No More Water!

The black thumb is a real thing! Turns out I did not get my father's gardening genes as I had hoped. I didn't get my Mom's either because she's good too. I got some DNA mutation which gives me a black thumb apparently. Did you know you can give your plants TOO MUCH water?? Probably not possible for you but I am guilty of plant homicide by drowning :(

Remember my beautiful mailbox bed? Made with Blood and sweat and tears?

And then I added this beautiful mandevilla that was going to add big, beautiful, pink flower behind the mailbox.

Wow....and now that I've seen that picture again it makes this one look even more pitiful...

Holy cow....I did not realize it looked that terrible. I mean I knew it looked like death but I did not notice the extreme change in it. Now my thumb feels blacker... 

So apparently I drowned it. Right after I planted it we got a TON of rain. Read buckets and buckets of rain poured down on Raleigh. No problem! Plants love rain! This is great! Well then it stopped raining and I continued to dump buckets and buckets of water on it. Seriously...buckets...my hose isn't long enough and I don't have a watering can. 

So when I finally noticed it wasn't doing so hot, which was probably much later then it should have been, I called my Dad. Dad asked about my watering schedule and suggested I might be drowning it. He told me to dig a little moat around it and see if the soil was wet. The soil wasn't wet, it was completely flooded. I would take a shovel full of mud out and the hole would immediately fill with water...it was pretty bad. So this is how it looks now. I pulled as much mud and water out as I could and laid it out around the hole to dry out. Then I filled the hole with half a bag of miracle grow that I had left over and I haven't touched it since. I'm hoping it will bounce back. 

My other plants don't seem to mind the water too much at all! To be fair, I'm not sure what this one is supposed to look like so if red is a sign of drowning these are going down the tubes too but at least it's less noticeable to the neighbors :)

My lovely succulents are doing amazing though! They've doubled in size and are starting to turn pink around the edges. Apparently I am amazing at growing anything that takes as much effort as a cactus. Go me!

Any other words of advice for my poor mandevilla? We might give it another week and if there is no sign of improvement we might call it dead and replace it. We shall see!