Hi, everybody. This is Joe Lampel, the Joe Behind Joe Gardner, and welcome to the Joe Gardner show, and welcome Amy Prentice, my trusted, faithful, companion, colleague, right-hand, left-hand, everything person. Yeah, you're that person. The title list has grown. Man.

And it's going to keep growing because you keep impressing. And I don't know how you do that.

But thank you that you're...

Thank you, Joe.

You're on board and you're here.

You're welcome.

My pleasure, my true pleasure.

So today, Amy, we are going to do our annual now look back on the year for gardening or events related to gardening because it's not just about the plants growing. It's about the

wildlife that we attract and the lessons learn, the aha moments, the good, the bad, the ugly, whatever

it is. And I haven't talked to you ahead of this recording as to what you're going to be sharing

with me, nor have I shared with you what I'm going to be talking about. So that's part of the

fun of this for us as well as everybody

listening, of course. And so with that, that's the plan. You know the drill. We did it last year

and maybe the year before. And we're going to progress through the season, starting with

winter of last year and move through this current time of year. How's that sound? Right. Sounds good. Yeah.

Okay. I'll start us off just to get the momentum going and then we'll just banter back and forth and

see where it goes. Okay. Okay. Let's do this. All right. Okay. So looking back to January of

2024 this year, of course, for many of us, there's not much going on, but if you have a

greenhouse or a growing room, a seed starting room or whatever, you can certainly get a head start.

And I've been known to do that a time or two in the past. And I go a little bit overboard every

time. And as we know, you know, the greenhouse was new to me last year. Yeah. And this year I had, you know, my second year in there. And of course in January, when it's cold outside, I'm inside the warm, toasty greenhouse. Sowing seeds. And sometimes, you know, it's a little bit early for that in January because when they're ready to get planted outside, it's still too cold.

But I'd like to experiment in the meantime just so I could be making notes and expanding my knowledge base. So one of the things I did, I was trying some soil medium. You know, I'm always

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