The end of the year is always a good time to reflect and take stock of the lessons we’ve learned. On this week’s podcast, we look back on 2024 in the garden to make note of the experiences and knowledge we will take with us going forward on our gardening journeys.
Joining me in recapping 2024 is my right-hand person — and left-hand too — Amy Prentice, the Director of Marketing and Communications here at Agrivana Media®. Amy is a gardener herself as well as a talented photographer who documents the interesting visitors to her yard.
Here I am at the GardenFarm™ with my right hand Amy Prentice.
Amy and I came each prepared with our own individual lists of our top takeaways from 2024.
Tomato Triumph
This is my second year being the owner of a greenhouse. In January, it was cold outside but warm and toasty in the greenhouse, where you could find me starting seeds and experimenting.
I tested different soil media with saved tomato seeds from the year before. For consistency, I used the same variety of tomato seeds, “pineapple,” in all the different media I trialed. I had no expectation of planting out the tomato seedlings when the time came in mid-April because three and a half months is a very long time to raise vegetable seedlings indoors. I expected the seedlings to be too big for the pots by then and not suited for transplanting.
Once my soil trial was over, I neglected the seedlings because I had no further plans for them. However, despite never moving them or watering them, the seedlings continued to grow bigger yet compact, with thick stems. This has prompted me to consider replicating this on a larger scale this year. Traditionally, I start tomato seeds in the third week of February, but the pineapple tomato seedlings that I had started in early January performed better. Smaller pots and less attention worked in the seedlings’ favor.
Tomato seedlings I started early, in January, then neglected performed great — even better than seedlings that I started at the normal time, the third week of February.
The Year of the Birds
On the podcast this fall, author and New York Times op-ed contributor Margaret Renkl said it is a mistake to believe that nature exists to teach us things.
“Those creatures and those plants are doing the things that they’ve been doing for ages,” she said. “They don’t exist to teach us anything, but we are idiots if we aren’t learning from them. Because what they have to teach us is so important about what’s happening in the natural world and what’s happening in us.”
Those words really resonated with Amy. She and her husband, Russell, have a small suburban backyard that is teeming with flora and fauna.
“That has taught me more about life than just about anything else I’ve experienced,” Amy says.
It started with birds. They’ve always fed and housed birds in their garden, but there was something about 2024 that they had an explosion of birds — due in no small part to their own efforts.
Amy wanted to start feeding crows this year, feeling inspired by social media videos of people who have befriended crows that bring them shiny objects and trinkets. She began putting out fruit and nuts and all these things she read that crows love. They got plenty of birds, but not a single crow.
“But one day Russell and I were outside on a weekend and just marveling at how many birds we had in the garden at that moment,” Amy recalls. “And out of nowhere, a mockingbird flies right up under the porch, comes up to me and drops a seed in my lap and just flies off.”
Who knew mockingbirds are gift-givers?
Amy and Russell’s garden has a cedar arbor that serves as the entrance. They call it the “fairie portal.” A big, gnarly piece of driftwood that they brought home from a kayaking adventure hangs from the top.
One day, Russel had been hearing a woodpecker pecking on something but couldn’t tell where the noise was coming from. Then he found himself standing under the fairy portal, and when he looked up, he saw a tiny woodpecker peeking out at him from a hole in the driftwood. The woodpecker built a cavity nest.
The handmade cedar garden arbor at the center of Amy’s suburban garden.
Photo Credit: Amy Prentice
“We are like full-on bird people now,” Amy says. “We have life lists now. Russell has his own life list. He’s building nesting boxes that bluebirds are fighting for. He’s building bird feeders. We’re the bird whisperers now. My daughter’s telling her friends the other day that birds are dad’s midlife crisis.”
She says the lesson she took from that is creating space for others to thrive, cultivating community and bringing joy and connection from nature.
Woodpeckers are cavity nesters and this one found a spot right in Amy’s garden at the top of the garden arbor.
Amy posts photos of the wildlife activity in her small yard on her Instagram account (@toadandsage) and it always blows me away. Her garden is beautiful, lush and bountiful. The lesson for anybody who feels like they don’t have a big enough space is don’t fall into that lie. It’s just not true.
Wildlife needs your help in urban and suburban areas, Amy says. “There’s wildlife just seeking places to survive, and the more we really cultivated that space with birds in mind, the more birds we’ve gotten.”
A new nesting box Amy’s husband built for bluebirds in the fall has seen a lot of bluebird activity so far.
Photo Credit: Amy Prentice
Regulate Plant Growth Through Temperature
I have an annual seedling sale with close to 2,000 seedlings that I started from seeds. This year, a week out from the opening sale day, my plants were not as big and impressive as they normally are. It occurred to me that I had been keeping the plants in a cooler environment than I had the year before, when the plants had gotten tall and spindly.
