Welcome to the Beginners Garden podcast. I'm Jill McShehehehe with Journey Withjil.net, and my goal is to give beginning garden your March. I know I have been the first weekend in March I was able to go to the Arkansas Flower and Garden Show, which is one of my favorite things to do every season.

But this year was the first year I actually got to participate.

And I did a couple of demonstrations on the how to area.

I demonstrated how to build a pole bean trellis using like little pieces of wood that my

husband had cut to scale. He's so good like that. And I also demonstrated how to use a kitchenade

mixer attachment to cut the time it takes to prepare tomatoes for canning. And so that was so much

fun. I got to meet so many neat people

and my mother-in-law went with me. And one thing that she was telling me on the way home was how

kind and friendly and gracious that gardeners are. I've noticed that with people I've met on

Instagram and online and there's just something about the gardening community

that people are just so friendly, and I love that.

And one thing that I noticed with the gardeners that I met is there is just this excitement

around garden season.

We are all starting to feel it, and one of the things that I'm really looking forward to this year is a great big harvest of

strawberries.

The other day, my kids and I were sitting at the bar eating breakfast and my daughter started

talking about how she likes bananas.

And then my son then started talking about how he loves fresh-picked strawberries.

Now, not frozen homegrown ones, mind you,

he wants them fresh. It made me start longing for strawberries, which in our area will start

ripening in May. Though I've grown strawberries every season, this is my sixth, they've remained

a mystery to me in many ways. After an early bumper crop, I thought

...