Planning Your Garden in 2025: Tips for Getting Started

With the New Year here, it’s time to plan your 2025 garden. Join farmer Briana Yablonski to learn helpful tips for setting up a productive and rewarding garden.

A person carrying a layout plan for a garden.

Contents

Whether you’re planting your first garden or heading into your twentieth season, spring is an exciting time of the year. The longer and warmer days encourage perennials like rhubarb and echinacea to pop from the ground and allow you to start planting cool-weather annuals like radishes and kale. However, before you start planting, you should develop a garden plan for 2025.

Thinking about what you want to plant before you touch seeds or soil will help your season go smoothly. You should also consider how much growing space you have available, proper crop rotation, and each plant’s prime growing season.

I’ll share some tips I’ve learned over the years to help you develop a 2025 garden plan that will guide you throughout the year. Couple these tips with our new Garden Planner, and you’ll be well on your way to creating a helpful blueprint filled with plants.

Garden Planner

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Our Garden Planner makes it easy to draw out your vegetable beds, add plants and move them around to get the perfect layout and a personalized planting calendar for your location.

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Big Brandy

Big Brandy Pole Tomato Seeds

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Big Brandy Pole Tomato Seeds

Black Krim

Black Krim Pole Tomato Seeds

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Black Krim Pole Tomato Seeds

Cherokee Purple

Cherokee Purple Pole Tomato Seeds

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Cherokee Purple Pole Tomato Seeds

Develop a Plan Before You Plant

A person holding copies of garden layouts on a table.
Use your plan as a guide on what to plant this 2025 growing season.

It’s easy to browse through a seed catalog in the winter and order eight types of tomato seeds (I’ll admit, choosing between ‘Cherokee Purple,’ ‘Black Krim,’ ‘Big Brandy,’ and other varieties is hard), four lettuce varieties, and a dozen packets of flower seeds. However, you’re wasting your time and money if you don’t have the space and the right growing conditions for these plants.

That’s why developing a garden plan for the 2025 growing season is helpful. While you may still need to tweak your layout during the growing season, you can use this plan as a guide. Trust me, when the hustle and bustle of summer activities and stressors like drought and weeds arrive, you’ll be glad to have a plan to refer to.

Size and Layout

A top view of raised garden beds with different plant varieties.
With the knowledge of how much space you have, use a garden planner to design your space easily.

First, determine how much space you have to grow. If you already have raised beds or a no-dig area, measure them to calculate your available growing space. Note how much of this space receives full sun, partial shade, and shade.

If you’re establishing your first garden, spend some time determining how much growing space you’d like. Standing in your yard provides a good sense of the layout, but working with the Garden Planner allows you to design and visualize more easily. 

You can add raised beds, paths, and mulches on an easy-to-see screen and quickly change your initial plan if you’re not happy with it. Tinkering with your layout on a screen rather than in real life can help you save time and money.

While raised beds and planters are obvious additions, you should also consider access to water. Map out your exterior spigot and determine how to route water to your garden. You should also ensure your beds are narrow enough to easily plant, weed, and harvest.

Desired Plants

A variety of colorful and vibrant zinnia flowers.
Brighten your yard with flowers that draw in beneficial insects.

Once you know the planting space you’ll be working in this year, you can start thinking about what to grow. If you want to grow vegetables, herbs, and fruits, consider what you like eating. You can also browse through seed catalogs for inspiration and check out some easy-to-grow vegetables.

If you want to brighten your yard with flowers that provide beauty and draw in beneficial insects, you have thousands of options! First, consider sun exposure. Popular cutting flowers like zinnias and cosmos require full sun, but you can find native perennials that thrive in partial shade or shade.

Larger plants like apple trees and blueberry bushes require more space and cast shade, so list your must-have trees and shrubs when designing your entire landscape.

Know Each Plant’s Season

Closeup of the curly, green leaves of kale.
Look up your crop’s ideal planting time based on your growing zone.

Once you have a list of what you want to grow, it’s time to determine when to plant each crop. Most crops thrive in either the warm days of summer or the cooler days of fall and spring, so getting your planting times right is a key part of their success.

If you’re a seasoned gardener, you may know the best time to sow seeds indoors and grow each crop. But this knowledge takes time! 

If you’re just getting started with gardening, it can be overwhelming to figure out when to plant your tomatoes, zinnias, lettuce, and kale. You can look up the ideal planting time for each crop based on your growing zone and last frost date. While this method works just fine, it takes time.

