Looking for homestead garden plans inspiration? Come along for our 2025 spring garden tour, where we chat about homesteading imperfectly and what our gardens currently look like for the 2025 growing season! This blog post is meant to accompany our YouTube spring garden tour for 2025.
Welcome to Healing Home. This is where we explore topics of motherhood, homemaking, and I share some of our life here on our 40-acre homestead. This week, I am sharing what our very imperfect spring 2025 garden looks like.
This post is best paired with our YouTube tour, where you will get a visual look at our gardens and life. On the YouTube video, I’ll also be sharing a recipe from our sister site, Healing Home Recipes, for an easy sourdough discard rhubarb crisp.
Welcome to our Healing Home. I hope you are encouraged and inspired by your time here.
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Homesteading Imperfectly
Homesteading is beautiful—but it’s not always picture-perfect.
In the spring of 2024, we welcomed our fourth baby boy. And just one year later, spring of 2025, our fifth little one arrived—another sweet boy added to our growing crew. That means we currently have three children, two years and under. Let me tell you… that changes things.
It’s shifted our priorities. It’s rearranged the tidy plans we once held for our garden beds and food preservation goals. We still dream of growing as much of our own food as we can—for health, for stewardship, for joy—but this year, we’re doing it differently. We’re homesteading imperfectly.
There’s a podcast I heard recently that offered a visual I haven’t been able to shake. It said life is like a pie chart. You can fill it with whatever you want, but you still only get 100%. If you allot 30% to homeschooling, 40% to working, 10% to rest, 5% to date nights… well, eventually the pie runs out. Something has to give.
This spring, that image has helped me breathe deeper and hold grace for our homesteading journey. Because if we’re honest, not every season can hold every dream. And this one? This one is full of babies, diapers, sleepy nights, and morning snuggles. And that is good. It’s holy work. But it means our pie graph looks different this year.
We’re not raising 30 tomato plants like we did a few seasons ago. I’m not canning sun-up to sun-down come August. And that’s okay. We’ve planted fewer crops, chosen more perennials, and simplified our goals to match our capacity, not our ambition. Because there’s wisdom in knowing our limits. There’s peace in letting go of perfection and choosing what is manageable and meaningful.
Imperfect homesteading doesn’t mean failing. It means making intentional choices for the sake of sustainability—of the land, and of the family growing up on it.
It means buying starter plants instead of seed-starting trays that never made it out of the basement. It means saying “no” to raising new animals this year and saying “yes” to picnics in the front yard with toddlers who think dandelions are treasure. It means planting what we know we’ll actually eat, even if it’s not what the trending reels suggest.
It means trusting that God doesn’t call us to do everything in every season. There are rhythms in nature for a reason—seasons of planting, seasons of rest, and even seasons where the ground lies fallow. And sometimes, we’re the soil that needs rest.
So to the mama who longs to homestead but feels overwhelmed by her own pie chart, you’re not alone. You don’t need to grow everything to grow something that matters. Tend what you can. Do it with joy, not guilt. Let your hands be full—even if your garden isn’t.
Because the heart of homesteading isn’t perfection. It’s provision, intention, and love.
And that, friend, is enough.
Recipe of the Week – Rhubarb Sourdough Discard Crisp
It’s the end of May, and our Rhubarb is finally ready to harvest. I know of many people in Minnesota who have been harvesting rhubarb for weeks now, but our little microclimate tends to push off production a bit because of the wind and cooler temperatures.
I’m excited to harvest rhubarb for recipes and put together some rhubarb BBQ sauce from Melissa K Norris’ preservation recipe book, which we love pouring over chicken for an easy meal during the winter.
This sourdough discard recipe is a very easy recipe, and it’s honestly a delicious way to use rhubarb and discard at the same time!
For the recipe, you’ll need:
- Chopped rhubarb
- Sourdough Starter or Discard
- Fresh or frozen blueberries
- Gentle Sweet
- Oats
- Butter at room temperature
- Cinnamon (additional for sprinkling)
- Cloves
- Mineral salt
You can find the entire recipe and instructions at healinghomerecipes.co
Our Imperfect Spring Homestead Garden Plans
Are you ready to take on our spring homestead tour?! Here are our garden areas plus a little about what we are planting this year. If you are interested in grabbing seeds, make sure to check out Botanitcal Interests, which is one of the seed companies that we use to get high quality and organic seeds!
🌱 Kitchen Garden
This is the heart of our raised bed setup—the place closest to the house and easiest to monitor in between diaper changes and toddler wrangling. This year, we’re growing broccoli, peppers, tomatoes, radishes, cucumbers, and beans, plus a few extras for fresh summer meals.
