My Garden In Review 2025

by Ryan Geyer —

2025 is over, we’re deep in the winter, and I’m missing my garden. What better time to review what happened this year and reminesce about back when things weren’t gray, cold, and dead?

Native Plants

I’m very passionate about native plants and insects. In my opinion, landscaping with native plants is one of the easiest ways for an individual to make a noticeable positive impact on the environment. Getting to see beneficial insects and birds using the things you planted for them is so incredibly satisfying, and it makes me feel so much more connected to nature than I ever have before. As an extra bonus, native plants are adapted to living in your climate on their own, so they require much less maintenance once they’re established!

Two landscaping beds outlined with rocks in front of a house, separated by a strip of grass between them. Each bed has a birdbath and is filled with a variety of plants. The bed closer to the camera has a variety of plants in bloom, including Lanceleaf Coreopsis, Purple Coneflowers, Black-Eyed Susans, Anise Hyssop, and Wild Petunias. A closer shot of the larger landscaping bed closer to the house. Purple Coneflowers and Black-Eyed Susans are absolutely thriving in this bed, along with a little bit of Butterfly Weed, one of my personal favorites.
Our front yard garden in August. Note that I am painfully aware that there are some non-native plants in here, but the ratio is probably 90% native and rising.

This was the second full growing season since I ripped up a bunch of our yard in the fall of 2023 and started the garden in earnest.

There were some disappointments; a couple things I planted in the previous year didn’t work out or struggled a lot more than I expected, including some plants that I was really excited about. But failure is part of the journey, and I’m learning a lot about what plants will work where depending on their needs.

With that said, I think things are still going great and this was overall a very successful year.

What I planted this year

I was a little out of control this year.

My parents got me a gift certificate for the Wildtype plant nursery near where I grew up so I took a trip out there this spring and loaded up. It was an awesome experience! If you’re located in Mid-Michigan and looking for native plants, you can’t do better than Wildtype.

Most of the plants listed here came from Wildtype, but I couldn’t help but keep adding more to my collection from other nuseries here and there as the year went on. So here is the full list, minus a couple things I know I bought but apparently didn’t keep records of and I have no idea what they were now. Guess that’ll be a fun surprise next year!

already had some, but added more

We ripped up two invasive Burning Bushes to replace with New Jersey Tea, I’m excited about that upgrade.

You may also notice that I went on quite a Blazing Star kick, getting 3 different varieties. A house in our neighborhood has an incredible yard full of native plants and every fall I see their Blazing Stars absolutely dripping with Monarch Butterflies and it fills me with envy, so I’m trying to copy them.

I planted a majority of these plants in the spring, and for the most part they did great! Some plants can be a little boring in their first year, especially if you planted them in the spring instead of the previous fall, but at least most of these stayed fairly happy and healthy. I’m excited to see what they do next year.

Bugs

The best part of native plant gardening is all the cool bugs that they attract! This was a great year for that. Here’s some of my favorite photos I got, all taken on my phone for better or worse. I tried my best to identify them correctly but may have gotten some wrong because I’m not even close to an expert!

A monarch butterfly caterpillar climbing around on swamp milkweed. Monarch caterpillars have black, white, and yellow stripes and have pairs of black tentacles on their head and rear. I say 'tentacles' instead of 'antennae' because apparently there is a meaningful difference; an antenna is considered to be stiff and rigid while a tentacle is more flexible and soft. A smaller monarch butterfly caterpillar on the underside of a swamp milkweed leaf, nibbling on the end of it.
Monarch Caterpillars
A bumblebee on a purple coneflower. The bee has a fuzzy yellow mane around its shoulders and back, and a brown-ish patch on its back which is why I think it's a Brown-Belted Bumblebee. The bee has a big grayish-yellow pollen sac on its hind leg. Some bee species' females have 'pollen baskets' on their hind legs which pollen accumulates in as they go from flower to flower. The photo is an extreme close-up which reveals a lot of detail; you can see little yellow specs of pollen on the flower and on the bee's face.
Brown-Belted Bumblebee
A black swallowtail caterpillar climbing up the stem of a carrot. Black swallowtail caterpillars are green with stipes running along their back that are composed of a series of black and yellow dots. A close-up shot of a black swallowtail caterpillar on the stem a carrot, about to eat some leaves on the end.
Black Swallowtail Caterpillars
An Eight-Spotted Forester moth. This is a very cool looking moth. It has a black body with orange tufts on its legs and yellow spots on what I guess I would call its shoulders? Its wings are all black with 2 white spots on each. It's not visible here but they have an additional set of inner wings which also have 2 spots each, bringing us to the eight spots in the name!
Eight-Spotted Forester Moth
A Monarch Butterfly eating nectar from Swamp Milkweed flowers. Monarch Butterflies have black bodies with white spots, and their wings are orange with black lines running through them and more black and white spots along the edges. This is not a great shot from a distance because I have found that Monarchs are annoyingly skittish and don't like me taking photos of them. A Yellow Swallowtail Butterfly eating nectar from Swamp Milkweed flowers. Yellow Swallowtails have yellow wings with black lines running through them. This Swallowtail appears to be a female, so it has a line of prominent blue spots along the edges of its lower wings, followed by a line of yellow spots. I believe males' blue spots are significantly less prominent.
Monarch and Yellow Swallowtail Butterflies on Swamp Milkweed
A Texas Leafcutter Bee on a Swamp Milkweed flower. These bees are very cool because they have unique black and white colors instead of the typical black and yellow. As you might be able to guess from the name, leafcutter bees cut little bits off of plant leaves to build their nests with.
Texas Leafcutter Bee
A side profiel of a bumblebee on a Cutleaf Coneflower. The flower has thin oval-shaped yellow petals. A close-up shot of a fuzzy little bumblebee on a Cutleaf Coneflower. The bee has gathered two orange pollen sacs, one on each hind leg.
Bumblebees on Cutleaf Coneflowers

Rain Barrels!

