2025 Year In Review – Semi Homesteading Wins & Losses

Now that the 2025 year has come to a close, I wanted to take a look back and give a little review of how the year went overall for the semi homestead. I also want to include a few of my favorite images that I’ve taken throughout the year. (No purchased or AI images here! They are all the real deal, taken by me.)

As with any gardening and homesteading experience, there are wins and losses. The goal is to take each one with a stride and focus more on the positives than the negatives. Granted, that can be hard to do sometimes, but learning from what went wrong throughout the year can help to make next year even better.

I’ll take a look at several different categories from throughout the year. I’ll include notes on our chickens, starting seeds indoors, planting and growing a garden, canning and preserving the harvest, and more. (I was also going to include some of my favorite recipes that I published throughout the year. However, I think I’ll do a separate article for those. Coming soon!)

In this 2025 review, I also want to make note of a few things I’d like to work on for next year. That includes new projects I have in line as well as ways I’m implementing what I learned throughout 2025 so that 2026 can be a better, more productive and joyful year.

The Semi Homestead’s 2025 Year In Review

Starting Seeds & Planting

Like I’ve done for the last several years, I started most of my seeds indoors toward the end of March and early April. Tomatoes, sweet peppers, hot peppers, broccoli, and lots of flowers.

This was probably our best year yet for indoor started seeds. When the vegetable plants got large enough, I transplanted them into bigger containers, which I think helped a ton with their growth and health.

Starting in late April and throughout May, we began hardening the seedlings off outside when the temperature allowed. Since we live in Illinois and are in zone 5, we can’t get plants out in the garden until about Mid-May. On May 12th and 13th, I got the garden planted.

I also planted five peony bushes on our property. My parents always had beautiful peonies, and I was so excited to start a few here. Unfortunately, I think the heat, our crappy soil, and the lack of rain strangled them. I’ll see if they come back this spring, but I won’t keep my hopes up.

Throughout the growing season, I also made a point of saving the seeds from as many plants as I could this year. I did this especially with the heirloom tomatoes and open-pollinated flowers. Now I’ll have them on hand to start in the 2026 growing season!

Growing Plants – 2025 Year In Review

We had our fair share of ups and downs with the growing plants. My best-looking tomato seedlings – the Amish Paste tomatoes – immediately started struggling once they were planted. They were the first fails of the season and had to be pulled after just a few weeks. Other tomato plants did just fine, thankfully.

We also had one variety of cucumbers that only produced male flowers. The plants were beautiful, full, and loaded down with blooms. Unfortunately, they were all males! So that was a bit frustrating. Other varieties of cucumber plants nearby did just fine. At least the bees were happy!

The star producers this year were our garlic, the pepper plants, and the dwarf tomatoes. I did half a row of just dwarf tomatoes for fun, and they were amazing producers! While they are supposed to be determinate tomatoes, most of them kept on producing all summer long.

I also planted nine zucchini plants. (I LOVE sauteed zucchini, freeze a lot, and make zucchini chips, so we go through a lot of zucchini.) We only lost two to vine borers and were able to have fresh zucchini often. The Gray Zucchini were my favorite variety this year.

Big & Small Pests

You can’t have an honest 2025 review without having a few losses. Another loss was our green beans. I replanted those darn things three different times, and each time ONE SINGLE RABBIT took them out. (We’ve had problems with rabbits in previous years.)

I do have a nice electric fence around our garden, but I watched that darn thing hop through it so fast that I don’t even think it felt a zap. I need to figure something else out for 2026 because even blood meal and store-bought repellents didn’t stop the thing. (And no, I have no intentions of killing it.)

In terms of larger pests, we did install deer netting around our mini orchard this year. We live right by a bunch of timber, and the deer have always helped themselves to our young fruit trees. They would walk by and snip off all the ends, leaving our trees stunted. So the deer net went up in June. Hopefully, it will allow the trees to actually grow! So far so good.

Canning & Preserving – 2025 Year In Review

As the gardening season went along, I started canning and preserving all the things. I also started to use my dehydrator a bit more.

One thing I was super happy about was finding a tested dill relish recipe that actually turned out yummy! I’ve tried other recipes in the past and never liked the result. It’s always so frustrating to put all that work and produce into a recipe and have it fail.

