Whoo hoo! It’s finally warm enough to plant our tender veggies and annuals. Take advantage of the warm weather (and possible rains later this week) to get your heat-loving plants off to a good start!
Kitchen Gardens
In fruit and vegetable gardens, we’re
- • planting out warm-weather transplants, including tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, melons, and squash.
- • sowing warm-weather seeds, including pole and bush beans, cucumbers, corn, melons, pumpkins, and squash.
- • planting out tender herbs, including basil, lemon verbena, rosemary, dill, and pineapple sage. It’s also a good time to plant your perennial herbs, like lavender, oregano, and thyme.
- • sowing warm-weather herbs from seed. Cilantro and dill both grow well from seed.
- • sowing warm-weather annuals in our kitchen garden. Zinnias, sunflowers, nasturtium, and other summer annuals bring in pollinators and add some zip to the vegetable beds. If you’ve bought annuals to transplant, you can do that now as well.
Zinnia and salvia can add color to the kitchen garden. Sow zinnia from seed now, and plant salvia as transplants.
- • thinning out lettuce, spinach, greens, carrots, and radishes in the garden. Check your seed packet for the “final” or “thin to” spacing. You can eat the thinnings of these plants in a salad.
- • caging our tomatoes. It’s easiest to cage a tomato right after you plant it. Put a pot upside down over the plant to protect it, then push the cage into the soil so that the bottom ring of the cage rests on the soil. Remove the pot.
- • keeping the seeds bed moist. Water your seed beds once or twice a day until your veggies emerge.
- • continuing to hill up potatoes. When your potatoes reach about 5″ tall, start covering the base of the plant with soil or straw mulch.
- • harvesting the first of our spring crops, like cut-and-come-again (leaf) lettuce. Cut or pick the lettuce leaves, but leave the base, which will grow new leaves.
- • weeding the kitchen garden. Weeds are popping up constantly, so use a hoe to knock down weed seedlings or weed by hand.
- • mulching the kitchen garden. We like straw, but you can use hardwood mulch for a more formal look. Don’t forget to mulch your strawberry bed too. Avoid mulching seed beds until those plants have emerged from the soil.
Lavender, lemon thyme, and English thyme make up this little herb garden. Golden oregano (in the back at upper right) provides a splash of color. Mid-May is a great time to plant out herbs.
Ornamental Gardens
In other parts of the garden, we’re
- • turning the compost heap.
- • beginning to mulch garden beds. Now that the soil temps have warmed up, you can safely mulch your beds with 2″ to 4″ of hardwood mulch, straw, shredded leaves, or other organic materials. See our post The Magic of Mulch for more info.
- • deadheading daffodils and tulips. Once your bulbs are done blooming, cut or snap off the flower stem close to the base of your plant. But leave the rest of the foliage to die back naturally; the sunlight it harvests nourishes the bulb for the next year.
- • outwitting slugs. If slugs are chomping your emerging hosta or other plants, try ringing the plants with gravel, crushed eggshell, or other sharp, gritty material. You can also drown them by putting out a shallow saucer of beer.
- • thoroughly weeding beds. Tap-rooted weeds like dandelions come up most easily after a rain.
- • planting shrubs and perennials. May is a great time to plant shrubs and perennials. Don’t forget to water them regularly.
- • savoring the lilacs, viburnum, and other flowering shrubs.
