21 Plants We Wouldn’t Grow Again

All plants are beautiful, and they have their place in the world. However, you only have so much space in your garden. Some plants just aren’t worth growing. Whether they’re too big, too messy, too high-maintenance, or outright invasive, certain species can do more harm than good in a home landscape. 

Between the Epic Homestead, Jacques in the Garden, Fluent Garden, and dozens of Epic Gardening writers, we’ve had our fair share of experiments and mistakes. As a small-scale organic farmer and backyard homesteader, I personally have dozens of examples of plants gone wrong. This article is not intended to hate on any of our botanical friends but rather to guide you away from plants that may waste your time, space, or energy.

Some crops are simply easier to purchase at the grocery store, so you can focus your space and growing efforts on the best quality vegetables and fruits. Let’s dig into the reasons why we wouldn’t grow these 21 plants ever again.

21 Plants Not Worth Growing in Your Garden

The excitement of starting or expanding a garden can often eclipse the need for preliminary research. While it can be exhilarating to impulse-buy new seeds, starts, and potted nursery stock, it is super important to study plants before you bring them home.

The species on this list are not intrinsically bad or harmful, but many of them are best left out of your temperate or subtropical garden in North America. Like all things in life, there are many nuances and caveats to our suggestions, so take everything here with a grain of salt (or soil). As you can see in this friendly debate video with Kevin and Jacques, everyone has their own opinion about which garden crops are worth your time.

Remember that persistence and experimentation can make almost any plant grow, but you only have limited time, space, and resources to devote to your garden. It is ultimately your decision to grow difficult, oversized, or potentially invasive species, but it helps to be aware of some challenges in advance.

Thorned Blackberries

Why get stabbed when you don’t have to? Thorned blackberries are a potentially painful addition to the garden, and they don’t have to be. With so many thornless varieties available, you might as well plant berries that are easy to tend and harvest. 

Thorned blackberries, like the Himalayan blackberry, grow naturally (and often invasively) throughout much of the United States. They readily vine over fence lines and even overgrow small structures. The plants are extremely difficult to prune and remove because their giant spikes are so painful. They can poke you through even the thickest gloves! 

The thorns will snag anyone walking by, potentially tearing their clothes or their skin. Even worse, the thorns take the fun out of harvesting. You can’t just walk by and grab a juicy, sweet berry.

Thornless berries are much better suited to any edible or ornamental garden, especially if you want to grow blackberries near a major pathway or fence. Unlike wild species, thornless varieties grow in vine-like canes that grow long and straight, perfect for easy trellising. These varieties are naturally bred or hybridized to grow without any spikes.

Jerusalem Artichokes (Sunchokes)

Sunchokes, or Jerusalem artichokes, are a fairly controversial garden crop. These sunflower-relatives look like giant sunflowers above the ground, but develop unique knobby edible tubers belowground. The tubers look like a mix of potato and ginger, but they taste like a nutty, earthy, starchy potato with an aftertaste of artichoke. 

If you want an absolute fail-proof crop, sunchokes are the best plant to grow. You cannot mess them up! However, they are quite vigorous and can easily overtake a garden bed. They produce outrageous amounts of tubers that yield with almost zero maintenance, but this also makes them difficult to remove. 

More importantly, most gardeners avoid them because they don’t like to eat them. Sunchokes are extremely rich in inulin and fiber, which are important for digestion. However, they often earn the nickname “fartichoke” because the tubers cause people to have a lot of gas after eating them. If you aren’t used to eating a lot of fiber, sunchokes can cause some digestive upsets, stinky gas, and bloating when eaten in excess. 

Still, they are considered a superfood in many parts of the world because they are such a great source of prebiotics to boost your gut microbiome. While these plants yield in incredible abundance, they are not a good choice for anyone with limited garden space or a sensitive stomach.

Butterfly Bush (Buddleja)

These absolutely stunning shrubs yield huge panicles of fragrant purple blossoms. Why wouldn’t you want to grow something so gorgeous? There are a lot of reasons why you shouldn’t plant butterfly bushes, including potential harm to your garden and local ecosystem.

Unfortunately, butterfly bush (Buddleja or Buddleia) is highly invasive, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, California coast, and all along the East Coast. It is considered a noxious weed in many states. 

