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 have you here with me today. I hope your gardening season is going very well so far. It's the middle of May when I'm recording this and I know I just love

going in my garden every single day to see what's new, especially after a rain or a warm

spell and things just shoot up. It's so much fun. And it's also the time of year when we kind

of start transitioning from the planning phase, which for me lasts for months, to the planting phase,

and then now we are transitioning in more of the maintenance phase.

Although for me, I just finished planting my last summer crop

a couple of weeks ago, and that was okra.

So now that I have everything in the ground,

I'm more on maintenance mode and I spend more time weeding than anything else even though I do

try to mulch my garden like I've talked to you guys before. But one thing you may notice,

especially when your plants start growing, is you start getting an idea of what pests and diseases

that you actually are up against. I know for me, when I first started gardening the year before I

started my first big garden and I was spending the whole winter researching, and I would research

and I would see all these potential pests and all these potential diseases.

And it was a little overwhelming because I wasn't sure what I would actually be up against.

Like would I really see a Colorado potato beetle in my potatoes or not?

And would I really see the tomato hornworm or not?

That's just examples of some pests, but when you get into some diseases, it gets a little

frightening because some of these diseases will completely take out a plant, and you don't

know if you're going to deal with it or not.

And then when something comes up in your garden, you're not really sure what the culprit is,

especially if you are a first-time gardener or even me. A lot of times I have to... then when something comes up in your garden, you're not really sure what the culprit is,

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