Other canning positives were salsa, pepperoncini peppers, pasta sauce, and a rotel-like product. A BIG time negative was attempting to can diced chilis. You know the ones that you get in small cans and throw into recipes like White Chicken Enchiladas? It took forever and was such a pain. I only ended up with a few small jars. Definitely not worth the time and effort, so that’s one product I’ll be buying instead of making.

In the dehydrator this year, we did zucchini chips, apple slices, pumpkin seeds, green onions, and dill. I also dehydrated mushrooms so I could make homemade cream of mushroom soup.

As far as freezing, I minced all of the homegrown garlic we had stored that had started to sprout. I loved being able to grab out a tablespoon of already minced garlic to throw into recipes.

We also froze peppers, shredded zucchini, extra tomatoes, and LOADS of peaches from our tree. It was the best year yet for the peach tree we planted several years ago. We ate as much as we could fresh, but froze the rest to use for later.

Raising Chickens

Throughout the year of 2025, we had 12 chickens total – six older hens and six under a year old. The younger hens had just started laying in the fall of 2024, so we were able to enjoy fresh eggs all winter long. While we weren’t swimming in eggs, it was enough to keep us from visiting the grocery store.

Once the weather warmed up, we made a few additions to the coop and run. One was getting more sand added. During fall 2024, we expanded the covered run area but never got around to adding more sand. We got that accomplished over the summer with an additional one ton of sand. Some went inside the coop to be the litter in there, but most stayed in the covered run.

Lastly, we added an additional automatic door to help close up the covered run. We were having issues with raccoons helping themselves to our trundle feeder while the hens were tucked up in their coop overnight. Because of our lifestyle (and some laziness), I’m not always able to go outside and close the covered run door. So I decided to invest in another automatic door.

It has been really nice to keep the man door shut this winter and still let the girls come in and out as they please. (We have two of these Omlet doors, but there are several different ones available – Product Link: Omlet Automatic Chicken Coop Door Opener.)

Miscellaneous

As I review the year 2025, I noticed that it also brought about some other miscellaneous tasks and accomplishments. The biggest one was probably the garden expansion. I added four in-ground raised garden beds to my garden space. They measure around nine feet long by about six feet wide. They were a great addition to our row garden and the traditional raised beds.

In 2025, we also rendered tallow for the first time. Since I cook only with cast iron cookware, I wanted a way to season the cookware without using Crisco and vegetable oils. We always purchase half a beef from a local farmer, so I asked the butcher if we could get the beef fat as well. They happily provided it to us for free, and we went about the smelly task of rendering the tallow. We use it for seasoning the cast iron as well as for cooking.

I also started having the goal of making all of our bread products homemade. I did large Pullman loaf sandwich bread, small loaf sandwich bread, hot dog buns, hoagie buns, French bread, hamburger buns, dinner rolls, Hawaiian sweet rolls, bagels, corn bread, quick breads, biscuits, and all sorts of other bread products. It was fun experimenting and creating new and favorite recipes.

Lastly, I experimented with collecting and storing a few different foraged items like shagbark hickory nuts and pecans. Having those items on hand that were homegrown and not store-bought has been amazing!

Plans & Goals For 2026

One goal for 2026 is to figure out a better way to keep rabbits out of the garden. While the electric fence has worked great in past years, it didn’t do so well last year. I need to figure out a new strategy that won’t break the bank or leave me without a green bean harvest this year!

For all my gardening and chicken stuff, I’d love to invest in a garden shed. Right now, all of my stuff is in the garage. I have a lot of old containers and watering cans that were my late grandparents that I want to keep, but don’t have the space for as is. So investing in a garden shed is hopefully on the list of to-dos.

Another addition that needs to be made is to trench electricity to the chicken coop. Right now, we use a heavy-duty extension cord that runs from our house to the coop. It works, but the cord is a pain. The goal is to trench a line in and make it permanent.

A simple task is to cover my compost containers with some sort of breathable lids. We have the containers situated right underneath a black walnut tree. This is definitely less than ideal since walnuts can be toxic to some plants. The goal is to cover the containers and at least prevent the leaves and nuts from falling into the compost, rendering it useless.

Lastly, I want to work on making more recipes from scratch. It all takes planning and organizing, but the goal is to do more homemade meals and fewer quick, convenient ones. Hopefully, that means there will be lots of new recipes to add to the website for you to enjoy!

Until Next Year – 2025 Year In Review

I hope you all had a wonderful 2025 and are excited to see where the new year takes you! Let’s make it a good one!

Until next time, thanks for stopping by!
– Chelsea

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