12 Crops We’re Planting in 2025
Spice up your garden with unique and diverse crops for a new season of growth! Garden expert Logan Hailey has twelve intriguing varieties of flowers, vegetables, grains, and herbs worth trying out in 2025.
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The New Year brings a new garden season prime for trying out new plants and varieties. It’s nice to grow the same reliable crops each year, but it also helps to mix things up to add diversity to your garden and kitchen!
When planning your 2025 garden, make sure you time your sowings properly based on your climate, frost dates, and harvest windows. The Epic Garden Planner is a new tool that allows you to perfectly plan your crops without the hassle of calculations, charts, and maps. The fully digital interface includes bed layouts, seed planting recommendations, and an integrated garden journal to keep records of your crop progress. This makes it a million times easier to reference your failures and successes next season!
Without further ado, let’s dig into the top twelve crops for 2025.
Hummingbird-Attracting Flowers
If you want more birds to visit your garden but can’t seem to attract their fluttering wings, our ‘Hummingbird Haven’ seed mix will make your yard irresistible. This unique seed shaker comes with an easy-use tube to scatter seeds around the garden almost effortlessly.
With 18 flowering species in diverse, bright colors, these tubular-shaped and nectar-rich flowers are proven to attract hummingbirds. Species like nasturtium, coral bells, and flowering tobacco add gorgeous accents to any garden and grow prolifically after a simple shake.
Be sure to loosen and weed your soil before scattering the seed shaker around your garden. Sprinkle with a layer of compost and keep consistently moist, then watch a new bird floral paradise unfold this spring.
Unique Peppers
Jalapenos and bell peppers aren’t the only spicy and sweet nightshades worth growing in your garden. There are hundreds of varieties of peppers grown around the world, and adding diversity to your seed starting will ensure more flavorful fun in the kitchen.
If you love pickled sweet banana peppers on your sandwiches as much as @jacquesinthegarden, you won’t want to skip adding this easygoing yellow pepper crop to your 2025 garden. Sow sweet banana pepper seeds in late spring on a germination heating mat. This warm-weather crop shouldn’t be moved outdoors until the temperatures are consistently above 50°F (10°C).
Heirloom pepper varieties like ‘Jimmy Nardello’ and ‘Paprika Alma’ also offer unique flavors and colors to blend into your favorite recipes. These thick-walled peppers make amazing powdered paprika spice whenever roasted, dried, and blended.
Luffa Gourds
Ditch all your synthetic sponges and grow your own all-natural scrubbers in the garden! Luffa gourds are squash relatives that grow on prolific vines. When the fruits fully mature and dry, their interior has the exact texture and scrub-power of a sponge.
You need to grow luffa on an extra sturdy trellis like a cattle panel. The vines wind rapidly upward and may need some help staying upright. Avoid letting them sprawl on the ground, as this can take up excess space and lead to foliar diseases like powdery mildew.
A single plant can yield up to 30+ luffa sponges! There is no need to grow any more gourds than this unless you love eating them. These unique squash-family crops are also edible when harvested young, small, and tender.
Naked-Seeded Pumpkins
Complement your veggies and fruits by adding some seedy snacks to your 2025 crop list. If you love to eat pumpkin seeds, you may have noticed that regular pumpkins produce difficult-to-process-seeds. Naked-seeded varieties come out as green pepitas without the hard white exterior seed coat. They don’t even need to be processed; you can eat them straight out of the shell or toast them!
Disease-and pest-resistant hybrids like ‘Naked Bear’ produce wonderfully in the Deep South. ‘Lady Godiva’ and ‘Kakai’ are heirloom naked-seeded options for northern climates.
Acorn Squash
If you love mashed potatoes but want a less-starchy, more nutrient-dense alternative, this is the crop for you! ‘Mashed Potatoes’ acorn squash is one of the tastiest white-fleshed varieties. This buttery smooth acorn squash produces 3-5 fruits per plant, yet it only grows about 48” long vines, making it perfect for containers and small-space gardens.
