2025 Garden WINS & FAILS: What Thrived, Died & Shocked Me!

From donkey invasions to unexpected Wasabi wins, here is the brutal truth about my 2025 garden…Go to https://surfshark.com/alltrades or use code ALLTRADES at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN!
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[00:00] Intro
[00:28] Grapes
[01:11] Lettuce
[01:49] Bok Choy
[02:48] The Best Harvest
[03:04] Snow Peas
[03:56] Pawpaw
[04:36] Kiwi
[04:59] Popcorn
[06:31] Raspberries
[07:34] Shampoo Ginger
[08:46] Dahlias & Zinnias
[09:29] Beets
[10:53] a word from our sponsor
[12:40] Tomatoes
[14:21] Wasabi
[16:38] Garlic
[18:06] Peppers
[21:57] Cucumbers & Zucchini
[23:11] Artichoke
[24:08] Asparagus
[25:21] Closing thoughts

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This year in the garden had tons of ups and downs. Actually, way more than usual. And because it’s the last day before our first frost and we’re about to lose everything, I figured we would take one last walk through the garden and give myself a little report card A to F and whatever lesson I’ll take into next year’s growing season from each. Let’s do this. Right off the bat, growing grapes on an arbor like this looks really cool, but is not actually a very efficient way to grow the actual fruit that I feel like is the reason that we would grow grapes if we’re not trying to just grow a picturesque garden. So, don’t grow your grapes this way, but do grow your grapes more like this. Actually, this is not even the best way to do it. I went to a vineyard to study how to actually grow grapes earlier this year, and I will do better next year. But that said, I grew way more grapes than our family could possibly keep up with this year just right here alone. So those grapes are an F. These grapes are a B because there’s still room for improvement. Normally, I’m the world’s biggest proponent of cut and come again when it comes to lettuce. So, we never pick more than one/ird of the plant at a time. We take it in. But every once in a while, I grow a truly perfect head of buttercrunch lettuce. And in the south, that is actually a very, very difficult thing to do. This had to be picked as a full head because this is exactly what butterc crunch lettuce should actually look like. And I feel like that’s worth celebrating. So, A+ at least for this one head. And then, you know, a regular Bish for the rest of the lettuce because it still tastes good. It’s just not as perfect as this. Bo choy is one of my favorite vegetables to cook with. And when we lived in Seattle, it was so easy to grow. But then when we moved to Tennessee, it was really, really hard to grow. So this season, I looked for a few tips on how to grow it better. And first, waiting until all of the cabbage worms and everything are kind of done for the season to plant them was a big one that really, really worked. And then also because it’s so hot here, planting them in the shade of a bunch of other plants where they’re still getting basically early morning and late evening sun is I mean it worked as you can see. And I will say that we grew way more bok choy this year than we actually were able to keep up with eating because I don’t for some reason have as much time to cook as I did before. So some of these are actually a little bit late. So, A+ for growing them, C for actually using them. And that makes me sad. My ability to grow a baby this year, A+. Quality of the baby, also A+. Having a baby in June as a gardener, F. That was a horrible choice. Don’t do that. This year, despite good timing and everything else that was supposed to be good, all of our snow peas were an abject failure. Like, this is the whole plant. This is the maximum that it produced. Right conditions, right weather, absolute failure. But here’s the thing with peas. I really like the pea vines a lot more than the peas. But I’m just going to go through and harvest all of the entire plants so you can see how ridiculously pathetic all of these plants were. Everywhere I planted them, you know, peas happened. But why did only like six peas per plant and only 6 in of vine ever happened on all these? I mean, this is our best performing vine in the whole garden. And that is not what it’s supposed to be like at all. So, we get an F for peas this year. As we walk past the paw paw tree, I cannot not give myself an A++ plus for my ability to frolic through the woods with a paintbrush, collecting pollen and then bringing it home and becoming the mommy and the daddy of so many delicious pawpaw fruits this season. Uh, as the planter of this tree, proud, proud mother, as the pollinator and the eater of the fruit, 10 stars, A+ gold stars. What other things do teachers give good students? I actually don’t know because I was a very bad student, but we’re going to give ourselves a good grade for this one. And as we walk past there, I will give myself an A+ for my ability to grow kiwi kiwi foliage and an F for my ability to actually grow kiwis. Supposedly, some varieties take like 5 years to grow, but I got kiwis on my first year in Washington, and I’ve gotten zero in 6 years here. So, I’m quite frustrated about that, but we’re going to keep on trying. If I could get a quick drum roll to re reveal the entire popcorn harvest of 2025. Oh. Oh. Uh, joy to the world. I thought last year’s popcorn harvest was especially pitiful, but it turns out, even after all the lessons I’ve learned, I could do even worse. I actually did have a lot more popcorn plants growing in that area of the garden prior to my donkeys breaking in and eating it all. However, I had still done it the wrong way. So, it’s very likely I would have gotten a very similar harvest this year, even if everything had gone totally right. But here’s the real reason I get an F for growing popcorn yet