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My 2025 Garden Plan: Simple, Sustainable, and Colorful

Spring has sprung… or has it? We’re still quite a few days away from the spring equinox, but other than some rain today, the weather in Central Pennsylvania has promised us some sunny days ahead!

I’ve gotten my gardening gloves out already and have been itching to get my hands in the dirt! This year my garden plan is a little less ambitious than it was last year (the year we put in 4 raised beds and ripped out a ton of rotted bushes!) and I plan to keep it very simple with our vegetable garden, growing a good amount of the veggies I know we’ll use, and less of the “exciting” stuff that ends up as rabbit and deer food when we just don’t reach for it.

One of my main focuses this season is to begin to tame a flower bed that was overgrown long before we moved into our house. It stretches along our creek bed and is full of burrs and brambles. There are some existing flowers that I will do my best to preserve, a lilac, black-eyed Susans, purple coneflowers, hyacinths, and surprise lilies, but I am hoping for a total redesign when it’s all said and done. My plan is to smother the weeds that we can, rip out the big gnarly things that need done away with, and fill the bed with hardy perennials and pollinator plants. There’s a mix of full sun and shade areas, so I will need to do a bit of studying up for the exact placement of each plant. I’d like for it to be low maintenance long term, but for now it needs some definite TLC and a big heaping handful of color!

When allowed to dream, I picture snow drops and lily of the valley, giant alliums, bearded irises, tulips, hot pink peonies, an English rose or two, a willow tree, Japanese anemone, lupine, globe thistle, and poppies in this space! I’ll have to research which of those will actually survive in this particular bed and go from there. I’d also like to make sure there is enough variety of plants with different blooming times to keep this garden bed interesting and beautiful year round!

In the vegetable garden, I’d like to focus on our heavy hitters: tomatoes, onions, peas, and herbs. I’d love to have an overflowing tomato harvest so I can make sauces and salsas to use all year long! We use onions practically every day in our kitchen, so having a large stockpile of those is a worthwhile investment as well. Peas are so easy to grow, and they’re incredibly versatile. Herbs are the glitter that make our meals sparkle, so I’ll take as much basil, dill, sage, thyme, and rosemary as I can grow! Garden herb salt, anyone?

We will also need to take heavy precautions against a new pest this year… there’s a little black dog around that thinks our raised beds are her personal agility course!

I’d also really like to focus on composting this season. We have a vermicompost (worm bin) setup in our garage, and it’s been fun to watch the little guys eat our scraps! At times it does fall into neglect because we simply forget about it, but worms are happy to remain undisturbed and they bounce back very quickly! They are a bit picky about what they eat, so I can’t throw everything in there. Maybe I’ll look into a more traditional compost tumbler for some of our less “desirable” food waste. I know our veggies will LOVE compost, so the more we make, the better!

Outside our front window is a space I call “the courtyard” which consists of a circle of bushes that lines our driveway. It’s a bit of a landscaping nightmare due to the slope of the ground and the amount of gravel the previous owners of our home added, in what I assume was an attempt to keep the weeds down. The gravel is just large and sparse enough, however, that the weeds have prevailed. So instead of a weedless “courtyard” we have a space that is nearly impossible to weed without bloodying one’s knuckles. Ideally I’d like to find another solution for this, perhaps brick patio pavers, but that is a project that might not be in the cards this year. I did plant a few David Austin rose bushes in this area last spring, and I am very excited to see them take off this season!

Moving into summer we’ll need to really keep our eyes out for poison ivy, as I got into it TWICE last year, but I think we are close to finally eradicating it on our property. Thankfully most of the areas it grows in are much more tame now!

Thank you so much for reading, please feel free share any thoughts, gardening tips, or ideas in the comments!

What are you most excited to grow this year?

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