You're listening to the Beginners Garden podcast. I'm Jill McShehehehe with Journey Withjil.net,

and my goal is to help beginning gardeners get the tools they need to grow a rewarding, productive garden. Have you ever thought about not cleaning up your garden in the fall? I know, it's a crazy thought,

and it's one I had not even considered before last season.

You see, I kind of love organization.

I like everything neat and tidy.

My husband makes fun of me because it seems like every year right after Christmas,

I am going through a cleaning purge.

I reorganize my closet, my pantry, everything, and it can get a little

borderline obsessive. And that proclivity of mine to always want things as organized as possible

definitely extends to my garden. In fact, one of my favorite things to do in the garden on a

fall afternoon or a nice fall

Saturday is to clean it up to get all the spent plants out of the garden and have this blank

canvas ready for next season's planting.

It's very therapeutic to me and I really, really enjoyed it. I'll never forget this time last year

one September morning. I was running at my local running track and I was listening to a podcast

episode from Teresa Lowe of the Living Homegrown podcast and she was interviewing Jessica Walliser.

And the title of the podcast was something

like, don't do fall garden cleanup, something like that. And to be honest with you, I was a little

bit nervous about pressing play because this really threatened one of my favorite garden activities.

But I decided I was going to listen anyway, and I learned a lot of

things about my garden and about garden cleanup and about just in general the kind of ecosystem

that would be better for my garden in the long run. But because this concept was very new to me,

...