My 2025 Growing Regrets
One of the best things about gardening is that very few things are permanent. If you grow something you don’t like, you can just decide not to grow it again or remove it.
Sure, sometimes removing a plant is very difficult. But experimenting, making mistakes, and changing your mind are all part of the process! So I did a little video on my growing regrets for 2025 to talk through things I won’t be doing next year and things I’ll be changing. Enjoy!
Too many sunflowers
I love sunflowers. I will ALWAYS grow sunflowers. Specifically Henry Wilde sunflowers. They get unbelievably tall, and they don’t need any support because they branch out and produce a ton of flowers with large but not floppy heads.
But I planted too many sunflowers this season. They kind of…took over. And guys what’s kind of a big job at the end of the growing season? Cutting down sunflowers. I try to leave them for the birds, but eventually they do need help coming down.
I probably spent hours cutting down and hauling sunflowers this season. Especially the one that started growing into my cattle panel arch trellis. Yes, it looks pretty (second photo below), but it was a huge ordeal to get down. Next year, I’ll limit myself to 3 or 4 strategically placed around the yard. That’s more than enough for my needs!
Ugly marigolds
I’ll always take free seeds at seed swaps. But let the below marigolds be a cautionary tale that you don’t always know what you’ll be getting. I got some marigold seeds at a seed swap early this year, and I started them for the spring.
They ended up being leggy, overgrown messes with very few blooms. And I love marigolds for their blooms! Below shows one of those plants. I ended up pulling them out in late July just so other annuals would have more room to spread and bloom.
And thank God I also got a few market packs of yellow marigolds for the garden. The ones I got cheap 6-packs of did amazing and bloomed profusely well into the fall.
Catmint…in certain spots
What’s that thing they say about mint? Never plant it in the ground? While the same can’t exactly be said for catmint, you should know that it is a prolific grower that fills out spaces very well.
That means that it might eventually outgrow the spot you’ve got it in after a few years. That was the case with the catmint plant below. It was impeding my access to some of the beds, and it had just gotten way too large for the space.
I ended up cutting this one back completely, digging it up, and moving it elsewhere in the yard where it can grow to its heart’s content. This one below was a classic case of the right plant in the WRONG place.
Purple tomatoes
I decided to try my hand at growing Norfolk Healthy Produce’s bioengineered purple tomato seeds. These super cool seeds were created by adding two genes from snapdragons to “turn on” anthocyanin production in the tomatoes. When you cut the ripe tomatoes open, they are truly gorgeous.
It was also pretty fun to make tomato sauces with them. The sauce ends up a really lovely magenta. And these were by far the most prolific producers of all of my cherry tomatoes. So why do I regret growing them?
Well, I wouldn’t say I necessarily regret growing them, I just regret growing so many of them. One plant would have been fine—and even then, I just wasn’t too crazy about the taste, which was a huge bummer. Especially since the seeds aren’t cheap.
I love plant science, so the approach they took to creating this seed was very interesting to me. But at the end of the day, if I don’t love the taste, I’m not going to grow it again in my limited space. Sorry, purple tomatoes 🙁 I did save a few seeds though, so maybe I’ll change my mind…
Invasive grasses
Below shows the area around our patio two years ago. We planted three Miscanthus sinensis grasses because I love how they don’t flop over, and they produce gorgeous fronds in the fall.
But while I was going through my Master Gardener training, I learned that these and similar types of grasses are frowned upon. And while cultivars like ‘Morning Light’ are said to be sterile, there are mixed opinions on whether they really are.
These grasses also spread via clumping rhizomes, and they can quickly outgrow an area. Given that this is prime real estate for sun in our yard, we decided to remove them. This was a regret for 2025 because 2025 was the year we decided to dig them out. And man, THAT was a job!
We replaced the two in the front with two goumi bushes, which produce yummy berries and have gorgeous foliage. They are also nitrogen fixers for the soil! And over on the side, we planted a self-fertile kiwi vine. We’re planning to wrap a cattle panel trellis around the side of the patio for that to grow on.
