2025 Spring Season: Review

Every new season is a new learning opportunity, and this one is no different. Here is everything I learned during the 2025 spring season, and in the following reflection I hope to show you what to do and what NOT to do through my numerous ridiculous failures. This will outline the success stories too, of course! Let’s celebrate who survived, and scratch our heads over those who didn’t (this sounds overly morbid, we’re talking about plants here).

1. The Success Stories

The 10 chili’s I propagated survived, unsurprisingly, because once they get going it is exceedingly hard to fail this one. You should also expect that the spicier the chili, the harder it is for them to even propagate in the first place. I expected this, and as such I only had a single ‘Habanero’— which I am still quite excited about tasting! I had fruit ready to eat in May, and they are continuing to fruit efficiently.

Speaking of chili’s, ‘Bird's-eye’ came in here and hit me like a truck. I’ve never really been able to grow a chili that became the mouth-numbing kinda spicy, but here is ‘Bird's-eye’ showing off, maturing early and blowing up your mouth. If you want a chili that’s super spicy, super easy to grow and fruits a lot and frequently, this is your guy!

image: ‘Bird's-eye’ chili and cilantro. Tiny but mighty!

Tomatoes: To Harden or Not to Harden

image: the team I transplanted without hardening May 26th.

My Newcomers

Celery has proved to be so ridiculously simple—they love to grow so much! They also smell really good. I let them get very leggy, but since these are crops that you can bury as deep as you want, their stems grew back strong and healthy once transplanted. I adore how they grow and how they look in my garden.

The Root celery is uh… Less exciting, and I mistreated them pretty badly. I have two of them that survived this abuse, so let’s see how all that turns out at a later date. I treated my Artichoke about the same, but they’re also alive and all, so they’ll just do their thing.

As usual, I bought like 5 more types of tomato this year, because I’m an addict. I’ll talk again and again about ’Silbertanne’ because this is my new most favorite cultivar in the universe. It’s so lovely and so fluffy. I can only hope the fruit itself is delicious, but I’m just having a blast with this one as it is.

I wasn’t looking forward to cabbage, yet I bought like 3 different types of various brassica to worry about. -Because I’m stupid. I absolutely love cabbage, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t love the Cabbage white butterfly. Every time my parents have tried to grow brassica they get absolutely destroyed and riddled with this pesky butterfly’s children. I find this cute, of course, but I would like to grow a nice, succulent head of cabbage at least once in my life. So I did what I had to do: cover the planter with a sheet. I don’t like this usually, but it’s working, and cabbage is actually happening with zero pests in sight. Woaw…

The Black-Eyed Susan vine is a flower I’ve been obsessed with ever since 2 years back when I saw one at a flower shop for way too much money than I could justify buying an annual for. I’ve been determined to grow this one for some time, but didn’t get the opportunity to buy the seeds until now. Turns out: she’s ridiculously simple. She flowers even in the smallest pot imaginable. Transplanting my 3 ladies has been less successful, because I didn’t harden them. What matters is that this didn’t kill them, growth is coming back, so I’m expecting more of those magnificent bright orange flowers within the next month!

image: Black-Eyed Susan vine.

The Other Discoveries

To close off this section, here are the general top events of this spring and the 2025 indoor season.

1. Indoor cilantro is awesome. They’ve always bolted* so quickly when I’ve grown them outside in the past, but indoors you get lots and lots of delicious greens consistently! (If you like cilantro…) I’m going to keep sowing them in different places outside just to see how to get the most cilantro possible, seeing as it’s my favorite herb.
2. I’m once again letting last year’s parsnip be a perennial and bloom, alongside another unexpected root veggie with shockingly beautiful flowers: black salsify. Yes, I should sow a new round of both because I would also like to eat them, but bugs ABSOLUTELY ADORE parsnip blooms. There’s ants. There’s beetles small and large, flies, stinkbugs and even wasps! It makes me so happy to sit and watch.
3. On the topic of bugs, the insect hotel I bought late last year never managed to attract any inhabitants. This spring I switched its location to a shady corner between my planters, and now I’m seeing frequent activity, spider webs and little clay houses!!
4. Snapdragons. Oh my goodness. My garden is infested with them! This is the best day of my life! It turns out that snapdragons are very good at reproducing themselves, which was a shock, seeing as I already grew like 20 of them indoors just because they are one of my new favorite things… Grow, my babies!
5. Perennials, in general. I can’t get over how the apparent lack of success the other year was actually not unsuccessful, at all. As I’ve shown in my album, my Sea holly, Creeping thyme and regular thyme all came back stronger than ever. I keep feeling like I’ve unlocked some kinda secret, forbidden knowledge here.
6. Here are the last of the things that came back from 2024 this year: My Cosmos, Love-in-a-mist and Hollyhock. (the Hollyhocks will not flower until next year, if I know these things correctly). And, as always, my Poppies, Marigold, Corncockles and Cornflower from my 2023 wildflower mix are here! They have not bloomed yet, but I’ve become very familiar with how these look. Soon enough I will get my little meadow back.

