys in the winter.
I grew some gourds from seed and boy what a success….many gourds all over the place. Then I had to harvest, dry and scrub them before decorating. Quite a chore but lots of fun!!
My best sucess is learning to garden with 9 hungry dear hanging out in my yard. You have to figure out what they don’t eat and grow the rest indoors with grow lights.
I will be starting to garden this spring so I don’t have any experience but I hope to learn a lot!