again. Popcorn or corn in general does not like to be planted in rows. It wants to be planted in squares. The way that you plant it affects how well it pollinates. It affects its ability to stand up to wind and or donkeys. And also, timing really, really matters with popcorn varieties because if you plant your popcorn kernels at the same time as your neighbor plants his corn, they’ll cross-pollinate. And you, like me, will end up with a hybrid of popcorn and sweet corn, which isn’t good at doing either one of those things. Raspberries this year get an absolute fail. If there’s something lower than an F, we would give ourselves that because after successfully growing raspberries for 15 years, I basically killed my entire raspberry patch in the main garden this year and have to now start over here. And as you can see, it’s not going super well. And that is due to a variety of factors. moisture, spidermitites, other things. But Michelle from More Than Farmers gave me a tip that I’m going to absolutely try next year, and that is early in the spring once they start coming up, just basically keep chopping them down so that they don’t get as affected by the fungal issues early in the season. And then halfway through the season, basically let them grow up and then hopefully by fall, you get a really decent good harvest. So that’s what we’re going to count on next year because this didn’t work. I got two edible raspberries this season. And while they were delicious, you can’t do a whole lot with two raspberries. We’re big fans of ginger in this household. Thanks in huge part to our friends Black Tropical Homestead who brought this ginger to us. Woo! Okay. Okay. We could have probably gotten some bigger little ryomes here. However, I should also point out that this is actually shampoo ginger, not other ginger. So, the ryomes of shampoo ginger are a little bit smaller than Ah, I’m sorry. The cool thing is as we harvest these, we can replant the smaller ones and mulch them really well, and then that’ll just grow right back again next year. There’s actually a lot more than I thought there was. And granted, if this were actually the eating kind, not the shampoo kind of ginger, and we were going to eat a ton of it, this would be enough for like 3 weeks of Asian cooking. So, I would be really disappointed with it. But, as a new mom, I’m pretty sure I’m not even going to have the time to take enough showers to use these before next season. So, this is a win. And in that, I’ll give it a B. My ability to grow das is always an A++ every year. However, this year I actually learned a lesson from my popcorn failures that is going to massively help my Dalia growing endeavors in the future. Dalia need tons of support and in the past I liked having these little pops of color in the middle of the garden. However, again, they need way more work to support them. So, I can easily get the same color pops from zenyas which need basically no support. And so next year, just like the corn, I’m going to grow all the dalas in a block instead of in rows because lazy gardening, my friends. Let’s stay lazy. This year, due to the donkey and dog invasion that happened while I was in the hospital having the baby, I had to break some of my own rules for the very first time. And one of those rules is we never water the garden unnecessarily. Well, because I was trying to restore my soil health after it had all been disturbed while simultaneously trying to cover all that soil up with anything I could get to grow at that time. I planted a whole bunch of beets, carrots, and other things that are generally really, really hard for me to grow in the middle of the season in Tennessee. And in that, shock of all shocks, when I was actually daily watering my germinating seedlings, they germinated a whole lot better. So, we have a much more robust beet harvest this time around. Now, did we actually grow enough beets to store them all year long and use them the way my babushka would prefer that I did? Absolutely not. There’s maybe 60 beets in this whole garden. And that’s enough for about 10 pots of borched. So, on ability to grow a delicious beet, perfectly shaped, nice all around, A+ on that. on our ability to grow enough beets this year to actually do a ton of stuff with. I will give that a C minus. One of the reasons that my garden was so susceptible to the donkeys and the dogs getting in and causing so much destruction when I wasn’t paying attention is cuz they’re really, really smart. They watch me every time I come in and out of every gate. And eventually, my donkey Howdy especially learned how to open and shut the gates himself. And that’s what brings me to the sponsor of today’s video, Surf SharkVPN. If you’re ever getting online without some sort of added layers of security, you are basically putting yourself under the watchful eye of any donkey who’s watching you to collect your data, to invade your privacy, to sell you stuff, to do all kinds of nefarious stuff. And because I am a total tech lite and Adam told me this was important a really long time ago, he installed Surf SharkVPN on all of my devices so that I’d be protected from all kinds of crazy things. If you’ve never used a VPN before, think about it like every time you get on the internet, you are in a glass house and you can be seen from the outside from 360°. And what the VPN does for you is it pulls a blackout curtain across every one of those windows so that nobody can see in. One of the main reasons we picked Surf Shark for our family is because a lot of other services will charge you per device. And Surf Shark has unlimited devices on a single account. And because of what we do for a living, there are a lot of devices in our household that all need protection. So if you care about your online privacy, pull down those