Well my results this year (Lubbock) were less than stellar, to put it mildly. I've been gardening for 55 years all across the country, including Puerto Rico, and have never had this much trouble.
In so-called "spring" birds ate nearly all my fennel plants. I ended up with ONE, but at least it got enormous. They also got all my dill and I'm not sure what happened to the rue other than it just up and died. I had some REAL tarragon (the french sort) that I thought was going to make it and it up and died as well. Due to only recently moving here I had to buy all my plants this spring and many of those bought from a local nursery either died or eventually (once the weather cooled off a few weeks ago and they could finally start flowering and setting fruit) turned out to not be what I thought I bought. I had 2 of three "white/yellow" fairy fan flower die and I've NEVER had fairy fan flower do more than grow slowly in extremely hot weather. Once it dries out even a little bit its hard to rewet unless you flood it for a long period of time, which would damage anything already planted in it.
I also had to grow in containers this year, which I've done before frequently, but much to my shock what passes these days for "potting" soil or container soil or whatever label you want to put on it is little more than finely ground wood mulch. To make THAT work I had to soak the stuff thoroughly - the very first plants I put in it before I figured this out did NOT thrive because the stuff is very hard to wet evenly once it gets dry and guess how humid it is (not) here LOL! It seemed sort of nominally damp but its basically splinters of wood and little else.
So I would fill up 5 gallon buckets and just cover it in water for a couple of days, then dump it into my wheel barrow to mix in peat moss. I used to use Growstone in my containers but they're out of business and all my bags of the stuff got left in the last move. The stuff was reusable forever but not if it gets left behind. After that things grew a LITTLE better - only to soon be faced with 95-100+ heat here for weeks on end, and no blooming or setting of fruit.
Now that I am getting some (generally tiny) Roma tomatoes, I'm faced with blossom end rot. How could that be, thunk I, as I have been feeding them whey left over from my yogurt making the whole summer! Yes, but they weren't setting fruit then. Now that they are setting fruit I realized I have not made yogurt (which I normally make in 3 to 4 gallon batches every week, then I hang it to drain off the whey so that's a whole lotta whey) in a month and a half, hence no calcium for them just when they needed it most. Well I've been distracted by a variety of things including yet another move upcoming this spring (*sigh*) and now it is October. Not much to be done now.
This woody container mix stuff needs to be fertilized liberally (because woody stuff ties up all the good nutrients), which I did, also religiously. I guess there are too many of us on the planet, the Good Stuff (potting-soil-wise) is exorbitantly expensive and every bag of container type soil I bought this year was the same, basically wood chips and splinters and little else. Planting in ground up wood (its not even ground up BARK) is not what I'druther, but its what I got this year. I was fertilizing every week. I used epsom salts and the whey every week as well but not at the same time as one interferes with the uptake of the other. I was getting leaf curl on my tomatoes but that was largely alleviated once I got a regular schedule going with the alternating whey and epsom salts. I was going to get SOME just due to the heat but the whey and epsom salts definitely reduced that.
I bought (again from the local nursery) what I thought were jalapenos and cayennes and what I got were 2 cayennes that look the same, one sorta-cayenne-ish looking pepper, no jalapenos, and some kind of bell pepper that due to the heat and all have only sparsely set very small odd looking fruit. One of my "Roma" tomatoes looks more like some kind of cherry tomato but could be the poor soil and the heat. Apparently eggplant is anathema in Tejas because there was nary an eggplant to be found anywhere this past spring. I was not able to start my own indoors as is my wont, and given the timing of the upcoming move, won't be able to do so next year either. So I was dependent on the big boxes and local nurseries and have been (and will be again next year) stuck with whatever they deign to stock.