These dense shrubs rapidly invade open slopes and riparian areas along streams and rivers. They grow up to 12 feet tall and 15 feet wide, rapidly escaping cultivation and displacing native plants. This reduces overall biodiversity and kills local plants that wildlife need to survive.

Harm to Butterflies

Indigenous to central China, butterfly bush is a magnet for Monarch butterflies and pollinators of all kinds. Its nectar-rich blossoms are drug-like for butterflies. This may seem like a good addition to North American gardeners. However, things get messy when you consider the ecological impact of an imported plant. 

Butterfly bush is actually harmful to Monarch butterfly reproduction. The adult butterflies go wild for the nectar, but their caterpillars cannot eat the Buddleia leaves. Butterflies have important host plants that they have evolved with for thousands of years. The adults need to lay their eggs on specific plants like native milkweed so that the larvae can hatch and feed on the host plant leaves. 

Simply put, butterfly bush supplies food for adult butterflies and harms the young ones by displacing their host plants, ultimately disrupting the reproductive cycles of these vital pollinators.

Tropical Milkweed

Speaking of butterfly host plants, milkweed is infamous for its close symbiosis with the Monarch butterfly. However, there are many species of milkweed. The native North American milkweeds are amazing for supporting endangered butterfly populations, but the invasive tropical milkweed does a lot more harm than good.

Tropical milkweed is not native to the United States. Like butterfly bush, it grows rapidly and provides lots of nectar-rich flowers that butterflies love. But it becomes problematic outside its native range when it doesn’t die back in the winter. 

It disrupts the migration patterns of Monarchs by inviting them to stay in temperate areas for longer than they should, harming their breeding and overwintering cycles. It also attracts a protozoan parasite of Monarch butterflies, which infects the caterpillars and prevents them from properly developing into butterflies and migrating.

Always check your milkweed seeds or plants for the species label. Avoid planting Asclepias curassavica. Instead, pick a locally native milkweed like one of these 21 species of native milkweed for attracting butterflies.

Kiwano

Rare and funky plants are fun to grow, but this strange melon-family fruit may not be worth it in your garden. Kiwano is also known as “horned melon” or “jelly melon.” The plants are ultra-vigorous, but they produce incredibly prickly leaves and stems. The flowers and fruits can be sparse and difficult to yield. But if your plants produce kiwano fruit, the ripe fruit is like a thick-skinned cucumber with an unappealing texture and tons of gel-filled seeds. 

Even though many kiwano seed packets claim it has a tropical fruit flavor, many temperate climate growers find that the taste is very lacking. This could be due to variety or climate differences, but most of us agree that the ultra-prickly horned melon is not worthwhile. Instead, focus on proven sweet melons and juicy crisp cucumbers.

Lemon Cucumber

Another Cucurbitaceae family crop, the lemon cucumber, is a relative of the common pickling and slicing cucumbers we are used to. However, lemon cucumbers may lack overall flavor. While the plants are incredibly prolific and easy to grow, the softball-sized yellow fruits are seedy and less desirable than other cukes.

If you love fresh cucumbers, a time-tested slicer like ‘Marketmore’ has superior flavor and texture. For pickle lovers, try the classic ‘Gherkin’ to easily pickle whole fruits in a jar. Cucumbers can take up a lot of space if you let them vine on the ground, so trellising is best to keep the plants tidy and organized. Moreover, a trellis keeps the fruit off the ground so it doesn’t get dirty or rotten. 

Ultimately, there is nothing wrong with lemon cucumber, but we’ve found that its flavor is lacking compared to more classic cuke varieties.

Rhubarb

This one might be controversial because rhubarb is an iconic pair for strawberries. However, if you have a small growing space, this crop probably isn’t worth it. Additionally, if you live in zone 8 or hotter, it may not be worth it to grow this cold-loving plant. 

Rhubarb plants grow up to four feet wide and tall, requiring significant space to spread out. They take about a year to fully settle and start yielding. You must ensure proper spacing between plants, or they can become stunted, overcrowded, and diseased. Rhubarb absolutely demands cool weather and suffers in extreme heat. The plants will die in temperatures consistently above 80°F (27°C).

