All our Awesome Garden and Backyard Habitat Moments of 2025 (including chickens!)

The year is over and I'm making plans for 2026, but not before thinking back to all the events of 2025. Aside from personal and professional, good, bad or ugly, I always reflect on what went right or wrong in the yard. You know, like everyone does (insert an LOL here!)

The first thing to know before I share my ups and downs, is that gardening is always a learning process and even though you might know alot (and I'm not saying that's me!), many things can still go wrong. Conversely, you can know very little, get lucky and have lots of things fall into place and be amazing! This goes for pollinator gardens, vegetable gardening and herb gardens. I still favor researching, learning....and praying it all works.

We have a lot going on in our little piece of the planet, so this is going to be quite a varied bit of information....

The Negative List...

• Most of our tomatoes did not do well. One heirloom variety of cherry tomatoes were awesome, the rest struggled. I have two thoughts about this: I'm not sure that our soil was healthy enough. I raise tomatoes in the same beds every year, which probably isn't good. There's a reason someone came up with "crop rotation". Perhaps not necessary in a raised bed, but I don't think I properly amended the soil, either. The other issue, for our hot weather loving veggies, is that our Ohio spring/early summer was wet and cool. Tomatoes aren't fans of that. We had loads of tomatoes starting to ripen way too late in the season when it started to frost. I can't control or change weather, so that's an unavoidable loss.

• Rats. Yep, I said rats. And this entry is following tomatoes because it's another way our tomatoes failed: rats (or squirrels) nibbled away almost daily. They weren't polite enough to eat the entre tomato, mind you, they just took chunks out and left them on the vine. So frustrating. Unfortunately, there's little effective countermeasures to combatting Norway rats or Grey squirrels. We live in an area where we're inundated with squirrels and sadly, an abundance of rats following a nearby construction project. Aside from not believing in poison, the chances of secondary poisonings (poisoning birds of prey or a local dog) are to high. Snap traps (inside locked bait boxes) can be effective against rats, but the desire to set them every night is pretty low. We've been at this for quite a few years now and it's a real struggle.

• Lettuce. We had a great setup for growing lettuce: a gutter garden hanging on the east side of a fence. It never got blasted by the west/evening sun and the depth was just right for lettuces. Well, the fence got replaced and we had to take the gutter garden down - and didn't put it back up. I tried growing lettuces in a tall cedar planter, but mixed in flowers and they overpowered the lettuces. I'd strongly encourage you to try a gutter garden; they're tidy, add an architectural element and are perfect for lettuces.

• Ah yes! My biggest fail: my kale bed. I know it's a crazy thing that a failed bed of kale would send me into a tizzy, but I eat kale every day and what I grow tastes far superior to what I can buy. I can only guess that the soil in the bed has had it. I added organic fertilizer, but nothing else. This year I'm replacing the bed itself, so it's a good time to ensure the soil is "perfect" and get my kale growing again! I'll directly sow the seeds as soon as the soil is workable in the spring. I've not grown kale indoors first, although maybe I'll give that a try this year.

  

  woman in garden with kale in her mouth

  

  gutter garden of lettuce in garden

  

  half eaten tomato from pests in garden

  

  a full raised bed of kale in garden
  
  

The Positive List:

This is way more fun to talk about, although It's always good for me to write about the fails, because I learn as I provide info for the article, which is another reason I started this blog!

The list of "wins" is a fun one:

butterfly on zinnia flower

monarch butterfly on flowers in garden

native sawtooth sunflowers in garden and landscape

native New England aster in landscaping

bees pollinating sunflower in garden

backyard chickens eating

chicken coop in suburban backyard

backyard chicken organic green egg

backyard chicken organic blue and brown eggs

woman holding a froglet in a backyard pond

native carolina mantis in a backyard

a native Carolina praying mantis on a pink zinnia flower

a goumi berry bush in an edible landscape

Goumi berries in different stages of ripeness

a harvest of goumi berries

paw paw fruit on a tree in a yard

A Tennessee coneflower in a yard

Native coneflowers in a suburban yard

a woman holding a native coneflower

a honeybee on a native coneflower

coneflowers in a landscape garden bed

• Butterflies! Specifically, the monarch butterflies that visited our yard this year was so much better than 2024. The number of monarchs I released was triple compared to last year! I chalk this up to luck in the weather overall, but [hopefully] to conservation and planting efforts by every day humans. The more native flowering, nectar-producing plants there are and especially the more native milkweeds that are available, the more monarchs we'll all see!

• Flowers. This year, we had so many varieties of asters and most notably, our New England asters were amazing, HUGE and prolific! I'm a huge fan of asters, but sadly most people haven't heard about them. They have heard about and choose their "cousins": mums. Mums don't feed wildlife, they don't provide the pollen and nectar necessary for pollinators. Asters, on the other hand, do all that and will come back year after year. Our Cutleaf Coneflowers were amazing, my Tennessee Coneflowers tripled and overall, our native flowers were just fabulous!

• Chickens. They were healthy, entertaining, laid a load of eggs and got a brand new coop setup. The building of the new setup should have been in the "negative" list, for all the headaches, but overall, it's a far superior design and better for the chickens.

• Wildlife: We had frogs, birds, mantises, dragonflies, bees, butterflies, moths, ladybugs/beetles and our little ecosystem was thriving! I couldn't ask for more. Although... I'd really like to attract an owl to take care of one of the problems on the "negative" list......

• Edible landscaping: many of our fruit bearing bushes and trees knocked it our of the park this year: our Goumi bushes were again loaded with delicious berries. High in antioxidants, vitamin C and actually improves the soil, you can't go wrong with Goumi berry bushes. In the spring they have an abundance of little , sweetly scented creamy yellow flowers and then come the berries! Equally as impressive are our two Paw Paw trees. Paw paws are North America's largest native fruit, the host plant for the Zebra Swallowtail butterfly and the tree itself is beautiful! The leaves look very tropical and can tolerate full sun all the way to shade.

I think that sums up the year in our suburban yard! When the weather permits it, I'm always in our yard: tinkering, exploring and all around just happy. I love sharing what you can do with a typical suburban lot, so you can come home to a happy place, too!