You're listening to the Beginners Garden Podcast.

I'm Jill McShehehehe with Journey With Jill.net, and my goal is to give beginning gardeners the tools they need to grow a out in my garden.

Now, I'm recording this in January.

So when I say that I walked out in my garden, you can be sure that I walked out to a bunch of brown.

Nothing is growing in my garden right now.

But the flat, clean garden space had me dreaming about all the garden possibilities.

Well, and looking at the seed catalogs over the weekend, that kind of does it for me too.

But in the middle of January, it's easy to forget the importance of weed control.

But you do not want weeds to take over in your garden, and without proper planning, that's what will happen.

Now, I have to confess something to you.

I have not conquered the weed issues of my garden.

It never fails that I start

out well, but eventually the garden tasks start mounting and every season I find myself in a losing

battle in one part of the garden or another. But I have found that in the areas where I am proactive,

I have much fewer problems with weeds.

First, before we talk about weed control methods, we need to understand why it's so important

to keep weeds from gaining a foothold in your garden. The first reason you want to keep

weeds out of your garden is probably obvious, and that is they are unsightly. I doubt that your garden dreams are filled with

rows of out-of-control weeds and grasses. The second reason is that weeds steal water and nutrients

from crops, and this is particularly important during the hot parts of the summer when there's not a

whole lot of rain, and every single bit of rain or every bit of irrigation that you provide need to go

directly to the crops you're growing and not to the weeds.

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