What new plant will you try in 2025?

Joylynn Hardesty wrote:Lotus! Which will be a challenge. I'm going to have to keep water in my tiny baby pool. I've moved to mostly dry gardening. Except for the two months of seasonal drought.

All about why I want to grow lotus. Edible!

Lotus that flowers put energy to seeds and the tubers will be much smaller, edible lotus rarely flowers. The 27 gal black tote or 32 gal trash can will be suitable for growing lotus if you have any.
https://tenmilecreeknursery.com/products/hubei-5-vegetable-tuber

I'd like to try some "old" plants that failed before to see if there's improvement now that I am a better gardener: blueberry, eggplant, tongho, amaranth etc. For some of them I still have the seeds but I will have to buy blueberry plant again.

Going to try some moringa from seeds. Also some alpine strawberries. Have never grown strawberries from seeds before.

On a similar theme ... I built a squash tunnel this year. Have wanted one since the first time I learned of that technique. It will have butternut squash, yard long beans, Dragon's Tongue beans, cucumbers, & probably a few tomatoes climbing on it.

No, I don't think I'll grow any new plants this year. I want to do my best to grow better plants. I mean: better maintenance of the shrubs and perennials, and more attention to the annuals (sow the seeds in the right month, add more compost to the soil, give water when needed ...).
This way I hope to have more yield from my allotment garden than last year.

Was a little dismayed by the Asheville photos as I have been planning on using the cattle panel approach to try mostly vining veggies as an experiment in my new location.  I heard that they are the most primitive varieties and thereby most likely to survive the new heat levels we are experiencing now.  Not sure if the deduction is accurate or not but I also no longer have the ambition to build raised beds to avoid bending over to tend the garden.  The plants are not the only things that like to remain vertical these days.  Have seeds for a couple each of moschato pumpkins,  small watermelons,  tomatoes, field peas & pole beans, cukes, sweet potatoes & malabar spinach .  I know I am already late for planting in N Fla but that will test their survivability.  
Not vining but tried some tree collards last year without success so am going to try that again.  Hopefully this does not attract the hurricanes as the one that hit Asheville just missed me.    

Dale Nute wrote:Was a little dismayed by the Asheville photos as I have been planning on using the cattle panel approach to try mostly vining veggies as an experiment in my new location.  I heard that they are the most primitive varieties and thereby most likely to survive the new heat levels we are experiencing now.  Not sure if the deduction is accurate or not but I also no longer have the ambition to build raised beds to avoid bending over to tend the garden.  The plants are not the only things that like to remain vertical these days.  Have seeds for a couple each of moschato pumpkins,  small watermelons,  tomatoes, field peas & pole beans, cukes, sweet potatoes & malabar spinach .  I know I am already late for planting in N Fla but that will test their survivability.  
Not vining but tried some tree collards last year without success so am going to try that again.  Hopefully this does not attract the hurricanes as the one that hit Asheville just missed me.    

Just a note on growing tree collards. They need a little babying and protection in the beginning. Once they have matured, they are hands off plants, that just need some water. I have started all of my tree collards in containers, and transplanted them when they have gotten too big for the container. The times I have planted them directly into their final home, they usually get eaten, or otherwise dies. Good news though is, that once established, they are close to indestructible.

I am trying a bunch of new plants this spring; I have hazelnut and witch hazel saplings on order, and I hope to a couple of paw paws as well,  In smaller plants, I will try to start some ground nuts from seed.

I planted a bunch of sunchokes in the fall, and hope to have enough to eat as well as leaving some to come back next year.

Ground nuts are actually New England natives, but have been forced out.  They are nitrogen fixing legumes similar to peas, but they also produce edible tubers, and have dark pink flowers that attract pollinators-- practically a perfect plant!


Here's info about groundnuts: https://www.ourtinyhomestead.com/groundnuts.html

I'm trying salsify and swede. Malabar spinach is a godsend in hot weather. It tolerates high temps well as long as it is watered. I find it is not so pleasant raw, but cooked is fine. It also seeds itself. Another virtue!

Artichokes. Starting the variety 'Imperial Star' from seed.  It has supposedly been bred to produce in one season.  However, since I am in long suspected and newly official zone 8, they may just be perennial for me.  I've made a nice new bed for them in hopes that they will stick around more than one season.

I'm trying to build a dyer's garden, so I'm going to try my hand at some dye plants - Japanese indigo and woad. Both produce blue dye. The idea is to see which one grows best in my garden and make it a garden staple.

Leigh Tate wrote:I'm trying to build a dyer's garden, so I'm going to try my hand at some dye plants - Japanese indigo and woad. Both produce blue dye. The idea is to see which one grows best in my garden and make it a garden staple.