shades and use Surf SharkVPN. Go to surfark.com/alltrades and use the codealltrades to get four extra months of service absolutely free. They have a 30-day money back guarantee, so there’s no risk to try it. A huge thank you to Surf Shark for sponsoring this video. If I was a rule follower, we would have gotten zero tomatoes this year. And so, I genuinely think that part of the reason I am a successful gardener is because I’m a contrarian by nature. And of course that does require a little bit of bravery, but that bravery gets easier and easier to create out of thin air the more and more times you’re right and everyone on the internet is wrong. If I were following the rules of tomato growing, I would have gotten zero tomatoes. However, I’ve actually had tons and tons of tomatoes all season long. So, the tomatoes get an A+ this year. In peak tomato growing season, I was in the hospital. We had horrible horn worms that were not addressed. There was tons and tons of blight on all of them. We should have not gotten any tomatoes. However, I knew that there’s one rule with tomatoes that really really works. If you can just keep taking the plant up off the ground, it truly doesn’t matter if you have blight. you as we very clearly do, but the plant won’t actually fully die and it’ll keep growing up as long as it has air flow where it’s really really important. And that’s basically the first foot off the ground. And then the other thing is we make sure that we cover the ground wherever the tomatoes are so that if there are pathogens that have fallen down into the soil, they’re not bouncing back up onto the plant over and over and over every time it rains. And beyond doing that, you basically have to do nothing else except, of course, at the end of the season, you do want to start pruning off some of this extra growth so that the plant will put its energy into actually ripening what’s already there instead of trying to create more the day before the frost. This one is 2 years in the waiting to see if it actually worked because wasabi has to grow for 2 years to actually be ready to harvest. So, this one we’ve been waiting for a grade on for quite a while. Based on the foliage of this plant, we’re going to get it give it an S. But actually, we harvest its ryomes, which means its roots, not the actual foliage. We also don’t want to harvest the entire plant if we can get away with it, cuz we don’t want to have to wait two more years for more wasabi here. But also, oh my gosh. Holy shamoly. Look at this. This is wild. I mean, like, this thing is the size of my fist. So, I think for for now, we’ll just Oh my gosh. More. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. So, despite its ugly topoo, we got a lot going on down here. Oh, that’s another side shoot. Oh, more side shoots. Wasabi is like the champagne of France. Technically, it can’t be called true wasabi if it wasn’t grown in Japan. And once we pick it, we have to cure it for 3 days. But immediately upon being exposed to air, it starts losing its potency. So, we’ll grate this to get full flavor. Cuz supposedly this stuff is only good for 24 hours. That green powder really doesn’t do it justice. Like, this is so good. I will also say it does taste shockingly like a ground radish. A++. Should I eat a bite of it like a carrot? Yeah, I’ve made a huge mistake. Help. I just really think the actual miracle of this plant is that I remembered that it was here long enough to keep it alive for 2 years to actually get to this moment. So, a little round of applause for that. Garlic is another plant that being a contrarian has really really helped me succeed with because apparently if I were following the advice of all of the gardeners on the internet, I should be growing soft neck garlic here in the south because it thrives at least a little bit more in the warm, humid southern climate that we’re currently in. and it stores a whole lot better than hard neck garlic. That said, I grow hard neck garlic, which stores fantastically well, grows phenomenally well, and in my personal professional opinion, is just superior all around. Now, what am I doing right now? I’m pulling it up because a whole bunch of it went to seed right here, and it’s not going to actually have enough space to grow. So, I’m actually just going to move these little garlics around a little bit. And, you know, free garlic starts. Huzzah. And the fact that I have these free garlic starts is directly due to the fact that I grow hard neck garlic here in the south like I shouldn’t be apparently. And every year I miss a few of those scapes that grow up and put off seeds and then those seeds blow all over and that’s how I get my next year’s garlic. So obviously garlic is an A. Basically any successful peppering that we got this year is going to be an A+ for the plant, not for me as the gardener because they were all volunteers. Peppers are yet another plant that really does thrive a lot better if you give it a lot more attention early in the season. If you do a lot more early pruning of the top foliage, it encourages these little guys to branch out and create more pepper flowers. So, uh, you know, I would say this is a pretty decent harvest considering the fact that this plant was a volunteer. I will say my donkeys did a little bit of that early season pruning for us. So, it did have that advantage there. But also, as you can see, there’s basically zero air flow in this plant because it is insanely crowded. And so, it should be really susceptible to blight, but for whatever reason, it didn’t. So, this would be a great candidate for seed saving and growing more of because obviously it really thrives in a situation where it’s not getting any of the things it’s supposed to actually need. But because all we need at this point is for them