But if you have tons of space and you live in zones 3-7, rhubarb is a reliable perennial with tasty tangy stalks. The foliage is poisonous and should not be consumed.

Artichokes

Another controversial opinion, but artichokes may not be worthwhile for many gardeners. ‘Green Globe’ is a classic artichoke you find in grocery stores, and true to its name, these giants grow up to 5 feet wide and tall. Plants need at least four to six feet of space to ensure you can still walk between them to harvest. However, the foliage can be very prickly and itchy.

Many artichokes only yield a few artichoke florets per plant, which is another reason why this crop isn’t always worthwhile. You could grow hundreds of tomatoes or peppers in the same amount of space as a couple of artichokes. Moreover, artichokes are time-consuming to prepare and cook, since most only want to eat the “hearts.” For many growers, it makes more sense to buy artichoke hearts at the grocery store.

Still, they are incredibly nutritious and very unique plants. They also have ornamental value. If you have a lot of space, you should certainly still give them a try.

Basic Zucchini

Jacques may stir up the pot with this one, but he believes that regular ole’ zucchini isn’t worth growing anymore. Once you try the huge array of diverse summer squashes, like Lebanese squash, ‘Lemon Sun’ patty pan, or yellow straightneck squash, obnoxious amounts of basic zucchini seem less interesting in comparison.

Lebanese squash is much creamier and denser than regular zucchini. The oblong fruits have less watery, grassy notes than basic zucchinis have. Patty pan squash are firmer and more flavorful than zucchini. They are easier to cook because they don’t add so much watery moisture to your meal.

There are also worthwhile climbing varieties of summer squash like ‘Center Cut’ squash and Korean ‘Early Bulam’ avocado squash. All of these unique squashes have a much creamier, superior flavor compared to regular zucchini.

Edamame

Our friend Chris of @fluent.garden has tried growing edamame for many years with little success. This legume may not be worth it for backyard gardeners in cooler regions. Edamame plants require extended periods of heat to yield in significant quantities. In temperate climates, the plants may yield a measly 10-20 pods over the entire summer. That is not very much edamame for the amount of effort! 

Edamame also takes a lot longer to produce compared to classic green beans. They don’t start producing until 80 days after seeding, and pod development may still lag. It can be more advantageous to grow bush beans because they are dependable, high-yielding, and start producing in less than 60 days. It’s easy to time successive sowings of bush beans, and you can eat the entire pod rather than just the inner beans of edamame. 

Eye-Catching Purple Tomatoes

This season is the era of abandoning crops that are “just pretty.” Beauty is important in the ornamental garden but not as much in the edible garden. If you are focused on growing quality, flavorful, delicious vegetables and fruits, Kevin advises that you skip the varieties that promise aesthetics without taste.

Kevin has done many experiments growing dozens of varieties of tomatoes. He’s found that certain varieties, such as purple-colored tomatoes, are only unique because of their appearance. The vigor and performance of the plants is nothing special compared to classic tomato types. To make matters worse, the flavor is lackluster.

If you only want to grow tomatoes for appearance, then stick with the wild purples and stripes! But if you truly love culinary experiences and flavorful yields, opt for classic sweet tomatoes like ‘Sun Gold’ or iconic heirlooms like ‘Black Krim.’ 

Basically, be careful about growing things that look really cool but may not taste that great in your kitchen.

Napa Cabbage

If you have a problem with earwigs, napa cabbage is not worth growing! This gorgeous Asian cabbage is amazing for kimchi fermentation and sautes. However, anyone who struggles with earwig infestations in the garden will find that the nasty bugs absolutely love to infiltrate the curly leafy heads of napa cabbage.

This predicament is particularly frustrating because the earwigs don’t usually attack the plants until near the end of their life. You can start the spring or fall with an amazing bed of baby napa cabbage. The plants love cool weather and grow similarly to other cabbages or kale-family crops. But once they start to “head up” and form denser, cone-shaped leaf clusters, the earwigs suddenly get the memo. 