*Bolt = flowering/seeding. When a herb bolts, it stops producing the leaves you wanna eat, dying shortly after. In cilantro’s case, it gives the leaves a bad, woody flavor.

image: the goings on when you let your parsnip bloom.

2. Losses & Bad Decisions

A series of unfortunate events

Looking past my personal gripes, here are all the rest of the things that went totally horribly wrong this spring:

• My Asters. Oh my god, my Asters, I’m so sorry. Nobody propagated, for some reason. Then when three did, I killed two of them because the plugs I use dried out so quickly. I take back everything I said about plugs in January. I’m not putting my Asters through this again. One Aster remains, and it’s so tiny right now I don’t think it’s going to have time to flower at all…
• That was not the end of my flower problems. I sowed the bulk of them too late, leaving me with little time to amend my mistakes. I forgot to sow my cheap, simple Petunias, and then I fumbled the three expensive ones I had. I now have ONE Petunia. Then I forgot even more and completely excluded Hollyhocks. Then it was too late, and I barely have any flowers ready to go for my containers. This isn’t that deep, I guess, but I miss those early blooms right now. Boohoo ;_; …
• Legginess abound. I have not let my plants get this leggy since 2022. I just let things happen, and all of them, the tomatoes, the cucumbers, melons, the celery, the squash ended up skinny, frail little things. I hate to see this, but here’s the important part: they lived anyway, chill out!!
• The asparagus beans died. AGAIN. These beans I get—it was a super cold spring this year. I can fully believe that 5°C is enough to make a fresh little bean croak. It is however quite hilarious that I can not for the life of me make ’Yard Long’ survive. I killed or failed to propagate this exact cultivar last year, too. Maybe this specific cultivar is just extra sensitive in general? I need to try direct sow them again… I WILL crack this nut.
• The pie pumpkins died. All three of them. No, my ’Sweet Dumpling’!!!!! D: This is probably the moment where neglect and legginess proves to be a killer. They were too frail, and the outdoors too harsh. The bigger squash are quite alright, but also growing unusually slow. I really messed this up this time. This is also a reminder to stop procrastinating and direct sow another round, since squash/pumpkin can still be planted in June and WILL have enough time to mature for August-September. Whew!
• The whole potato fiasco. It’s not too bad, because they are now in the dirt, but this isn’t going to be a year of early potatoes like last year. Not only was I late to the sowing, I was also so late to buying them that they were sold out. The only ones I could get my hands on were indeterminate** autumn potatoes, which I’ve never grown before. I need to remember to mound these, and probably wait until into winter until they are ready to be harvested. So much for those sweet sweet home-grown midsummer taters, but there will be eventual taters.

**Indeterminate = late potatoes that grow in several layers in continuous stages. Their counterpart, Determinate potatoes, grow faster and produce earlier, creating a much smaller but predictable crop in the process. I’m still in the process of learning more about this topic.

Silly mistakes aside…

I need to realize that one thing that was out of my control here. This spring has been ridiculously cold. I went around worrying, nail biting, cursing over how little I’ve gotten done, how small everything was, how late I’m going to be seeing the fruits of my labor because of my neglect... Then my phone suddenly notified me of a picture taken at this exact same time, last year. In this photo, my perennial pollinator garden was already blooming in May.

And suddenly it clicked: It’s not me. At least not uh, completely on me, because the flower failure was positively, 100% my fault. Quite simply, a month of May that does not hit 20°C at a single moment is a stagnant garden. Well, phew! Sometimes a season just straight up sucks, and in this scenario you simply just have to make the best out of it.

Here’s to the next 3 months of green, lush, flowery goodness!

3. Takeaway

So, TL;DR,

• Sow flowers early and often. It’s that simple.
• Hardening is overrated—if you can rely on a diverse, mild climate, that is.
• Legginess might screw you over, but more often than not it’s not that bad, especially when it comes to plants that root from their stems (celery, chili’s, tomatoes). Relax and bury those things.
• Covering your planters is ugly but effective. Protect your brassica from becoming a nursery!
• A lot of things is going to be out of your control when your hobby revolves around the will of the wilderness.
• Take some time to appreciate what your garden does without you.

Thanks for reading my big long post, see you in the garden, gamers!