to dry, our lazy harvesting technique is going to literally be pulling this thing up out of the ground, taking it up to the house, turning it upside down, and I’ll come back and get those dried peppers when they’re actually dry. and we’re not going to waste our time with any other garbage. Now, that’ll also give us the opportunity to have the plant send a little bit more energy into actually ripening a few more of the peppers with whatever energy it has left as it’s then slowly dying a painful death. Incidentally, what’ll happen when I feed Adam all these peppers later on this season? These peppers are certainly a hybrid of my ghost Korean Carolina Reaper habanero jalapeno peppers that I had in this row last year. And one of the seeds just turned into a plant. So, A++ for its desire and will to live. Also, for somehow surviving the donkey attack of 2025. I’ll eat it. I’ll do it. I’ll suffer. Should I take a brave bite or a timid bite, Adam? I don’t know how hot this is. I don’t want to ruin your day. I do. Hot hot hot pepper. Oh, it’s good. Actually, it’s really good. Oo, it tastes like a habanero pepper, but it has the heat of a something hotter. It’s really good. I’ve decided that this is absolutely a pepper plant worth overwintering. So, we’re going to just pull it up and take it in before that frost and plant it again next year. That’s a good one. Oo, I’m really impressed with that one. I love it when an accident works out that way. What a dream. All right. I’m a bit of a glutton for punishment here cuz this really is really hot, but it’s also delicious. And uh when I say something’s really hot, that’s actually saying something because my sister, who is much, much older than me and from Indonesia, used to put habaneros in my baby food so that I one day I’d be able to eat spicy food like an Asian. So, I can outspice almost everyone I know. And that is a pride point for me and a challenge if you ever want to challenge me. All right, off camera, I took a really big bite of that pepper to prove a point to Adam, and now I’m suffering a little bit. So, uh, little known flat fact, when you are eating something really, really spicy, do not drink water to make it better. It makes it worse. But you can eat cucumbers. On the topic of cucumbers, Tennessee is a pretty hard place to grow a lot of the things in the cucit family. So, cucumbers, zucchinis, things like that because we have enormous amounts of pest pressure. However, I picked up a trick from an old-timer farmer who said, “Put dry wood ash around your tuker bit plants when they’re first getting established, and it basically works a lot like dietimmacous earthwood, which like basically all the pests walk over the dry wood ash and end up basically desiccating themselves. So drying them out was really easy to grow a ton of cucumbers and a ton of zucchini this year. And that’s especially exciting because it gives me a chance to once and for all plate at least part of the internet that went up in arms when I made a joke video about hating zucchini because zucchini is actually delicious. Shard is not. I will stand by that. But yeah, zucchini is great. So, I’m excited to be able to have given myself an A+ for my cucumber harvest and my zucchini harvest this year. Yum, yum, yum. M. This really is good. I’m going to stand over here and use my zucchini pointer to point out my first artichoke that I have successfully gotten to a stage where I may potentially be able to overwinter it. So, I’m going to give myself an A+ for this artichoke. zero actual artichokes grown so far, full disclosure. But I can’t actually get close enough to show you anything about it because it is currently completely infested with both red wasps and yellow jackets inexplicably. So, we’re just going to be over here. But this is this is very exciting. A+ for be able being able to get it this far. I would love to give myself whatever, you know, above an A++ is next year when I pick my first artichoke come spring. Or maybe it will die. We shall see. What the heck is with all the wasps, though? I’m like terrified to be anywhere near that thing. Earlier this season, I would have proudly given an A+ for my asparagus growing. However, when we went to visit our friends Michelle and Cody More Than Farmers, I learned that perhaps the abundance of having a enormous row of all asparagus has actually given me some false confidence because it turns out Michelle told me that every year we should actually trim these back. And that will supposedly help us to avoid asparagus beetles, which cause damage like this, which I literally just thought was age of the plant. And as I clean this really really well this winter to avoid the asparagus beetles and burn all the foliage instead of using it as the asparagus patch mulch. I will either kill my entire asparagus patch that took 5 years to establish or next year I’ll have a significantly improved asparagus harvest and we’re going to keep our fingers crossed and assume the latter not the former. So, opportunity to learn. We’ll give this asparagus a C this year. It’s taken me a really long time to get to the point where I can grade myself with anything but a failing grade and seeing my misses every single time I evaluate anything I’ve done because I can be a pretty harsh judge. But over the last couple years, I’ve gotten a lot better at evaluating myself based on one question. Am I doing my best? Can my best look different season to season? When I do fail, am I going to remember that failure in a month, a year, 5 years? And at the end of my life, what am I going to be really, really proud of myself for having done well? So, my one challenge to you as we wrap up yet another gardening season together is don’t grade yourself too harshly. We’re all just out here doing our best, aren’t we, buddy?