A cooler environment kept the plants from getting tall and leggy, but it worked a little too well. So I opened all the windows and doors in the greenhouse during the day to let in as much heat as possible, and literally overnight I could see a difference in how the plants responded. In just four days the plants looked way different. On opening day, they were picture perfect.
I learned a valuable lesson about regulating plant growth through temperature.
The temperature in the greenhouse had a clear impact on how compact or leggy tomato seedlings grew.
The Very Hungry Caterpillars
Amy noticed caterpillars picking different host plants than they typically use. For one, she noticed variegated fritillary caterpillars, which normally feed on violets and passion flowers. She had neither in her garden at that time, but she noticed variegated fritillary caterpillars on wild wood sorrel, also known as sheep showers. Wood sorrel has oxalic acid that gives in a sour taste that the caterpillars apparently enjoyed.
A fritillary caterpillar on wood sorrel leaves.
Photo Credit: Amy Prentice
She also found painted lady caterpillars feeding on mugwort. It didn’t make sense because painted lady caterpillars are typically on thistles, hollyhocks and mallows.
Amy went down a rabbit hole of research, looking into monarchs too. She found on the Texas Butterfly Ranch website that monarchs, which are milkweed specialists, will sometimes eat pumpkins or cucumbers if milkweed isn’t available. Chip Taylor of Monarch Watch confirmed this does occur, but only in the fifth stage instar, when the caterpillars are about ready to pupate.
A painted lady caterpillar that used mugwort as a host plant in Amy’s garden.
Photo Credit: Amy Prentice
My Early Spring Flowering Bulb Lawn
In November of 2023 I planted a bulb lawn, sowing a few thousand bulbs. This spring I got to see the fruits of my labor. It was incredible, and the cool thing about bulbs is the show gets better and better every year as the bulbs naturalize.
I wanted to have a spring bulb meadow for its beauty but also because these single-flowering bulbs are accessible to pollinators seeking nectar sources when they don’t have many food sources around.
I learned that you need to get bulbs in the summertime for fall planting because if you wait, they will be out of stock.
My flowering bulb lawn in spring.
Sawfly, Don’t Bother Me
Amy noticed an ornamental vine on a livestock panel had been completely defoliated overnight. She found caterpillar-looking larvae feasting on the vine. She feared once they finished off the vine, they would come for her food crops.
She took photos of the insects with her macro lens then took the photos to iNaturalist.org and the private Online Gardening Academy community group “What’s That Bug?” She learned the insects were not caterpillars but sawflies, which meant Bt, the biological control for caterpillars, would not be effective.
Just a few of the thousands of sawfly larvae that Amy talked about which infested an ornamental vine in the garden.
Photo Credit: Amy Prentice
Amy went out to her garden days later and discovered the larvae had pupated and emerged as adult flies. Her toad friend was having the time of his life picking off the sawflies in the air. Had she eliminated the sawflies, the toads wouldn’t have that food resource.
A toad that took up residence in Amy’s garden all year and benefited from an outbreak of sawflies on a nearby ornamental vine.
Photo Credit: Amy Prentice
Look Out for Box Turtles
In June, I observed a mama box turtle digging into the base of my compost bin to make a hole to lay a clutch of eggs. I leaned against my greenhouse, sweating to death on that hot day, to watch and record the box turtle. When she left, she covered her tracks very well. You never would have known there were eggs buried there.
I was inspired to research the life cycle of box turtles. I learned that it takes 90 days for box turtle eggs to hatch. I protected the nest with a barrier — a compost sifter — until it was nearly time for the eggs to hatch, so any emerging turtles could get out. I never saw any baby turtles, but I continue to see box turtles living happily on my property.
Any time you plan to mow or weedwhack tall grass, take a walk around and look for turtles and other wildlife. In summertime, box turtles are very active, so keep their safety in mind.
A box turtle makes a cavity by a compost heap to lay eggs.
There’s Always More to Learn
Amy frequently notices insects in her garden that she is unfamiliar with. They may have been there before but went unnoticed or could be new visitors. This year, a standout was the white-margined burrower bug, also known as the “mother bug.”
She had noticed something clustered on the sides of her raised bed walls. It looked like ladybugs — orange and black — but she had never seen ladybugs congregate like that.
Upon closer inspection, she saw that they had stripes rather than spots. She got her camera, took photos and did her research to identify them and learn about them. She learned white-margined burrower bug mothers bring seeds to their nymphs. They feed on the nettle family and mint family and are not considered pests because they don’t cause significant harm to crops.
A brood of white-margined burrower bug nymphs that Amy discovered for the first time in her garden this year.