Another option is to use the Garden Planner. After you enter which crops you want to grow, you can look at the ideal times of the year to sow seeds indoors, directly sow seeds outdoors, and transplant crops outdoors. This information is tailored to your growing zone, so you don’t have to wonder if the dates apply to your area.

Recognize Each Plant’s Spacing Requirements

A close-up of an urban backyard garden featuring square raised planting beds filled with brown soil, some mulched with wood, hosting a variety of green plants.
With proper spacing, you can fill a bed with different crops to create a diverse planting.

You should also know each crop’s ideal spacing as part of your 2025 garden plan. If you’re working with a three-by-eight-foot raised bed, you can fill it with endless combinations of crops. However, overcrowding your plants can lead to diseases, fierce competition for water and nutrients, and unhealthy plants.

Most seed packets list the ideal plant spacing, and you can also find this information online. Once you know how much space each plant needs, you can design your layout.

Let’s go back to the three-by-eight-foot bed. If you want to grow tomatoes at their preferred 20-inch spacing, you can fit one row of five plants in your bed. However, if you want to grow kale plants at 16-inch spacing with 18 inches between rows, you can fit two rows of six plants.

Of course, you don’t have to fill an entire bed with one type of plant! You can mix and match different crops to yield a diverse harvest.

Pro tip: If you want to grow different crops in the same area, be aware that some plants grow better together than others. Planting the wrong plants next to each other can cause both crops to suffer. However, proper companion planting allows both neighbors to benefit each other. The Garden Planner offers companion planting suggestions for each crop, making it easy to design a healthy and diverse garden.

Determine How Many Plants You’ll Grow

An image focused on beets among other crops planted in a raised bed.
Determine how many seeds you need by looking at the size of the planting space.

This tip goes hand in hand with determining plant spacing. Once you know each plant’s spacing and how much room you want to devote to that crop, you can figure out how many plants (or seeds) you’ll need.

Let’s say you want to grow two eight-foot rows of beets. If you space each plant four inches apart, you’ll need 24 plants for each row or 48 plants total. Conducting calculations like this one can help you determine how many seeds to order and how many seedlings to buy.

If you want to make things easy, you can once again turn to the Garden Planner. Use the mapping feature to sketch out where you want to plant a certain crop, and it will calculate how many plants you need to fill that area.

Buy Necessary Seeds and Supplies

Home made wooden planters made with planks made of wood, in the backyard.
Aim to order and install your new raised bed before the growing season begins.

When you’ve finished planning and your planting season arrives, you’ll want to focus your attention on sowing seeds, keeping on top of weeds, and enjoying the beauty of your 2025 spring garden. Ordering seeds and supplies ahead of time will allow you to spend your valuable time on what matters.

If you want to add a new raised bed, aim to order and install it before the growing season starts. This timeline will give you time to fill your bed with soil and get it ready for plants.

Once you determine what and how much of each crop you want to grow, you can order seeds. Having the necessary varieties on hand will allow you to keep up with your planting calendar and avoid seed shortages that often occur later in the growing season.

Practice Crop Rotation

Rows of green pepper plants with broad, shiny leaves growing alongside compact heads of light-green lettuce with tightly packed leaves.
Rotate crop families, and make sure that no family grows in the same space repeatedely to avoid diseases and pests.

Crop rotation is a key part of preventing pests and diseases, no matter the size of your yard. The practice involves rotating crop families throughout your beds so no family grows in the same space twice in a row. Notice that I said plant families rather than plants.

Diseases and pests are often family-specific, so rotating plants by family rather than individual crops helps keep these issues at bay. For example, the brassica family (Brassicaceae) includes plants like cabbage, broccoli, arugula, turnips, kale, and radishes. All of these crops are susceptible to cabbage worms, flea beetles, and harlequin bugs, as well as diseases like black leg and black rot. Giving your garden a few months free of all brassicas prevents the buildup of these problems.

So, as you practice succession planting, rotate crops throughout your space. Rather than planting three rounds of carrots in the same bed, rotate these successions throughout different parts of your garden.

Keep a Journal

Keeping a garden journal will help you remember everything about a crop that you planted.

No matter how carefully you develop a garden plan for 2025, not everything will go as planned. And that’s okay! Gardening is a continual dance of noticing problems, determining causes, and learning from your mistakes.

Keeping a garden journal will help you remember when you planted a crop, how long it was in the ground, what was next to it, how it performed, and so on. You can use this information to investigate what led to bumper crops and weak plants and let it guide your future plantings.

The type of journal is up to you. A paper notebook and pen work great for keeping track of daily activities and allow you to make quick sketches. You can also use an online option, like the journal portion of the Garden Planner, to note activities and upload photos.

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