Early May Garden To-Do List
For Middle Tennessee
Have you been following our Make Space for Summer Harvest Challenge on Instagram? Get out your baskets and clippers and salad spinners, because the #1 task for early May is HARVEST!
Harvest: A lot. Eat up as much of the cool season spring garden as you can to make room for summer crops. Plus, when it gets hot in a few weeks, your lettuce and spinach won’t taste good. Cilantro will bolt. This is seasonal eating, embrace the abundance!
Add a bit of fresh compost. As you remove spring crops, give your soil an inch or so of fresh compost to boost nutrition before planting the big summer plants which require lots of nutrients.
Plant warm season crops. Temperatures over the next couple of weeks look ideal to plant tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, beans, and melons. The rain we are getting will help seeds germinate quickly, which is a great way to start strong, healthy plants. (Seed or seeding? Read the question of the week to help you decide.)
Don’t Forget Flowers. We could go on and on about the benefits of planting flowers along with your veggies, but their cheerful colors speak for themselves. We are adding cosmos, dahlias, marigolds, snapdragons, zinnias, nasturtium, celosia, and sunflowers in and around gardens this month.
Weeding: The veggie seeds you sowed aren’t the only plants that germinate easily in this weather. While intensively-planted, raised-bed gardens don’t have many weeds, a few do sneak in. Pulling these few up once a week or so keeps weeding a quick and easy task, rather than a daunting all-weekend chore.
Look out for pests and apply treatments. Slugs and pillbugs and earwigs like damp soil too. Harvesting your crops and removing yellow leaves near the base will help keep them in check. Cabbage Moths have been active in gardens we’ve visited this month. Hand-pick them or spray leaves with BT once a week. Aphids can be knocked off with a spray of water.
Look out for beneficial bugs! While we’re in the garden “noticing” cicadas, why not take note of all the other benign or beneficial insects playing their part? Can you identify any ladybugs, lacewings, bees, and spiders? Yay! This little book is a great quick reference for the most common garden insects, good and “bad.”
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