I didn’t get to do any seed starts this year, which is something I intentionally chose because of the coming baby. So we’ve been slowly buying starts from garden centers. Certainly not the cheapest garden we’ve ever done, but it’s worth not having the extra stress of nurturing garden plants while preparing to have a baby.
We have a lot of basic varieties like Purple Beauty Peppers, Lady Bell Peppers, and Rocdor yellow beans, just to name a few. We’ve really enjoyed having lacto fermented peppers around, which I have a recipe for, so I’ll link that up. So we planted the largest amount of peppers we’ve grown yet! The nice thing about lacto fermented peppers is that you can use any variety, and the flavor changes accordingly! Plus, you can still use them for lots of different recipes, including soups!
To the left of the kitchen garden is our tomato area. We have fencing to support the tomatoes, which works great as long as we remember to use string to support the tomato vines as they spread. The cattle fencing works a lot better than cages, but we’ve got to catch the growth at just the right time, otherwise we end up with a mess of tomatoes on the ground!
A couple of years ago, I realized that our kitchen garden area was not the place for me to grow my lettuce because it gets very hot and inevitably bolts and dies way too soon in the season. So I’ve moved my lettuce production to a little raised garden cart on our porch, which works great for harvest!
With three little ones two years old and under, we’ve kept things practical but still purposeful. Our raised beds are a mix of metal and wood (including some treated lumber we now regret), and while we’d love to upgrade everything, for now, we’re working with what we’ve got—and choosing peace over perfection.
🌿Herb Gardens
In last years 2024 spring garden update, I talked about how I hoped to get one more year out of my raised herb garden, and even with the sides falling apart, I’m still hoping to get one more year out of this ceder board structure.
Maybe next year we can snag another metal raised garden bed, which I like the durability of. I’ve used herb gardens for a variety of purposes over the years, including drying herbs for teas and seasonings, but I’ve really found a place where I like to use herbs for tinctures. In this year’s herb garden, I have sage, chamomile, thyme, and spearmint. Plus, I took one of our containers by the porch and added herbs for kitchen use, such as basil, oregano, and parsley.
🎃 Pumpkin Garden
Our pumpkin garden is behind our kitchen garden. We’ve had big dreams for this area… and big challenges. Last year, we planted about 30 pumpkin plants and harvested exactly zero pumpkins. The soil was hard and unforgiving.
This spring, Danny has worked tirelessly moving dirt from other parts of the property to soften and enrich the soil. We’re hoping this gives us a fighting chance this season. It’s still a work in progress, but it’s progress—and that counts in our book. We’re also putting decorative gourds and cute baby pumpkins in our preservation garden, which is a great lead into that garden!
🌾 Preservation Garden
Tucked behind our pine trees, this garden has become one of my favorite places to work. The breeze, the rustling pine needles, the peace—it’s a gift. This year, we’re planting onions, potatoes, squash, ornamental pumpkins, and gourds.
These are the crops we hope to preserve and store for winter, helping feed our ever-growing family. I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way) which onion varieties store well and which… don’t. Although we love purple onions, not many of them store well.
The same goes for potatoes. Although purple potatoes are much healthier, they don’t tend to store well, so we tend to use those on special occasions and grow very basic preservation onions and potatoes like Kennebec and Yukon gold. Every year brings more wisdom and more grace, even in the small things like learning what type of potatoes store best!
🌸 Flowers, Pots, and Trees
Sprinkled throughout our homestead are flower beds, container gardens, and kitchen porch pots. I’m especially loving the lettuce and arugula I started indoors and now keep just outside the kitchen door—it’s been harvested often and is thriving! The lilacs bloom in late May and fill the air with their sweet scent, and while the flower gardens are still far from what I envision, they’re slowly growing, just like us. We’ll maybe get to our big garden in the front portion of our home later this year, but I’m not totally holding my breath.
I should also mention all the trees that we have blooming this year! We have a few apple trees that are starting to produce more each year and about 10 plum trees, and a faithful cherry tree that produces an abundance of tart cherries each July.
Conclusion
So that’s the scoop on our wildly imperfect, joyfully chaotic, and beautifully simple spring garden of 2025. Maybe it’s not Pinterest-perfect, and maybe a few frost-bitten cucumbers had to sacrifice themselves for the cause, but this little plot of land continues to grow good things. And honestly, so do we.
Whether your garden is overflowing or barely planted, whether your days are full of blooms or mostly just muddy boots and baby snuggles, I hope you feel encouraged to keep going. To plant something. To water what matters. To find beauty not just in the harvest, but in the trying.
Thanks for stopping by our Healing Home—where the ducks are loud, the toddlers are louder, and the rhubarb is finally ready. Until next time, may your garden grow, your coffee stay hot, and your heart be reminded that you don’t have to do it all—you just have to do the next right thing.
Happy homesteading, friends! 🌿🐓🥧
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