We’ve been dealing with annoying drainage issues since we got this house because the previous owners decided to pave so much usable yard space around our garage that when it rains, the water only has a few limited places to drain which causes the ground in those spots to basically become a completely saturated swamp.

I learned that our county has a program where you can apply for rebates for taking actions to improve drainage and reduce water usage, including installing rain barrels, so I went for it! It was a great easy process and we were approved for 2 rain barrels. Between getting all of the pieces to connect the barrels to our downspouts and the materials for building a simple wooden stand for one of the barrels, I ended up spending a bit beyond the maximum rebate amount, but we still got a really nice setup for something like 80% off!

A terra cotta-colored rain barrel on a patio. A flex tube is running from a nearby downspout to the top of the barrel so that rain running off of the roof will be diverted into the barrel. A terra cotta-colored rain barrel, raised up on a wooden stand about 3 feet off the ground, on the other side of the house from where the first barrel is. A flex tube is running from a nearby downspout to the top of the barrel so that rain running off of the roof will be diverted into the barrel.
The two rain barrels I installed this spring.

Between installing these barrels and planting a bunch of water-loving native plants in one of the particularly swampy corners of our property, our drainage issues seem to have been almost completely resolved. Along with the drainage improvements, they were able to serve as a very reliable source of free water for my gardens! It’s pretty astonishing to see how quickly these barrels can fill with even a relatively small amount of rain, and that rain goes much further than you might think. I barely had to use a garden hose to water anything all summer, which felt like a huge win.

Vegetables

I focus a lot of my energy on native plants, but I do grow some vegetables too! The last couple years, my attempts at growing vegetables went fine, but I kept making the mistake of growing things which seem neat, but weren’t practical at all because we don’t actually care to eat them that much.

So this year, I tried to shift my focus to things I knew we would use: cucumbers, tomatoes, and carrots.

I learned that tomatoes are pretty sensitive to cold, so in cold climates like Michigan, if you want to maximize their growing season you have to start them early indoors until it’s consistently warm enough for them to go outside. I had tomato seeds I harvested last year from tomato plants that my partner’s uncle had given us, so I just planted those in pots in early April and let them grow on my office window sill. I couldn’t believe how many of the seeds germinated, this went better than I could have dreamed.

A close-up of two tiny tomato plant seedlings poking out of the dirt in a small pot on a window sill. A small pot on a window sill with 4 small tomato plants in it. One of the plants is getting particularly tall, probably about 8-10 inches.
Indoor tomato growth progress from week 1 to week 4.

The tomatoes and cucumbers ended up being massive successes. We had a near-constant supply of fresh cucumbers and tomatoes all summer, and it never felt like we couldn’t find enough uses for them. Lots of great salads, and I became quite fond of a “greek chickpea bowl” type thing which was just chickpeas, red onions, cucumbers, and tomatoes over rice with tzatziki sauce. Delicious.

We did have some points where we were starting to drown in cucumbers, but people love cucumbers so it was pretty easy to offload them on friends and family.

A raised garden bed with a trellis attached with a bunch of cherry tomato plants growing up it. On the other side of these tomatoes is a dense thicket of Jerusalem artichokes. We'll get to that. A raised garden bed with a trellis attached with cucumber vines growing up it. On the other side of these cucumbers is a patch of carrots.
The tomatoes and cucumbers at their peak in mid-August.

As for the carrots… We did use some! Nowhere close to all of them though. As it turns out, carrots don’t always grow as nicely as you see them in the store (or I may have messed something up, not going to rule that out); a lot of them came out short and knotty and kinda ugly, but they did still get the job done. The real problem is that we realized that most dishes that we like to use carrots in are things like soups and stews which don’t quite feel as appealing in the summer. I think the ideal setup is to harvest the carrots in the fall and store them in some way that allows them to stay good over the winter, but I’m not sure what that looks like right now.

A bunch of carrots held up in front of the camera by a hand. The carrots are all varying sizes from about 3-6 inches. The carrots all have a bunch of places where they have knots and forks where they diverged and started growing in two different directions.
Some gnarly-looking carrots.

I haven’t mentioned the fourth vegetable I grew in our vegetable garden yet… Jerusalem Artichoke. I had a dish which featured Jerusalem Artichoke at a restaurant the year prior and became fascinated by it. It’s a native plant which is very beneficial to pollinators, but it has edible tubers that taste kinda like a nutty potato and can basically be cooked the same ways a potato can.

A close-up shot of a Common Checkered Skipper on a Jerusalem Artichoke flower. The flower is bright yellow with medium-length petals that come to a point. These plants are in the sunflower family and can grow up to 10 feet tall. The skipper is a small butterfly with brown and white spotted wings.
A Common Checkered Skipper on a Jerusalem Artichoke flower.

Here’s the thing… you’re supposed to wait to harvest them until after the first frost, but things got away from me and I just never harvested them. Now the ground is too frozen for me to dig them up, so I’m going to have to wait for a day this winter when things thaw out enough that I can run out there and grab some.

Even if they’re good, I think it was still a mistake to grow this because the ratio of how much space in my garden they took up to the number of times we’ll actually eat them is completely off. It was nice to grow them for the pollinators, but the raised garden beds are supposed to be the little patch that’s reserved for what us humans want to eat. I think next year I’m going to try replacing them with Jalapeños.

Wrapping Up

Whew, that was a lot! 2025 wasn’t a great year for much, but I had a great time with my plants at least. Here’s hoping that next year will be even better!