2025 is wrapped up here in Minnesota, zone 4. It's October and the temperatures are dropping. We've completed most of the chores before winter but there always seems to be a press for time to get everything buttoned up. Anyways let's review our 2025 season.
Garden Revamp
We utilize the indoor grow tents we sell on our website to get starter plants going for spring sales and for our own garden. Getting seeds going in February and March is a busy time, but once everything is in the tents it's a breeze until spring. By then the plants have filled up their space and are ready for hardening off, but doing that transition can be challenging. Where do you put all those seed trays? Is it warm enough at night to leave outside or do they need protection?
For a small business efficiency is key to keeping labor costs low. That's why this year we invested in a greenhouse. After much research we decided on the Palram Canopia Glory Kit from ShedsDirect (not affiliated or sponsored). For the sake of brevity I won't get into that decision here, but you can find out more details about our greenhouse on a different blog, Choosing a Greenhouse.
This decision is a game changer. It created a safe controlled environment to harden off seedlings for continued development, increased our usable footprint, decreased labor cost moving plants around, and extended our fall season.
We look forward to continued use and improving our setup with AC Infinity automation controls for temperature and watering. That'll be a later post.
Tomatoes
Bumper crop! Just a fantastic year. After getting the greenhouse project completed and the garden boxes rearranged and refilled with soil . We now had two garden boxes for tomatoes this year. One for snacking and general eating which included cherry and beefsteak tomatoes and another box for sauce which were filled with Roma tomatoes.
The Roma plants were lined up down the center of the box and around the perimeter was a bouquet of sage, kale, and basil. All did very well cohabitating in that 4x8 ft box. And the Roma's! Some were larger than the palm of my hand. My freezer is full, and my wife and I are excited to make tomato sauce soon.
Broccoli, Brussels, and Carrots Oh My!
There was some mild success this year in the brassica family. I got a few small heads of Broccoli, but nothing jumbo like you see in the stores. Still tasted good though! Brussels were kind of a disappointment too. The heads never really formed any size. The issue could be for the same reason my broccoli didn't create a large head either. I think I crowded the plants by placing too many close together in the same box.
I also tried to stick carrots in the same box as the brassica. Those didn't work well either. There was too much shade from the foliage of the broccoli and Brussel sprouts that most of the plants didn't grow. Only those towards the edge where they could received enough sunlight grew large enough to harvest. Oh well lessons learned.
Peppers
It was another great year for pepper harvest. In addition to my standard habanero and jalapeno plants. I also tried Paprika (Hungarian pepper) and green bell peppers.
I was able to harvest an abundance of bell peppers but the Hungarian's didn't do as well. They were is a separate box and received to much shade from a trellised gourd near by. Note to self, peppers love sun!
I still made the mistake of not pruning my pepper plants early enough to allow all the jalapenos and habaneros to ripen. I'm going to mark my calendar for next year that around September it's time to start snipping them back.
Co-Planting
With the new box layout I tried to change things around a little bit. This year I tried co-planting my jalapenos with Sunflowers and habaneros and bell peppers with Sorghum. Now knowing that peppers like sun they were placed on the southern side of the box and the taller sorghum and sunflowers were on the northern side of the box. This ensured that the taller plants didn't interfere with the smaller pepper plants. It worked great. Like I said before, plenty of beautiful peppers. Just needed to prune earlier to have them ripen in time.
Herbs
I've got Basil down to a science but I tried Sage this year. I've only used sage in cooking once in a while but thought I'd see how fresh sage goes for sales and for personal use. It's a very hardy plant that grows very well in variable conditions. This fall I harvested all the sage leaves. We dried some for cooking, hung some in the kitchen as a potpourri for it's aromatic smell, and also saved a few fresh leaves for tea.
So far the sage tea has been my favorite. You simply take 2 leaves, lightly crush to help release oils then steep in hot water for couple minutes. Take out the leaves, add a touch of honey and voila. You have a wonder light tea that tastes almost light chamomile.
Something New
I like to experiment with at least one new garden plant each season. This year I tried Lauki, Tareh (Persian Dill), Sage, and Hungarian Pepper.
Lauki, is a sweet bottle gourd. Tastes similar to zucchini but a little sweeter. It was a fun plant to have in the garden but probably one I won't grow again. Reason is that the flowers are not naturally pollinated by insects here in the Midwest. This required hand pollination, which isn't hard but not something I want to spend my summers focused on.
Tareh, was a gem. Growth and harvest is similar to green onion or chive. Once the stems are long enough you can cut them back and they'll regrow. So you can easily harvest a few times through the summer. My favorite dish to use Tareh in was breakfast eggs. When scrambling a few eggs in the morning for the family I'd add in a small handfull of diced Tareh. Delicious and the wife gave compliments to the chef!
Sage was a new experiment too. I had the seeds so I thought why not. There wasn't much interest from customers to buy plants so I thought I'd save a few from compost and add them to our garden. They were easy to grow, no maintenance, and easy to harvest. As stated previously so far my favorite use has been for Sage Tea.
The reason for Hungarian Pepper is it's used to make paprika which is one of my favorite cooking spices. However sunlight was blocked by the large Lauki trellis so my harvest was minimal. What peppers I was able to collect I've dried the peppers and plan to grind them soon for paprika. Should be tasty!
Question for You
Did you try anything new in your garden this year?
