Welcome to the Beginners Garden podcast. I'm Jill McShehehehe with Journey Withjil.net, and my goal is to give beginning gardeners the tools they need to begin a second season with you on the Beginners Garden podcast. For my

regular listeners, I just want to say thank you. When I first started

in January 2017, I had no idea how this podcast venture would work, but you guys have been

amazing. For 2018, I've got some pretty awesome, in my opinion, episodes planned for you.

And in doing research for them, I'm learning more myself.

Win, win, right? At the time of this first episode of 2018, everything is brown outside.

In fact, I just turned off my floor heater in my office so I could record this and I'm shivering

just a little bit. I am not a fan of the cold. Christmas has just passed,

and it's when many of us start to get the garden itch. We begin dreaming of our gardens and what we

would like them to be each year. I just love that. It's one of the highlights of January when everything

else is so brown and dead outside and it's so cold just to begin to dream

of my own garden this year. That's just so much fun for me. And with the new year, along with

starting the beginning stages of planning our gardens, many of us set resolutions or goals.

And one of the most common resolutions is to get on track financially. One area I'm seeing

pop up a lot right now is in the area of spending on groceries. As you may have heard me say

before, especially if you follow my podcast or my blog, you know that my reason when I first started

gardening was to save money on groceries.

I was a brand new stay-at-home mom and we needed to cut some corners.

And since I had just quit my job, the main area that I could affect our household spending

was in the area of groceries.

So that's what I did.

I set out to grow a garden with the primary

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