Gardeners make plans, and nature laughs: Lessons learned from 2025 season

With the growing season now largely behind us, I’ve been taking the time lately to reflect on both my successes and learning moments from this year’s gardening. Yes, unfortunately, even we professionally trained horticulturists can struggle with ensuring plant success from time to time. Sometimes, even with the best efforts and ample research-based information in your pocket, nature can sometimes (infuriatingly) have other plans in store.

This year, I began the season with the composition of a grand “planting plan,” my attempt to precisely map out an entire year’s worth of sowing and harvesting across my beds, rotating crops, cycling nutrients, managing pests, and encouraging ample production.

And my efforts were a grand success! For about three weeks.

The problem I came to be reminded of was that, despite my best efforts, environmental conditions are the one outlier that cannot be controlled in a planting plan. They also happen to be the outlier that will dramatically alter a planting plan at a moment’s notice.

In this year’s case, cool spring conditions lasted much longer than anticipated, slowing the growth that many plants need from an early burst of spring heat and delaying their harvest by a month. Later, rapid temperature fluctuations and flooding conditions caused fruiting plants to focus more on survival than growth, pushing back production and harvest times. Dry conditions that followed towards the end of the season had plants once again fighting to stay alive, rather than investing their energy in production. And thus, even with a finite and foolproof plan of attack for the season, by the time the year ended, almost none of my initial plans came to fruition.

That’s not to say, however, that adjustments to my gardening didn’t happen. Even in unpredictable conditions, there are several ways to mitigate the environmental impact on plant life, including adjusting water levels, mulching to control soil temperature and moisture, selecting resilient plant varieties, or, as was necessary this year, adjusting sow and harvest dates.

As such, vegetable gardeners, like me, would do well now, at the end of the season, to do a quick mental data collection exercise. Which crops were the heavy hitters, and what were their varieties? Which varieties underperformed compared to years passed in the conditions presented to them? Did any maintenance adjustments, like spacing, watering, fertilizing, or pest control, make a notable difference this year? Noting the successes of these changes now can not only spare you the trouble of trying to remember them later, but it will also help in preventing making the same missteps twice, anticipating and proactively mitigating future roadblocks.

All in all, this year was still a great success, so in my meticulous note-taking, I’ll be sure to write down and emphasize what worked as well. As for the “learning moments” of this year, they too will be recorded in my garden journal, and they’ll help me make more informed decisions for my next planting plan – perhaps a little more flexible with whatever nature has in store.

Anthony Reardon is a horticulture agent with Kansas State University Extension, Johnson County. Have more questions? Contact the Johnson County Extension gardening hotline at 913-715-7050 or email garden.help@jocogov.org.