I really, really liked indigo, it was pretty easy to grow and seemed to like the summer here in 9b.
I grew it two years in a row but didn't have the space/time to dedicate to the quantities I needed. I did some dying with the fresh leaf and am saving the seeds for next summer, I think.

Tereza Okava wrote:I did some dying with the fresh leaf and am saving the seeds for next summer, I think.

I hadn't even thought about fresh leaf dyeing, so thanks for that!

I also recently found a source for true indigo seed and want to add that to my list.

Riona Abhainn wrote:I want to do a mushroom kit, since I've never done mushroom growing before.  I feel like once I do that then I can try doing it the less expensive and more DIY way.

just got a bag of wine cap mushroom mycelium from NorthSpore.  Hoping they grow.  

Mike Barkley wrote:Going to try some moringa from seeds. Also some alpine strawberries. Have never grown strawberries from seeds before.

On a similar theme ... I built a squash tunnel this year. Have wanted one since the first time I learned of that technique. It will have butternut squash, yard long beans, Dragon's Tongue beans, cucumbers, & probably a few tomatoes climbing on it.

The alpine strawberries took very very long to germinate but I finally got two plants out of an entire seed pack. The two plants multiplied and in less than a year we have 11 plants. They have to be divided, no runners. They are so delicious it is nothing like a store-berry. :-)

Trying out bush beans, especially Blue Lake 274 and Dragon's Tongue. Hoping for lots and lots of green beans to eat and put away! Also hoping to try many varieties of Japanese turnips!

Jen Fulkerson wrote:Every season I enjoy trying something new to me.  This year I'm growing
Malabar spinach: I've heard it's great, and I've heard terrible. I thought I'd give it a try. My family loves their veggies, so why not.
Swiss chard perpetual spinach: I grow Swiss chard, it grows year round here. It's pretty bitter in the summer heat, so I feed it to the chickens, they don't mind a bit. This is supposed to taste more like spinach, I can't wait.
Fennel: I'm not a big fan of licorice flavor, so have never tried it, but my daughter wants it, so it's on the list.
Tumeric: last year I struggled to grow ginger. All of YouTube says how easy it is to grow, but I had a very different experience. Finally at the end of the summer I got some to grow. I planted it in the center of a raised bed that had loofah, and  a large tomato. It hardly got any sun, and seemed happy that way. In our intense heat, it seems it needs to be an understory plant. So I hope to actually get it to grow and I'm going to apply the same for tumeric.
The next list are not exactly new. Last year I tried and failed.
Moringa: I got it to late. It didn't get big enough to survive the winter. I will start them early in the spring, so it will be established, and maybe I can get it to survive the winter.
Butterfly pea: another "easy" on that didn't grow. Totally my fault. I built a raised bed with a trellis. I work for a co-op. We were cleaning the chick tanks, and I took the wood pellets from the tanks home for the compost. For some stupid reason I decided to put it in the beds. I'm pretty sure it was just to much because all the peas sprouted, and grew about 2" and that was it. I think poor soil, and planting to late so it was to hot kept them from growing.
Hyacinth beans: same as the butterfly pea. Bad soil and to late. I removed a bunch of the wood, and replaced it with compost. I hope this and the time to break down added a much earlier planting will make the difference.
Of course I'm always trying different varieties of tomatoes, peppers squash and melons.
What new plant are you trying? Maybe I'll add it to my list.

I grew malabar spinach, and it's perfectly great as spinach goes! Perhaps the naysayers are comparing it to baby spinach they'd buy in a store as salad greens. Malabar is more like the kind I grew up with: bigger, thicker, a bit wiggly looking. I'd eat it raw as a salad, and if it's cooked there is no difference between it and the typical frozen type spinach. Maybe you'll want to remove some of the thicker mid-ribs for picky eaters, that's all.

I want to try turmeric too! I haven't looked into it enough yet, because apparently sticking a piece into a pot of dirt is not working for me indoors. It's shriveling up down in there, lol

I believe Butterfly peas are used to make color-changing butterfly tea! Not sure if it's the flowers or leaves, but it makes a blue tea. When you add some lemon juice it turns purple! What fun! It tastes nice too, cold or hot, though I added honey especially after adding the lemon. I did not grow it myself.

I will be trying loofah and wintergreen! I want to try growing something on the edge of some woods with a lot of pines, and I read here somewhere that loofah & wintergreen would do well there assuming the soil is on the acidic side. I mean I AM assuming it, lol, I'm not testing it, I'm at an experimental stage where I  plant seeds, thank the Universe in advance, walk away, and come back a couple months later. (I can only go to my future land once in a while) Out of 9 things I planted last year, I got a pumpkin and some turnip greens. But if something can grow without me at ALL, then that's really good information for planning other things. And if all I can grow is pumpkins, then dangit I guess I'm opening a pumpkin farm, with hayrides!