After all that time growing and tending the crop, it’s a bummer to harvest the heads and find them stuffed with nasty bugs. The crinkly stacks of leaves of napa cabbage make the perfect hiding spot. This unique leaf shape seems to be the main reason why earwigs are attracted to them. Consider growing a tighter, smooth-leaved heading cabbage like ‘Copenhagen’ or just stick with open brassica plants like kale and collard greens.

Malabar Spinach 

Malabar spinach is not actually related to spinach, but it is a popular heat-tolerant alternative for growers in sweltering climates. True spinach is a notoriously cool-weather crop that instantly bolts when hot weather arrives. If you want to enjoy iron-rich, earthy-flavored greens in the summer, malabar spinach seems like the perfect fit. Unfortunately, the plants may not perform very well without the hot, sunny conditions they are used to in their tropical home.

Southern gardeners tend to have a lot of success with this unique vining green. It even has significant ornamental value. The edible dark green leaves may have a slightly peppery or citrus flavor, and they look really pretty with their reddish stems. However, if you live in an area with cool summers, malabar spinach may not be the best.

Celery

While this vegetable can be rewarding, it is also difficult to grow as a home gardener. Celery is not recommended for beginners because the seeds can be finicky, the young plants are sensitive, and they take forever to yield. I used to be a commercial organic farmer, and I knew veteran growers who still struggled with celery after decades of growing it. Many small-scale vegetable farms stopped growing it because the financials just didn’t make sense at the farmer’s market. 

The reason celery is so difficult is because the plant is extremely temperature and moisture sensitive. It needs cool weather, but not too cold. It needs moist soil, but not too moist. It also takes a whopping 130 to 140 days to mature, which is a lot of time for your beds to stay locked up in a single crop that mostly tastes like water.

If you love celery, it may be worth the trials and errors. But if you only occasionally chop up celery in your chicken salad, it’s probably best to just buy it at the store. After all, store-bought celery is pretty similar to what you grow in the garden. In contrast, homegrown tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, and melons are way better than their supermarket counterparts. Save your garden space and effort for crops that are more forgiving and unavailable in mainstream stores.

Giant Pumpkins

We all love a good pumpkin patch, but giant Jack-O-Lanterns take up extraordinary amounts of space, water, and fertilization. As a small-scale gardener, it usually isn’t worth it to grow a giant pumpkin. Each plant can take up an average of 1,000 square feet! Yes, one thousand! Of course, you can cram more plants into one space, but this could be problematic for plant health and attract pathogens like powdery mildew that easily spread to the rest of your garden.

Giant pumpkins are also water-hogging machines. They require extraordinary amounts of irrigation, even when you mulch them heavily. The prolific rambling vines and oversized fruits suck every bit of moisture out of the soil and wilt pathetically in the heat. You could end up watering these vines every day in the peak of summer.

One thousand square feet is enough space for a small orchard or a perennial berry patch! Pumpkins are so cheap that they just don’t make much sense unless you have a specialty pie variety with superior flavor. After all, why take up valuable edible garden space with a crop that you won’t even eat? If you or your kids go crazy for pumpkin carving, it may be more efficient to go to a local pumpkin patch.

Ground Cherries

Some people love them, and some people hate them, but we can all agree that they get pretty out-of-hand in the garden. Ground cherries are relatives of tomatillos that yield thousands of tiny lantern-husked fruits with a weird tangy, savory, kinda sweet flavor. Many people dislike the flavor of ground cherries, and I am certainly in that camp. They just taste funky and not worth growing.

Ground cherries take up a lot of space and have a wild growth habit. They get their name because they like to ramble along the ground. Their sprawling vines and fallen fruit make the garden look messy. 

To make matters worse, any ground cherry fruits left in the soil are likely to germinate with dozens (or even hundreds) of new seedlings next year. The fruit smells atrocious if they are left to rot in the soil, and it can be quite annoying to have ground cherry seedlings popping up everywhere. If you need a tangy flavor in your salsa verde, tomatillos are a better option.

Purslane

Though it is remarkably nutritious, purslane is a crop that I would not recommend planting. The succulent oval-shaped leaves of purslane have some of the highest amounts of omega-3 fatty acids in the entire plant kingdom. They are also rich in Vitamin A, magnesium, potassium, and calcium. However, the plants can be insanely invasive in the right conditions.

