Evan X. Merz

Well, it's September of 2025 and the gardening season is coming to an end. It's just about time to begin cleaning up from 2025, and making plans for 2026. In fact, I'm starting to come up with goals for my 2026 season, so I figured that it was a good time to revisit my goals for 2025 and see how I did.

Spoiler: I didn't succeed with all of them.

1. Have success with full sized tomatoes

In 2025 I wanted to go over the top with full sized tomatoes for the first time in my gardening career. In years past, I had a mountain of success with cherry tomatoes, which are very easy to grow. And I harvested a few full sized tomatoes from plants in a few years. But I'd never been overwhelmed with tomatoes. In 2025 I wanted to be giving away tomatoes to my neighbors.

So I listened to Farmer Fred's annual tomato show where he and Dan Shor discuss the tomato varieties that they're excited about. I picked three varieties that they discussed: Rugby, San Marzano, and Bush Early Girl. I started those from seed. Then I was gifted a fourth variety from a friend. It was Chef's Choice Black, I think.

I'm proud to report that my tomatoes were an overwhelming success this year. I had so many tomatoes that Erin made tomato soup, tomato ketchup, and tomato sauce. Even after all that, we were still giving bags of tomatoes away to neighbors.

Still, it wasn't a universal success. My tomatoes in the ground did great, but my tomatoes in containers were pretty disappointing. Maybe next year I will give a little more thought to the varieties I put in containers and how I care for them.

VERDICT: SUCCESS!

2. Have success growing cucumbers

I had the exact same goal with cucumbers. I'd grown cucumbers in the past, but they generally produced very few fruit that weren't very tasty. This year I wanted to be swimming in cucumbers.

So what did I do?

Well, I started my cucumbers from seed a little early in the season. I started more plants than I thought I needed, and ultimately I put six of them into the ground about two weeks before it was recommended because they were out-growing their containers.

Then I watered every day and built trellises from sticks I had laying around.

And let me tell you, we ate cucumbers until we were tired of them. I think I ate cucumber sandwiches for every lunch for a month. I was forcing the kids to eat cucumber sandwiches, too. It was definitely the best cucumber harvest I've ever experienced, and it was a lot of fun.

VERDICT: SUCCESS!

3. Grow eggplant for the first time

Every year I try to grow something that I've never grown before. This year I tried eggplant. I grew the heirloom variety Black Beauty from seed, and transplanted three eggplants into containers a few weeks after I put my tomatoes in.

But I made several mistakes.

First, I put two eggplant bushes into one container. It is one of my largest containers, but I see now that eggplants are such heavy feeders that they can't share space with another eggplant.

Second, I put the third eggplant in a container that was too far from my door. This led to me underwatering it, and it only producing a single fruit.

The problem with crowding my eggplants together was that the eggplants never reached full size. So I never noticed that they were coming into ripeness at a smaller size, and I let almost all of them become bitter and overripe.

Erin was a trooper and she still made eggplant parmesan from the few good looking ones that we harvested, but even those were a bit overripe.

So I failed at my first time growing eggplant, but that's how it usually goes when you grow something for the first time. In a way, I expected to fail. Failing at growing eggplants this year makes it much more likely that I will succeed at growing them next year.

VERDICT: FAIL!

4. Propagate more native plants

Last year I had a small success with native plant propagation. I collected seeds from California Buckeyes and grew them in containers. When some of my friends had a planting project in the spring where they needed trees, I was fortunate to be able to step in and give them around 10 California Buckeye saplings.

This year I wanted to repear that success, but with several different varieties of plants. I wanted to grow oak, toyon, sagebrush, and Roger's Red Grape.

I collected seeds conservatively from local parks, only taking one or two from each plant. Then I cold stratified the oak acorns over the winter and planted them in the spring. I'm pleased to report that I have around 10 oak seedlings growing in containers in my backyard right now.

I also have around 10 toyon, 5 or 6 native grapes, and around 10 containers of native irises. In fact, I'm most proud of the irises because I had to divide irises on my own for the first time.

Still, I wasn't successful with all the plants that I wanted to propagate. I wanted to propagate sagebrush by cutting, but I failed at every attempt. I'm going to ask a friendly local native plant expert about how she propagates sagebrush and give it another go.

VERDICT: SUCCESS!

5. Grow Dan Tucker pumpkins

In 2024 I thought about buying a cabin outside the city. In fact, this is something I'm still working on. I'm tired of living in the city. I want to have a big garden and grow lots of fruit trees. So I started visiting cabins on a few acres of land in 2024.

At one such cabin, I met a man named Dan Tucker. He showed me all around his beautiful property. We talked about his career as an organic farmer in Texas. We talked about his cancer diagnosis. I told him about wanting to get out of the city and away from the traffic. He showed me where salmon swim upstream on a creek nearby, and where the rare native flowers grow.

I loved his place, but I didn't have the money to give him the most competitive offer. It's no surprise that he sold to someone else.

Still, before I left that day he gave me some seeds. They were pumpkin seeds that he bred by crossing Mother Hubbard and Speckled Hound varieties, and I'm going to call the result Dan Tucker Pumpkins in his honor.

So how did I do growing them? Well, I tried to start them in the ground twice and failed both times. By that point it was quite late to start more pumpkins, but I couldn't just give up on them. So I started more in a cup, and just when they were ready to go in the ground I had to fly across the country. I asked a neighbor to water them but I still lost 2 out of 3.

Still, there is one growing in my front yard, and it has a few female flowers that I'm hoping were pollinated successfully. I still won't know for a few more weeks if I've had success with this one or not, but I'm hoping that I will get at least one funky looking pumpkin from all this effort.

VERDICT: TBD!