On today's Q&A, I wanted to address a question I get quite frequently this time of year in personal emails, through my Instagram DMs, and even in some Facebook groups.

And that question is, what is wrong with my fill in the blank?

That's one of those things that all of us ask, especially when we're new gardeners, when things

aren't working out as we had planned. We may not know why our plant isn't growing the way we

expected. We may notice something on the leaves and we don't know if it's disease or a pest or maybe

there's a fruit problem or maybe your plant is getting eaten entirely and you don't know

if it's an insect or an animal of some sort. That's really the frustrating thing about being a gardener

is you do all this work planning and then you actually have something growing and then something

happens and you have trouble figuring out what the problem is. I totally get that

frustration. In fact, I feel it quite frequently when I'm trying to troubleshoot something in my

garden and I understand that we want the answers and we want them now and we want to know what I

can do to fix it. Well, when I get these questions, sometimes it's hard for me,

to be honest with you, because I have only been gardening for eight. This is my ninth year.

And so I haven't encountered everything that can possibly go wrong with different plants.

There are some diseases that I've never had to deal with. There's some pests that I've

never had to deal with. I don't know your particular growing conditions. I don't know your

soil. I don't know your water. There's so many factors that it's just really hard for me to be

able to tell in many cases. Now there are some things that are pretty easy. I can tell you

pretty quickly what early blight is. I can tell you if I suspect a beetle or a worm. You know,

those are some things that I've learned over the years. But in general, it's really hard for me to know.

And partly, it's because I'm not educated in horticulture. I don't have a degree in that. I'm not a master

gardener, although I've always wanted to go through that just to be able to add to my knowledge,

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