Purslane is usually known as a weed, but seed companies have made it available to vegetable gardeners. The problem is, if you accidentally let a purslane plant bolt and go to seed, you may never get rid of it. A single purslane plant can produce 240,000 seeds! Even worse, the seeds remain viable in the soil for nearly 40 years. The rambling plants can also spread vegetatively when fragments are broken in half. This means if you dig or hoe an area where there were purslane roots, every piece of root left behind can grow into a new plant.

If you really want the nutritional benefits of this plant, it’s best to forage from someone else’s patch of un-sprayed weeds or find the plant in a wild area. It’s kind of crazy to imagine that people intentionally plant this green. Once it’s in your garden, you will probably have it forever.

Cucamelon

Like ground cherries, cucamelons are favored by some and despised by others. Sometimes called Mexican sour cucumbers, cucamelons yield miniature cucumber fruits with citrusy-cucumber flavor. While the outsides may look like baby watermelons, they don’t have any sweetness to them. In fact, they can be downright sour. Imagine your face twisting in that ugly “sourpuss” face when you taste something outrageously tart or acrid. That’s what happens when many people eat cucamelons.

If you love sour-tangy fruits, then this plant is still worth growing. But if you were hoping for a refreshing, crisp cucumber flavor in a grape-sized fruit, you may be disappointed. Cucamelons have a climbing vine habit just like their cucumber relatives. They can grow a whopping 10 feet tall and overtake a trellis or fence quickly. If you’re short on space or craving something sweet, try growing personal melons instead. 

Broccoli

A lot of gardeners struggle with broccoli. This cool-weather brassica can be frustrating to grow when it gets attacked by aphids or fails to properly “head up.” Broccoli is also widely available in grocery stores, so it doesn’t always make sense to take up several square feet of space for such a standard crop.

If you want to change the broccoli game, I recommend growing broccolini or Chinese sprouting broccoli instead. These plants are much easier to tend and they provide a longer harvest window. Instead of harvesting just a single broccoli head (and maybe a few side shoots), sprouting broccoli is the gift that keeps on giving. You can plant it in the spring and harvest long, tender broccoli shoots until it gets too hot. Plant again in late summer for an autumn full of delectable harvests. 

Sprouting broccoli has long edible stems that are much more desirable than regular broccoli. The tender baby florets are also much easier to cook with because they don’t require cutting. You don’t have to worry about a million little broccoli pieces on your cutting board. Instead, pop whole stems of sprouting broccoli on the grill or in a roasting pan. Once you try this plant, you may not want regular broccoli ever again.

Wisteria

In spite of its gorgeous, fragrant flowers in lavender hues, this perennial vine is outrageously invasive. Chinese wisteria (Wisteria sinensis) grows so rapidly that it can vine right over native plants and even kill trees. The plants are very difficult to manage because they grow so quickly and put on so much weight in a single year. You literally have to prune this vine every month or so. If you look away for too long, it might smother your whole garden.

Chinese wisteria is reported as invasive in at least 19 U.S. states. I’ve seen this insane vine pull down entire porches and pergolas. The vines will grow over your garden, garage, fence, and even your house! If it can do that, imagine how harmful it can be when it escapes to nearby wildlands. 

If you love local ecosystems and you don’t want to spend the rest of your life pruning, skip the Chinese wisteria! Try growing a native wisteria instead like American wisteria (W. frutescens) or Kentucky wisteria (W. macrostachya). These native plants are easier to control and do not threaten their neighboring wild species.

Pineapple

Last but not least, the lovely pineapple plant may not be worth growing in your garden. While pineapples are really cool and ornamental, they are not for the faint of heart. This plant requires a ton of patience! Unless you live in a tropical area with a lot of space, pineapple plants aren’t always worth the effort.

These giant Bromeliads can grow three to six feet high and wide. They take several years to bear fruit, and each plant only produces one single pineapple! Rarely, it can fruit again, but it could take another two years! To make matters worse, homegrown pineapples sometimes turn out a measly four to six inches tall.

That is a lot of time, work, and space for just one or two potentially small fruits. You are better off buying pineapple at the store and instead planting an array of fruit trees, berries, or dozens of different vegetables.