Who is a stoopid s**t, and why am I?

I’m not the world’s most enthusiastic gardener, so most of what I grow has to fairly robust and not require much input from me. If it can’t tolerate neglect, it’s no good to me.
But every now and again I try to do something new, and many of those things I manage to kill through my ignorance.

Some of my “knowledge” was literally learnt at my mother’s knee: and some of it was absolutely wrong. “Don’t touch fennel, every part of the plant is poisonous!” BULLDUST, Mama. Every part of the plant is edible, and tastes delish, and it took me 60 years to learn that. I am aware of allelopathy (look it up if you don’t know, it can save you grief if you know about it), but if I have a plant that’s not doing well I always forget to check.

Recent balls ups:

And the mint? Everybody needs mint. We had an old washtub kicking around, mint went there. Because it’s just outside the door, it has had a few horticultural experiments just tucked into it, “To see what would happen,” or, “Where it’s close handy so I can look after it.” Garlic, ginger, a (very expensive) pineapple have failed in there. Eventually I asked Dr Google. He advised mint is quite strongly allelopathic, and I was a noodle for not knowing.

I got a free red pineapple pup from a fella up the road, which I started rooting in a glass of water. I planted it straight into the garden once it had roots, and it was growing good. The store-bought one that had been in with the mint got planted out at the same time. It was twice as big as the red pup. Today:

The store bought one has not grown a bit. Did the mint kill it? No, there was a gap alongside it, and some fool had a couple of bits of fennel he had sprouted, and he thought the wee gap would be just right for a couple of herb plants.
Yes, Matilda, I now know fennel is poisonous like my mother said – to other plants, not humans!

While the red pup grew, it didn’t do as well as I had expected. Behind it I have got cucumbers with heaps of flowers, but no fruit. In between the cukes and the pineapple I had planted some rosemary. Yep, it’s allelopathic. It has such a vigorous root system it starves anything nearby. Worse: it repels insects. No bees for the pollination, no cucumbers.

So now the fennel and the rosemary have been shifted. They may live, or they may die, but where they are now they won’t be killing my desirable veges. If I used the same patch of ground all the time for my brassicas I could grow rosemary at the end of the bed and not have to worry about white butterfly, aphids and diamondback moth. But your brassicas get clubroot if you use the same place all the time…