And for the first time in my life I've got some weird kind of aphid or something not only on one of my peppers but also on the Desert Willows I planted in the front yard. I've seen similar bugs on ornamentals from time to time over the years, but never on a tree or any of my garden plants. Flea beetles have been the bane of my existence since they banned rotenone (I LOVES me some eggplant, but so do the flea beetles), and I've seen other garden pests, but not aphids on my veggies or on a tree! At least I THINK they are aphids. Tiny little clusters of white things on my pepper plant that I can't quite see, and tiny little clusters of black things on the ends of the stems of my Desert Willow that I can't quite see. Gotta find the neem spray I have around here somewhere.
I had plans to landscape with mostly Texas Natives and now all the learning and planning I put into that will go to waste. I did manage to get 3 texas sage planted and the 2 desert willow, but one (NOT the one with the aphids or whatever they are) doesn't look that great. It hasn't grown much, the other tree is a good foot taller now. They were planted at the same time and were both about the same height but the 2nd one is doing much better, bugs on it notwithstanding.
However the pigeon berry seems to be doing adequately well. The Gregg's mistflower is doing fantastic and I actually worry now that I planted it too close to the pigeonberry. And 2 of 3 beauty berry that I got from the Arbor Day foundation are finally doing ok (I accidentally weed whacked the 3rd) but they were shipped bare root and took forever to sprout. I was not impressed with the Arbor Day foundation plants I got. The camellia died, the beauty berry were very slow to take off and still are small, and 2 butterfly bush plants I bought were DOA, I mean totally crumbly and dry. Not sure what to think of that. My dad was a lifetime member, I only got around to it this past year.
The pigeonberry, Gregg's mistflower, which I planted here, and some other stuff I planted at my son's house (fall aster, texas bluebells, Engleman's daisy, cowpen daisy, ruellia, gaillardia, another type of ruellia aka "wild petunia") I got from the Texas Native plant society (NPSOT) in Ft. Worth area last spring, and they are all doing relatively well, though I worry about the wild petunia as I had that planted in containers and only recently transplanted it into his garden bed. Not sure it'll make it through the winter disturbing the roots this late in the season like that, but one can hope. I will say the stuff self-seeds VERY freely, the pots were FULL of little starts. My plan had been to harvest seed from the stuff because I only had the two plants, to propagate more, but it drops the seed so fast I never got the chance LOL! Had I planted them in the ground a couple feet apart I'm pretty sure they'd have spread towards each other quite rapidly.
Oh and no rain for months here. Sometimes it would rain at my son's house 2 blocks away and nary a sprinkle here. I watered religiously so that was some comfort to my poor plants in all the heat, but no amount of watering is going to help when its 95+ for months on end. Last I checked, late August, we'd already had 22 days of over 100F heat. I saw on a climate change site where they were predicting 21 days of over 100F weather in this region in 10 years time. Yeah. Already past that.
My geraniums are finally perking up but too late, they'll be dead soon when what passes for winter finally rolls around. I will try to overwinter them but I've not been here long enough to have my growlights set up. I left 5 year old geraniums in the last move so I've done it in the past, but ... things are a little more challenging these days.
Next year I'll likely be in NY state somewhere so I won't be battling extreme heat and drought. The growing season is (nominally) shorter but given nothing sets fruit in this kind of heat for months on end, I would HAVE to end up with more actual produce LOL! But it will be retail plant starts and container growing again next year, wherever I end up, as it will just be too late to do otherwise when I get there. And another year to learn about the local natives before I can start landscaping.
I will say, the cayennes, once they were able to set fruit, have been prolific. And it looks like some dill managed to self-seed into a pot of dead geraniums that I didn't get around to picking up from amongst my container plants, not sure how that happened since the birds got all of mine well before it got big enough to even THINK about flowering, let alone set any seed. One of life's little mysteries, I guess.
Everything else, though, not so much. LOL!
. No rain and lots and lots of triple digit temps beginning in May. More of the same all summer it would seem.
and don't let the weather get to you.
So I want to baby this plant because I've lost too many in the past and I want one to actually live for years. 
