We start 2025 with nearly 11 inches of snow piled on top of a layer of sleet sitting on a layer of ice. It’s the perfect time to reflect on the past year and start planning for the next. While we learned plenty of what to do differently in 2025, there are a few things we did better compared to the year before.
1. Our top achievement of 2025 was without a doubt building a woodshed. To boot, it cost nothing more than our own labor and hardware. We made the sides from invasive elms that needed removed. The roof is sheet metal from a local business that was re-siding their building. No more tarps and a winter of dry wood.
2. This year we dried our herbs in the oven and ground them in a coffee grinder. In the beginning we used a mortar and pestle which is incredibly time consuming. We were able to fill jars of basil, parsley, sage and oregano for the spice rack and make mint and lemon grass teas.
3. Our squash experiment paid off in 2024. We started zucchini and summer squash inside so that they were about to flower when we put them in the garden. This allowed us to get a month or more of vegetables before the squash beetles got them. We’ll be doing this again for the 2025 growing season.
4. No new chickens. Getting new chicks every year is fun, but always ends with the Rooster Problem. You can only have one rooster per yard/coop. You can order pullets (female chicks), but it’s still not a perfect sorting system and they are often more expensive. If we don’t have a broody hen this spring, we’ll likely get a half dozen chicks to make up for the three hens we lost this year. We also have a few that don’t lay much anymore. They get to stay, but we could do with a bit of an increase in eggs.
5. Pulled volunteers. This might be the hardest for me personally. I hate pulling all those little tomato and bean plants that just want to grow. However, when they pop up in places that will crowd out other vegetables they have to go. We were able to successfully transplant a few. One tomato managed to grow to a giant bush on the back side of our large chicken yard. The chickens enjoyed the treats as they fell.
6. Finally, we switched over to all glass jars for honey. They are more expensive but can be safely heated when honey begins to crystallize, which all raw honey does. They also can be reused or easily recycled unlike plastic.
Now for the lessons learned. You would think the list would get smaller each year, but it never does.
1. We planted our luffas a bit late in 2024. This was the first time we grew them so we can chalk this one up to being amateur luffa grower. We’ll be planting them earlier this year. We will also be removing small luffas to allow large ones to ripen in time.
2. Sweet potatoes don’t need great soil. Despite a late summer drought we still filled two five gallon buckets with sweet potatoes. Many were very small and several long and skinny which was probably the result of growing them in nutrient and nitrogen rich compost. We did get a soil test in the spring that showed we had high nitrogen and thought this was a good thing for all vegetables. Not so much for sweet potatoes.
3. No tomatoes in the kitchen garden. This is the smaller garden close to the house. It isn’t tiny, just under 900 square feet, but it is ideal for container and box growing. The tomatoes grew so fast and so large they took over half the space making it difficult to get to anything else. We’ll also be more diligent in pruning this year’s tomatoes. In addition, we will be more careful about where we plant sunflowers this year. They are allelopathic plants meaning they produce a substance that can be toxic to potatoes and green beans.
4. We also have decided carrots and beets and greens do need to go in the kitchen garden. In 2024 we broke a golden rule of permaculture, these plants need more maintenance and need to be closer to the house.
5. While 2024 was our best year for herbs there is one thing we’ll be doing differently this year. We planted a few groups together in large containers which made it hard to keep track of what was what. This year they will all be planted separately.
Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda’s
We preserved more food this year than ever before. This was a combination of having the new canner and being more dedicated. Still, we definitely could have preserved more than we did. We also waited too long to plant peas and didn’t plant enough when we did. Finally, we allowed the green beans to get so out of control they were difficult to harvest. We’ll be going back to tripods for beans in 2025.
So, get out the seed catalogs, the notebooks and graph paper! It’s a balmy 21* right now with a windchill of 10*. I can’t think of anything better to do than start planning for spring.
Have a lesson or successful change you would like to share? Please post below or on one of our social media posts of this blog!
Happy Planning!
Audrey L Elder
Fourteen Acre Wood
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