Spring is three weeks away. For many of us, that means time to get back into the garden for the 2024 growing season. But there still is work to do before then to get ready, including cleaning up from last year.

Do you know when to prune and mulch? What are you planning in the garden this year?

Horticulturalist Erica Jo Shaffer was on The Spark Tuesday where she warned against cleaning up the garden too soon,"That depends on how many leaves have blown into your garden and all that. One of the things, though, that really is coming into more people's awareness is if you clean up too early there's morning widow or morning cloak butterflies, there's Luna moths, lightning bugs. They're all in that leaf litter right now. So if you start cleaning that up too early, you're actually dropping their populations. So there's a patience involved here. Shaffer added it's too soon right now to rid the garden over everything from over the winter,"Now they're exposing their perennial crowns to colder weather that was protected underneath those leaves. And again, lightning bugs are tucked underneath all that leaf litter, waiting for the warmth to come so that they can sprout. Be patient, find other things to do and leave the leaves for at least another month, at least another month."

Even though spring starts officially March 19, Shaffer again encouraged patience and talked about starting seeds,"A lot of people are starting their vegetable seeds right now. And you might be starting them too early. Like right now we're going to have our pepper seeds started, but we actually want to wait two more weeks before we start our tomato seeds, or they're going to get all long and lanky and fall all over each other. We're nowhere near starting squashes or cucumbers."

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