Happy New Year!
As usual, today I am posting our gardening goals for 2025.
- Finish Alabama Survival Gardening
- Finish The Good Guide to Food Forests
- Get a tiller for the tractor
- Get a bed-maker/hiller for the tractor
- Get a grapple for the Bobcat
- Set up the cane mill
- Get a cane boiling pot
- Make our own cane syrup
- Plant a patch of sorghum and make sorghum syrup
- Plant a good patch of corn
- Grow a large patch of ube yams
- Do better at growing potatoes
- Put in a large row-crop area with the tractor
- Plant the death hedge
- Expand the pastures
- Grow 5,000lbs of food
- Build a better chicken coop
- Get Leghorn chickens
- Add at least 20 cold-hardy citrus to the homestead
- Plant some modern pecan varieties
- Eliminate popcorn trees from the woods
- Plant papaya trees in the ground in the nursery
- Grow enough green beans to freeze for the year
- Grow enough tomatoes to make all our own sauce
- Make Steve’s mix again and balance our garden minerals
- Grow out the Grenada Black Pumpkin to start stabilizing it
- Grow 1000lbs of watermelon
What do you plan to do?
4 responses to “Goals for 2025”
1. Establish a 24 part rotational grazing/browsing system for three dairy goats.
2. Establish a bootleg aquaponics set-up for bluegill and vegetables in the decorative fountain fed from our pond.
3. Reboot defunct meat rabbit colony.
4. Unleash the power of vines – muscadine, hardy kiwi, jelly melon, chocolate vine, Chinese yam, and chayote.
5. Experiment with no irrigation, self seeding annual cereals in newly coppiced/pollarded sections of the shrub land – amaranth, sorghum and millet.
6. Reach 90% feed independence with chickens with said cereals, pond duckweed, Jerusalem artichokes, squash, BSF larvae, berries, garbanzos, entrails from rabbits, whey from goats, etc.
7. Add persimmons, hickories, hazelnuts, beef and onion tree, strawberry tree, hawthorns and honey locusts to tree crops.
These are great goals. It would be amazing to hit that level of feed independence on the chickens. Godspeed!
Garden Goals 2025 – east coast central fl
Test apple leaf stripping for production in warm environments.
Note, my tropic sweet apple died the first year. Anna and Dorset are still healthy. May try another one (considering winter banana, gala, or cripps pink).
Add the following to my perennials : muscadines, rosegold mango.
Find a plantain variety for my area no higher than 10’ expected height.
Continue snow pea adaptation to my environment, going on 7th gen.
Continue to adapt pinto bean variety to my location (3rd gen).
Focus on sweet potatoes since the family likes them. Note, grew too many tomatoes and only 2 of us truly enjoy them. Made lots of bbq sauce though!
Add a sitting bench and improve the fencing.
Keep strawberries alive through the summer – considering alumanet over their bed. Green shade cloth gave me 50% survival.
Add more flowers – Makes Mrs SNH happy.
Determine if I am keeping citrus or calling it a loss. This season will determine.
Add another Good book or two to the reading list.
Great! We found that the strawberries in some shade lived through the summer.