If you read my recent post about food costs, I hope it spurred you to think about gardening in 2025. You can expect setting a decent dinner on the table to become more and more expensive, so anything you can raise yourself will make a difference. No, you don’t need a lot of land. What you do need is to choose your crops wisely and manage them well. Here are my recommendations for your 2025 garden.
Soil Preparation
Building the best quality soil is THE most important thing you can do in any garden. It’s especially important if you don’t have much space. Good soil means higher production, better nutrition, increased drought tolerance and resistance to disease as well as insects. It also, in my experience, means better taste. Choose your garden site for maximum sun exposure – it’s the thing over which you have the least control. Then get your soil tested. Very few of us can claim to have excellent soil to start, but you can build it with compost, organic fertilizers, soil amendments, earthworms and green manure. The techniques are the same whether you garden on a plot of land, in raised beds or containers.
Choose High-Producing Varieties
When you’re dreaming over the seed catalogs, look for words like prolific, abundant, bountiful or heavy yields. If a catalog entry raves about taste and doesn’t mention the size of the crop, be wary. Other positive signs are “long-harvest period” or “suitable for cut-and-come-again harvest.” Choose varieties that are adapted to your climate. If you live in a high rainfall area, drought resistance isn’t that important but resistance to humidity and related diseases makes a big difference. Variety choices are even more important if your garden is small. For example, always choose pole over bush beans – the former will produce twice as many beans in most cases.
Focus on the Basics
Yes, home-grown melons are likely to be luscious, especially compared to supermarket melons. They also take a lot more space, water and nutrients; can only be grown in summer, and usually take 90 days or more to mature. Lettuce and chard, on the other hand, can be grown for nine to 12 months of the year, can be harvested at six to eight weeks and can be planted once for multiple harvests. They also provide healthy food for the gut microbiome, which is critical for your overall health. Multi-purpose foods always get my vote – a bean that provides snap, shell and dry beans like Jacob’s Cattle, for example. Runner beans are a multipurpose pole bean and also attract hummingbirds. Amish Paste tomatoes are just as good for slicing as for canning.
Garden All Year
Gardening in 2025 is going to be challenging no matter where you live because climate change has us in a tight-fisted grasp. Still, there are a number of vegetables that can either be grown the year around or over-wintered in the garden. I can usually grow chard 12 months out of the year. The leaves will freeze when temps get down to the mid-twenties, but as soon as things warm a bit, the plants will start growing again. Root crops like parsnips, carrots, beets, salsify, turnips and Jerusalem artichokes will happily snuggle under mulch so you can harvest them between snowfalls. Do, however, make sure you control rodents like mice and voles. You can grow many cool-season crops in both spring and fall – lettuce, peas, spinach and root crops come to mind. Kale tolerates heavy snow quite well. If nothing else, plant a green manure crop to build your soil over the winter.
I wish you happy gardening in 2025!