Photo Credit: Amy Prentice
“It was just amazing because these clusters were everywhere, and I never could find the mother, and I didn’t have any idea what I was looking at,” Amy recalls. “But learning about their life cycle made me realize how much is happening just right outside our backdoor. Even when we think we know our surroundings and we think we know whatever’s out there, you have to stay curious. You have to stay observant because it’s just full of wonder out there.
“So that’s one of the things that I love most about just being out in nature, having a garden, being even at your local park is there’s always just a new discovery out there.”
Going Vertical
This was the first year that I went vertical with livestock panel hoop trellises between two beds. It was pretty — from a distance.
My squash plants were prolific, though staying on top of squash beetles, squash bugs, squash vine borers and pickleworms was a challenge. I spent an hour every morning removing eggs, worms, beetles and bugs.
The squash beetle is just one of many pests that target squash plants.
I have decided not to do winter squash up those trellises anymore. But what I will do is grow pea vines, which my farm manager Tobi had done. They have beautiful small blue flowers that I am looking forward to seeing. They are pretty vigorous vines, though not as much as squash. It will take planting ahead and sowing seeds densely at the bottom of the trellises to cover the trellises.
Blue pea vine, also known as bluebellvine and butterfly pea.
Peacocks: An Unusual Challenge
An unusual challenge that I never saw coming this fall is a couple of peacocks from the farm next door that like sitting on my porch, eating out of our cats’ bowl and enjoying the property.
Their presence hadn’t been a problem until one day I walked out into my garden and they were in my beds, feasting on my seedlings. They are not easy to exclude from a garden because they can fly.
The fall crops that I had started in midsummer were just getting established when the peacocks devoured them. I ended up with no broccoli, cauliflower or cabbage. The plants tried to grow back but couldn’t form heads. I did have leafy crops that recovered.
I know how to deal with a range of pests in the garden, but peacocks take the cake.
Peacocks in the garden — one of my most prevalent gardening pests this year.
Special Delivery
This year, I was wanting for leaves to shred to use as mulch in my gardens and organic matter for compost. I usually collect bags of whole leaves from neighbors and then shred it myself, with my daughter’s help. But this year, I told a leaf removal company that I’d be happy to take a load of leaves of their hands. I welcomed the company to drop unwanted leaves at my property rather than paying tip fees at a landfill.
Boy, did they deliver. I accepted a truckload of leaves — and the best part is that they had already been shredded. That saves me the work and from any guilt over shredding leaves myself due to the wildlife that lives among whole leaves.
Joe standing on his giant pile of leaves that were delivered to him by the leaf collection service.
Photo Credit: Tobi McDaniel
I hope you enjoyed my lookback on 2024 in the garden. If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
What experiences from 2024 in the garden will you long remember? Let us know about your experience in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Some product links in this guide are affiliate links. See full disclosure below.
Episode 286: Naturalizing Bulb Lawns
Episode 350: What to Know About Buying and Owning a Hobby Greenhouse
Episode 386: The Revelations of a Nature Journal, with Margaret Renkl
joegardenerTV: How to Add Spring Flowering Bulbs to Your Landscape in the Fall
joegardener Online Gardening Academy™: Popular courses on gardening fundamentals; managing pests, diseases & weeds; seed starting and more.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Organic Vegetable Gardening: My new premium online course. The course is designed to be a comprehensive guide to starting, growing, nurturing and harvesting your favorite vegetables, no matter what you love to eat, no matter where you live, no matter your level of gardening experience.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Seed Starting: Everything you need to know to start your own plants from seed — indoors and out.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Beginning Gardener Fundamentals: Essential principles to know to create a thriving garden.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Growing Epic Tomatoes: Learn how to grow epic tomatoes with Joe Lamp’l and Craig LeHoullier.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Pests, Diseases & Weeds: Learn the proactive steps to take to manage pests, diseases and weeds for a more successful garden with a lot less frustration. Just $47 for lifetime access!
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Perfect Soil Recipe Master Class: Learn how to create the perfect soil environment for thriving plants.
Amy Prentice on Instagram | @toadandsage
Milorganite® – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Disclosure: Some product links in this guide are affiliate links, which means we get a commission if you purchase. However, none of the prices of these resources have been increased to compensate us, and compensation is not an influencing factor on their inclusion here. The selection of all items featured in this post and podcast was based solely on merit and in no way influenced by any affiliate or financial incentive, or contractual relationship. At the time of this writing, Joe Lamp’l has professional relationships with the following companies who may have products included in this post and podcast: Corona Tools, Milorganite, Soil3, Territorial Seed Company, Earth’s Ally, Proven Winners ColorChoice, Farmer’s Defense, Heirloom Roses and Dramm. These companies are either Brand Partners of joegardener.com and/or advertise on our website. However, we receive no additional compensation from the sales or promotion of their product through this guide. The inclusion of any products mentioned within this post is entirely independent and exclusive of any relationship.