When you harvest your acorns later in the fall, you can cure them, roast them, and then scoop out the flesh to prepare as buttery mashed potatoes. Serve the creamy delicious puree inside the shell for a restaurant-worthy presentation.
Wheat
Many gardeners avoid growing grain crops due to the difficulties of threshing and processing the grains on a small scale. But it turns out that heirloom grains offer a wealth of new opportunities for home growers, and processing them isn’t all that difficult.
If you love baking homemade sourdough bread and focaccia, hard spring wheat is the perfect variety for fluffy white flour. Winter wheat is more ideal for northern climates, while spring wheat works best in the south.
Hull-Less Oats
Like wheat, most oat crops are impractical for the home scale. However, hull-less oats do not have the hard hull that needs to be removed. Experimenting with hull-less varieties allows you to harvest the grain heads straight from the plant, separate from the chaff (non-seed material), and quickly prepare your favorite oatmeal recipe.
Lemongrass
With its delectable fragrance and versatile culinary uses, this crop should be on your radar for 2025! Lemongrass is beautiful, ornamental, and outrageously easy to grow. This grass has a citrusy, lemon-like flavor often used in Vietnamese and Thai cuisines. The aromatic herb enhances the flavor of meats, stews, curries, stews, and teas.
This plant is tropical and loves warm weather. It grows as a perennial in southern areas but cannot survive outdoors in zones 7 or colder. To perpetuate the lemongrass harvest, all you need to do is harvest and preserve the foliage at the end of the season and then grab a few lemongrass stalks to propagate in glass containers over the winter. Keep these clippings in water to remain rooted until spring, when they can be transplanted outdoors again.
Diverse Lettuce
The world of lettuce is far more exciting than a bland iceberg. You can easily sprinkle your salad blends with exciting medleys of colorful, crunchy, crisp, and sweet lettuce varieties that thrive in both cool and warm weather.
Keep your lettuce harvests and salad recipes going all season with successive sowings from spring through fall. You can sow them densely as baby greens or space 6-10” apart for big, luscious heads.
‘Ice Queen,’ ‘Great Lakes 118,’ ‘Australe,’ and ‘Buttercrunch’ are all amazing options for backyard growers. Prioritize bolt-resistant options like ‘Marvel of Four Seasons’ during warm summers, and aim for frost-tolerant types like ‘Truchas’ and ‘Little Gem’ in the cold weather.
King Size Strawflowers
Flowers should have a place in every garden, including vegetable beds. Floral resources attract beneficial insects and pollinators for natural pest control and exceptional pollination that enhances crop yields. They are also beautiful, colorful, and perfect for enhancing diversity.
‘King Size Silvery Rose’ strawflowers are a particularly intriguing flower crop for 2025. These beautiful whitish-pink strawflowers contrast the traditional reddish-orange blooms. Butterflies are especially drawn to strawflowers. Better yet, these blooms are easily dried and saved for striking cool-season dry arrangements and garlands.
Lacy Phacelia
We all know that cover cropping can enhance soil fertility and suppress weeds, among many other benefits. But cover crops don’t have to be bland! Lacy phacelia is a stunning flowering cover crop that we all want to grow in 2025. The vibrant purple flowers curl under in little spiral-corms with fern-like foliage. These blooms are always covered in buzzing bees, offering excellent nectar and habitat for beneficial insects.
Lacy phacelia also fixes nitrogen in the soil, offering more nutrients to the below-ground ecosystem. When this crop winter-kills at the first frost, it yields a fluffy straw-like mulch perfect for overwintering crops or protecting bare soil during the dormant months. If you live outside its native range in southwest North America, ensure it’s not invasive to your region before planting.
Longhorn Peppers
The ‘Thunder Mountain Longhorn Pepper’ is unlike any other pepper you’ve grown. It is purported to be the world’s longest cayenne pepper, yielding intriguing skinny peppers up to 10” long with deep red skins. They have medium heat perfect for Asian and Indian cooking without completely blasting your taste buds away. The plants are also highly ornamental for spilling out of hanging baskets.
