I start itching to do some fall cleanup in late July. I prune the dead raspberries and mow the dead strawberry beds and pull out the sweet peas. By the time fall rolls around, I’m spending a few hours a day gardening, taking down trellis, turning beds, pruning perennials and putting things away for the winter. Until last year, when I just didn’t. Instead, I adopted a dog, took her to sunny Arizona for a few weeks to sit by a pool, and generally ignored things. Spoiler alert: It worked out well.

Of course, there are benefits to fall tidying up, which involves many components: pruning shrubs and trees, turning beds by removing annuals or dead plants and planting new ones, composting, mulching, saving seeds, planting spring-flowering bulbs, winterizing, and general tidying up. The effect of doing each of these tasks is that your garden will likely look neater in the fall and winter, and you will have a more blooming spring. However, I was shocked at how little difference it ultimately made not to do these things. In November, leaves covered my garden in a blanket of multicolored leaves. Then the snow fell over them. People were still walking by, complimenting the garden, and I wondered how much time I had saved. What surprised me even more was that in the spring the garden seemed largely prepared to take care of itself. Plants sprouted up naturally from what I had not pulled last year. A tomato bed that I had not planted at all this year filled up with better volunteers (plants that grow where last year’s seeds fell) than I would have planted. The effects of my laissez-faire attitude were certainly there: the garden was less orderly. The Douglas firs had migrated out of their beds and into the clover; tomatoes and yarrow were growing everywhere in and out of raised beds; and my artichokes were not surviving the winter without their usual thick mulch. But the result was something new and interesting after 13 years of doing the same thing.

Two years ago I planted a native berry island in my hellstrip specifically for local wildlife and birds. Currants, osoberries, blueberries, cranberries, and other random berries replaced the grass that had never done me any good. Leaving the berries up all winter became a fascinating study in local birding. I moved my Haikubox, a smart recording device that recognizes birdsong and plays it on your phone, out to the islands and was shocked by the variety of birds that found their way into my garden. By leaving my berries up last year instead of picking the blueberry, raspberry, strawberry, boysenberry, and blackberry bushes, those birds spread out into my garden, making nests and finding roosts in boxes I had left for them. It was the first winter I had a semi-successful winter crop; I usually lose them to slugs, and I think there is a connection between the birds and the lack of slugs.

It wasn’t just the berries, I left the tomatoes, eggplant, corn, peppers, and all the flowers too. And although I did some clearing in the spring to make room for new plants, the seeds that the plants had dropped last fall were still in the ground and coming up, making my garden more diverse than ever. Those seeds had survived the winter, which meant that the plants and the fruit they bore were also more resilient. They came up exactly when the ground was ready. In some cases, they came up in random places instead of where they had fallen last year due to bees and birds snacking on them. By spring, the plants that had been left in the ground had largely composted on their own. I found myself tidying the beds mainly to make them look clean and tidy for my own pleasure; the plants themselves didn’t need it.