Hi Cynthia,
Gardening is frustrating sometimes. Especially when you work really hard and it fails anyway. Here are some suggestions:
Get rid of that landscape fabric. Its not doing your plants any good. In fact, depending upon type, it may be souring the soil.
Make sure your garden spot is getting at least 6 hours of sun every day.
Instead of trying to fix the soil in the whole garden, decide where you want to put plants, dig holes (at least 5 gallon size) and improve that soil with compost, garden soil, manure (for the squash and cucumbers) and time release fertilizer. Adding a couple of handfuls of alfalfa pellets (rabbit food) and a handful of bonemeal will also help. In a 5 gallon size hole, you can plant 3 or 4 cucumbers or squash, or 1 tomato plant or eggplant, or 5 - 6 bean seeds, or 2 or 3 pepper plants.
Water consistently and regularly. If you are watering by hand, make sure you water enough to get down to the bottom of the roots. Also, if you water only the planting holes, you will save water and cut down on weeds.
Insects are an entire new problem. You may have luck spraying your newly planted garden with Neem Oil. It is a systemic that only kills sucking and biting insects (the good insects are safe) and is harmless to humans. If you do use Neem, spray it in the evening after the sun has set. It takes a couple weeks to work but will last a month or more.
There are also the old fashioned insecticides ie: Sevin or something equally scary. DON'T under any circumstances BUY THIS STUFF!! Do you know what DDT is? They used to spray it on people to kill lice and fleas and on food crops to kill everything else.
http://www.panna.org/resources...
Sevin will someday have a similar story. Please don't add to the problem.
Choose plants that will grow to maturity and produce vegetables before the end of your season. Check the "Vegetable Planting Calendar" under 'Tools and Apps' (top of this page) to find out how long your average growing season is and choose varieties accordingly. For instance, my average growing season is 135 days. I grow short season tomatoes that will mature in 60 to 75 days so that I have another couple months to enjoy my home grown tomatoes before the frost kills them (that happened last week
). Cucumber and squash produce male flowers until they reach maturity, then start producing females flowers also. I suspect that if your cucumbers bloomed but never set fruit, they never matured to the point of producing female flowers.
Good Luck! Keep us posted.