Joylynn Hardesty wrote:Lotus! Which will be a challenge. I'm going to have to keep water in my tiny baby pool. I've moved to mostly dry gardening. Except for the two months of seasonal drought.

All about why I want to grow lotus. Edible!

I'm growing lotus for the first time too. Filed the belly button end of the seeds, dropped them in cups of water and they sprouted within a few days. Put them in a container and submersed them in my pond. They've been doing well. Probably a month in the pond now and they are still putting out new pads.

Very excited to grow more of them. The tubers were what I originally wanted, food-wise, but this site made me want to try grinding the seeds into flour: https://feralforaging.com/lotus-bread/

Apparently you can use 100% lotus flour to make bread, which seems rare for the non-gluten flours. I'm not a gluten free guy, but I'm always looking for bread ingredients that are more convenient to grow and process than wheat and its cousins.

Suzette Thib wrote:Trying out bush beans, especially Blue Lake 274 and Dragon's Tongue. Hoping for lots and lots of green beans to eat and put away! Also hoping to try many varieties of Japanese turnips!

I'm trying out pigeon peas for the first time as an annual in my fall goat pasture. My hope is my Memphis summer is hot and muggy enough for them to grow big and then get eaten down by my goats before the December weather kills them off.

Mark Griffin wrote:Artichokes. Starting the variety 'Imperial Star' from seed.  It has supposedly been bred to produce in one season.  However, since I am in long suspected and newly official zone 8, they may just be perennial for me.  I've made a nice new bed for them in hopes that they will stick around more than one season.

I've had an easier time growing its kinsman cardoon in the same zone. For whatever reason, artichoke just doesn't thrive for me, though I keep trying. But cardoon takes off and outcompetes most everything around it. The cardoon stalks don't match artichoke hearts for texture and richness, but they hit some of the same flavor profile.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:Nothing new in my world, plant-wise. I think I will be aggressively scaling up more of the same old. Volume of calories will be of the greatest importance. Because I can, I must. Not for me, but for others. These are interesting times.

That's still the plan.

But I do have one new addition: while visiting my sister, she gave me a bunch of sunchoke tubers and I can't resist planting them (somewhere far, far away from my garden proper). Naturally it felt pleasantly sneaky to "smuggle" them home on the plane. This is a long term project, but worth a try. BTW she cooked up a few tubers while I was there, sliced oiled and roasted, and they were excellent!

Maybe you can try the "Super Loofah", which can grow up to an incredible 1.6m, which is really amazing, and it doesn't seem to require any special planting methods.

I have sword beans going!
Sword Beans - trying them as an annual

The beans end up 12+ inches long, and I'm hoping I can pressure can them up like green beans.

