The 2025 garden season is here. Hope springs eternal. Visions of beautiful flowers and bountiful harvests dance through my head. This year will be the best yet!
More often than not, each new season is better than the last–especially with plants that come back every year. Experience makes a difference too. Lessons learned in previous seasons make for better decisions each year.
I enjoy growing annuals from seed and like to try new and unusual varieties. Failures are common and often my fault. Some get another chance, some don’t.
Growing everything from seed requires a different kind of planning. With no idea how well seeds will do, I tend to over-plant. Too much is better than not enough.
Planning starts with two lists: seed on hand to grow again and seed I need to order. Other than deer-resistant varieties for the front, my options are limited only by garden space. Climate is also a factor, but not necessarily a deal-breaker.
Armed with my order list, I went seed shopping. Some varieties were only available from one source. I ended up ordering four packs of seed from three different places (Burpee, Park, and Seed Savers Exchange).
Some selections were not on my shopping list. Several are hard-to-find favorites from earlier gardens. A few are new or different versions of varieties I already have.
Figuring out a planting schedule is the next step. Some seed–like squash, cucumbers and corn–go directly into the ground at planting time. Making sure to leave room for them in the garden is the challenge.
The rest need to be started indoors as much as twelve weeks before the last frost. My predictions for the last frost date tends to be exceedingly optimistic. This year, I moved my guess to late- rather than mid-April.
Two weeks too early is more likely to be a problem than planting a few weeks later. I’m chomping at the bit to start seed, so waiting a couple of more weeks is the hard part. I think I can, I think I can….
I’ll keep you posted and plan to do a post soon about new selections. As always, thanks for stopping by.