2025 Garden

An enjoyable season in the garden! Let's go through everything

I ordered seeds from Johnny's, Harris, Pinetree, and Tomato Growers, which ended up being ~ $160.

I bought a real LED grow light this year, a Mars Hydro. It's very powerful and I'm still trying to learn the proper distance/lumens. I did have a lot of problems this year specifically with my tomato and pepper seedlings and I partially blame too much light.

I also set up a drip irigation system (from drip depot). It has a main line with drip tape for nearly every garden row. It's a little finicky with the drip tape popping out of the connectors every once in a while but it does work quite well

Inputs/Outputs

Once again a very expensive hobby but I do pull a lot of produce out of the ground!

Seed Saving

Finding seed saving to be a fun part of gardening and not too much work or space taken up. This year I saved:

• a bunch of cilantro/corriander
• Mammoth sunflower
• Large amount of last year's bunching onions
• Muir lettuce and some kind of romain from last year
• A ton of tomato seeds, which were fermented and dried: Orange oxheart, Cipolla's pride, San Marzano, Cherokee purple, and Roma II

I had not known that tomatoes don't (or rarely) cross pollinate, so very nice to save so many seeds when they are so pricey to buy.

What I grew this year

Lettuce & Kale

Tried 3 varieties of lettuce, Gabriella (a red lettuce) wasn't super productive. Summertime is a 'crisphead' (it balls up) that did well, and Muir (on the right) which makes beautiful heads and was very tolerant to bitterness/bolting. I'll be growing Muir next season for sure.

I had big slug problems this spring which ruined a lot of the lettuce when it was at it's peak.

A friend gave me their 'salad tower' though which produced quite a bit of slug free plants, and is just a fun part of the garden.

Kale always does well and I had a full row of it that stayed in the entire year. I haven't figured out how to get lettuce crops during high summer so we switch to kale salads. Vates was maybe the best this year IMO

Root Vegetables

'Tokyo Cross' turnips were amazing eaten fresh. 1/3 of a bed of 'Red Ace Beets', which wasn't nearly enough. Beets keep forever in the fridge and I should probably do an entire row.

Garlic

8lb of garlic from one bed, which was half 'Duganski' hard neck, and half mixed soft/hard from last year. I harvested it a bit late so it didn't store great but we ate a lot had enough to plant a full bed this fall.

Blackberries

Thrilled to have fruit this year. Forget the name of this variety (a friend gave it to me) but it's thornless and we got 6 quarts of fruit from the patch. I had to put a bird net over it which is kind of finicky. We ate most of these fresh and I made a really good pie.

Gooseberries

I did have a bit of very good gooseberries on one of my plants. My mom has an old plant that bears heavy and I cleaned it out with leather gloves and made very good gooseberry jam. Processing (taking off the stems and goosebeaks) took hours and kind of sucked so next time I'm probablyh going to just mash, strain, and make jelly. (or maybe just process everything and make fruit leather?)

Anyway gooseberries are one of my favorite fruits, nothing like them!

Paw Paw

These were from my mom's trees but I'm including them because I hand polinated them this year and they produced quite a bit of fruit. I'm going to be honest and say Paw Paw is kind of an aquired taste I haven't aquired yet. It also causes stomach discomfort, especially when baked although I got it just from eating too close to the skin I think. Still cool though!

Cucumbers

Massive year for cucumbers, mainly because there were almost no cucumber beetles. Maybe they got froze out or something? I try to get 'gynaceous and parthenocarpic' varieties now, which means all female flowers and don't need pollination. One row which gave us 140 slicing cucumbers: Diva (again) and Sashimi (very big, I think i like the bumpy Soyu varieties better though).

I also had 2/3 of a bed of slicing varieties "Adam Gherkin", and "Cool Customer" which were both productive.

Pickles

I did two big canning runs this year, one dill and one bread and butter. The dill recipe I used was maybe a bit salty, the bread and butter is great.

I also got some large fermentation jars and tried a brine fermentation. One jar was more active the other but not as much as I had read to expect, so I just had a nibble of each. In retrospect I think tap water might have too much chlorine? I'll try with distilled water next year. I do really want to crack this process because it's so easy to pack compared to water bath canning.

Tomatoes

Big problems with my tomato seedlings this year, barely half survived (though stunted). I was planning 4 rows of tomatoes which is like 44 plants, and I had to buy seedlings from the local garden center to fill them out. (also gave some of the surving seedlings to my mom who has things figured out better) In the picture you can see mine in the front and the garden center's in the back.

In the end I had

• 1 row San Marzano and Cippola's Pride paste tomatoes
• 1 row Purple Cherokee, Black Krim, Better Boy.
• 1 row Orange Oxheart and Brandywine
• 1 row determinate Roma II paste

The Orange Oxheart did amazing, very large fruit that set heavy. Kids didn't like the orange color though.

The other varieties had issues with splitting and spoilage on the vine but still a ton of tomatoes, I was giving cardboard flats of them to friends and family.

I canned a respectable amount of tomato sauce and dehydrated quite a bit too.

Peppers

1 row of hot peppers (early jalepeno, red rocket, and hot cherry) and two rows of Italian 'Carmen'. I let everything get red before harvesting. The carmen rows did so so but I had so many plants that there was enough. Huge harvests of the hot peppers, which I can only eat so much of but I gave a ton away. I also made 6+ quarts of hot sauce (de-seeded peppers with some tomato sauce), and got a food dehydrator for making chili powder.

The chili powder is especially good, I separated the varieties so I have different heat levels. I am putting it on almost every meal I eat!

Other

Heavy Hitter okra again this year, a whole row with cucumbers on the ground. It's one of my favorite vegetables.

Also did 'Jade' bush green beans which were beautifull but I only did a third of a bed which wasn't enough. Good variety though!

'Long Island Cheese' pumpkins. I grew these in random spots outside of the garden.

Garden Projects

I got kits to make a big container chicken feeder and a 5 gallon bucket water station that I can fill with the hose from outside the coop, which makes the chickens so easy to take care of. They mainly eat kitchen scraps though, we have a big bucket for them and a smaller one for compostable stuff like coffee grounds/paper towels etc.

I made a rolling seedling table where trays sit as they harden off (or until I can find time to plant them). It's the exact same height as my work table in the garage and in the winter I've been clamping the mitre saw to it, which is nice to wheel around.

Been working on hot compost piles, which I've gotten up to 160F. I should have maybe 3 cubic yards of my own compost to use for next year.