Is the 13th attempt the charm?
My comment in March above as to what I was going to plant in 2025 almost materialized but life happened.  I am now on my 13th attempt at a functioning garden in the past 70+ years.  Hopefully it will be a successful application of what I have learned in the previous dozen attempts.  
I had started laying out the garden plot when I had to stop to move furniture and the blocks from a raised bed garden at a previous house to the new garden.  I had finally gotten the new garden laid out two days before receiving word I had to move (two weeks after my optimistic comment).  So I found a new place and moved the concrete blocks there.  I finally got all my household stuff moved and got started on converting a weed patch in the front yard to bare soil.  A previous owner had tried to make a lawn by laying sod over weed cloth.  The sod promptly died as the roots couldn't get enough water but the weed roots went right on through and other weeds came up through the bottom.  It was a real pain to remove and I still haven't finished but that is on the back burner now.  
So far the garden has been laid out and a cover crop planted - iron & clay cowpeas & buckwheat.  Both the use of a cover crop and those two plants are new.  I had never even seen buckwheat before and did not know it would grow in Fla.  
I know that concrete blocks are frowned upon by permies but I have learned from previous attempts that I need some structure that will take care of itself in the intervals of chaos that seem to happen when I attempt a garden.  The blocks not only slow the rhizome roots of weeds like nutgrass & betony but also provide a place to plant things like mint that want to compete with the nutgrass for dominion over my wimpy domesticated plants.  
So far the blocks outline the beds/paths and about half are actually leveled.  I decided to prep the beds before finishing the leveling so as to make some visible green progress so the neighbors don't complain too much, hopefully.  The backyard is a small slope backing up to a drainage ditch that I hope doesn't overflow in a hurricane so I have to use the larger front yard.  I calculate that I have a plot of about 690 sq ft of which 368 is in planting beds and 91 sq ft in the holes in the 182 concrete blocks and 180 sq ft in living pathways with about 50 sq ft in concrete.  I plan on a pollinator garden on the North edge of the vegetable garden.  
I noticed after laying out the intended garden at the previous house in March in a keyhole fashion that the grass was growing so well it could be a chop&drop source except that I had laid the paths out too narrow for my lawn mower.  So the current garden has 2 foot wide pathways to accommodate both my lawn mower and two wheel garden cart.  I noticed when clearing the plot that some weed roots were particularly adept at aggregating the soil which is a mix of gravel ( previous driveway ) and compacted clay.  So I looked for info on the internet about whether anyone used grass or weeds in their garden paths (I had used mostly pavers before).  I found a site about No Till Market Gardening hosted by Farmer Jesse and one of his YouTube videos had three guests who had all been using "Living Pathways" for 30 years.  No one really said what to use in N.Fla. so I have ordered four things to try and will let them compete with any weeds that show up.  I plan on mowing before any of them can go to seed the first year.  
The garden backs up to a bamboo "hedge" on the East side that overshadows the easternmost bed in which I had planned on growing greens to avoid some of the summer heat.  I found out that the soil was a thick mat of bamboo roots that obviously were going to act like a perennial grass to suck everything dry.  That bed is on the back burner also as I am going to create a wicking bed to provide enough water and root space to determine if greens will actually grow in the shade of the bamboo.  
Having missed the Summer Heat experiment I was going to try, I now plan to plant some Fall/Winter crops although the majority of the seeds I bought prior to the move are in a box hiding in the midst of chaos in my garage so they may turn out to be Spring crops if I don't find the box soon.  
I have installed the Tposts to construct six cattle panel arches for vining plants but have to level the blocks before actually installing them.  I found another dimension to watch out for when constructing this portion of infrastructure.  I had used a garden fork to loosen the soil and then a garden rake and a combo scuffle/stirrup hoe to clear the weeds from the plot and level the beds.  The Tposts were to be 8 inches from the concrete blocks while the hoe is 7 inches wide.  Since the blocks are 16"x8",  most dimensions defaulted to be in 8 inch intervals.  Some of the posts ended up being too close to the blocks to use the scuffle hoe easily between the posts & blocks.    
The plan was to be no-till which is why I bought the scuffle hoe.  I had used the old variety 70 years ago to clear weeds from the shallow roots of orange trees at 2 1/2 cents per tree so figured I would leave the trillions of soil critters alone if I bought the new edition.  It actually worked great except I did have to use a grub ax to pry up the weed cloth.  I also had to use a railroad pinch bar to remove several pine tree roots from between the posts where I was going to plant the vining crops.  After all, what will it profit a man to plant sweet taters if he can't grub 'em?  There also were two places where the roots were too close to the surface to level some of blocks and by the time I got them out the holes were below even plow depth.  
I will add some photos for general principles as soon as I can find/figure out the procedures but no timetable for that knowing the way I do things involving computers.  

I am growing several new ones this year. Corn, which the rats ate, so that didn’t go very well. Malabar spinach, which is a success. Has anyone tried using the berries for dyes?
Hibiscus both leafy ones and the Florida cranberry type, both are doing very well. Chinese finger roots, are growing, but haven’t seen the results yet. Pigeon peas, which I am going to keep growing, since they grow extremely well, and are giving us a lot of foot for our livestock.
I have 5 new trees to plant.
A Surinam cherry (even though some say the berries taste bad).
Yerba Mate, which will join my ever growing collection of plants for tea.
Fuerte Avocado, since we only have a hash avocado, and want avocados all year round.
White and black Sapote, because they will fit a gab in our fruit production, where we don’t have any fresh fruit or berries.
Earlier this year, I also planted regular tea (carmelia senensis) and mountain tea, so far they are doing very well.
I am also trying purple basil, which has been a huge success. We love it as hot tea and as ice tea.
Black pepper and long pepper that are doing well, but are slow growing.plantain, which are doing great
Grain of paradise, which isn’t doing as well as I hoped
Arrowroot’s and shampoo ginger, which are doing well.
Btw, the two coffee trees I planted last year, are thriving. I am looking forward to the berries.

Next year I will try chickpeas, bitter oranges, Yuzu, banana yucca if I can find it. I planted finger limes this spring, and they bear their first fruits. New Zealand spinach, which has a hard time, but is slowly taking hold and flowering ; no harvesting for this year, I will let it self-seed. Lots of lavender and sage, and a beehive is under discussion.
We have had no frosts, two periods of prolonged drought between storms and nearly no rain - still less than 150 mm of rain since the start of january, it used to be 760mm per year on average for comparison.
I feel I have to plant for mediterranean conditions.

Have a nice evening,
Oliver