Gardening mishaps happen, and when they do your only real option is to laugh and learn from it.

There’s no way around it. Gardening mishaps happen. And if we’re going to be honest, some of them are quite the learning experiences. After all, it’s one thing to grow a patch of really hot peppers instead of those sweet banana peppers you thought you were growing. It’s another thing altogether to accidentally smack a hornet’s nest with your rake.

One nice thing about gardening mishaps is that we all have them. And at some point, we can meet up with our fellow gardeners around the kitchen table and share those stories and all have a good laugh. Hopefully we learn something, too. Because there are some mistakes that really don’t need to be repeated.

One such occurrence happened to Ivy Booth, as she was digging a new garden to grow roses. Knowing she would need to dig deep if the roses were to survive the cold Winter, she pulled out the shovel and went at it. But she got quite the surprise and a funny nickname when something unexpected happened. I think you’ll get a good laugh from her story, The Gas Garden.  

Of course, gardening mishaps happen to non-gardeners, too, as writer Heidi Epps reveals in Not a Plant Person. We’ll give her credit for trying, but we never realized how easy it is to kill a succulent!

And don’t miss Harvey Silverman’s story about a very rocky garden. Too, Too Many Rocks explores the seemingly simple topic of what to do when you find your garden plot full of rocks. And then more rocks. 

Get more stories about gardening mishaps below

Feel free to stay a while and enjoy all the funny gardening mishaps we have to share below. And be sure to check out our Gardening Mishaps Collection while you’re here, which features a hand-picked selection of our favorite stories from this category.