Garden Mistakes and Lessons Learned Over Time

So first I want to talk about some plants that became more work than expected in my garden.

Some of these may not be a surprise to experienced gardeners, but I wanted to first talk about the mistake of letting plants any plant in the APACA family self-sow.

So the APACA family includes herbs like dill and parsley.

It also includes carrots, flowers like Queen Anne's lace and poison hemlock.

But what I'm talking about today is specifically dill and parsley.

I intentionally allowed dill and parsley to to bloom in two separate areas of my garden.

One was in my vegetable garden.

The dill was the herbs that I only use like once a year or I save for long-term use in the vegetable garden.

And then I have a small kitchen herb garden outside of my back door.

And that's where my parsley grows because I can go out and cut it fresh for a meal easily.

So I did intentionally allow those to self-sow both for the pollinators and just for the convenience of not having to replant them.

And Honestly, for the dill, after I used what I needed for my pickles, the flower heads, they were pretty, they were attracting pollinators, so I just decided to let them go.

And initially it seemed like a great trade-off because I do like volunteers in my garden and I like being able to choose crops to self-sow.

But...

Dill and parsley in particular spread like crazy because they have these compound umbels, which are the style of the flower.

So they have hundreds and hundreds of smaller flowers that create one compound blossom.

And so that's hundreds and hundreds of seeds per plant.

And or just per blossom even.

And you multiply, you know, dill can have a half a dozen flowers on it.

So.

This became a problem.

The dill became a problem in the vegetable garden because the seedlings are so small and so fine that I couldn't pull them.

And I underestimated how easily those seeds would germinate.

They came up in my onions and I had to wait for them to get large enough that I could actually grab them and pull them from the soil, which means that in the short term, they also, you know, use the water and the soil nutrients that I would have rather given to my onions.

So parsley was the same thing.