May’s Garden Chores
Want to spend your spare hours outdoors, but not sure what to prioritize? Here’s what I’m focusing on this month.
Repotting plants
Indoor and outdoor plants kept in pots may need repotting now. Carefully remove plants from their pots and check the root to soil ratio. If there’s more roots than soil, consider moving that plant to a bigger pot. There are some exceptions – some varieties like small containers. For example, spider plants grow better when they’re a little pot-bound. Unlike April, if life gets busy, your potting station can chill for a few days. Indoor plants left outdoors overnight in May won’t automatically die. Whether you need a bigger pot or not, consider refreshing everyone’s soil, adding a layer of compost or soil on top.
Up your watering routine
Get out those water hoses and watering cans, it’s time to make it rain. Both indoor and outdoor plants will need more water as the degrees tick ever upwards. Trees planted during the fall or winter require irrigation the first year to become established. Try to get a standard routine in place. Maybe it’s a meditative watering at the beginning of the day. Maybe you and your child can water every Wednesday and Sunday together. Maybe you’ll be like me and wander around the yard at 6 p.m., beer in one hand, hose in the other. Don’t water every green shoot every day. If you frequently drown your plants, try dividing your yard into fourths and focus on watering one quarter per day.
Weeding time
May turns the sweet inoffensive weeds of spring into the hellish, pervasive and easily reanimated weeds of summer. Spring weeds like dead nettle provide flowers for pollinators, and easy to pull chickweed and watercress are great treats for my chickens. Summer weeds, like bermuda grass and crab grass require effort to keep in check. Pull out what you can, where you can. Put down barriers, like mulch or cardboard topped with mulch, to slow their growth. Try shading out areas by planting more robust varieties that can out-compete those weeds. This is a good month to tackle poison ivy as well. The vines are still fairly young, but large enough to see and they haven’t set fruit yet. I usually wait till it rains, suit up in plastic gloves and an old rain jacket and pull as much poison ivy as I can fit in a few garbage bags. Weeding isn’t a zero sum game for me, it’s about slowly reducing the footprint of these invasives.
Check for ticks
Check dogs, cats, kids and adults. Ticks often ride deer into neighborhoods, so you don’t need a back country hike to find the parasite. Deer ticks, black or brown and black, can carry Lyme disease and Lone Star ticks, dark with a small white dot, carry Heartland disease. Wear long pants, spray ankles and shoes with bug spray and check your body for any little boogers that try to hitch a ride.
Garden planning
May is a great month to start mapping out what you’d like where, budgeting for upgrades and to start collecting plants for your eventual makeover. Garden planning can go sadly awry when there aren’t any leaves on the trees — are you sure that spot gets 8 hours of sunlight? You can save money by buying some accessories at the end of the summer, when prices tend to drop. I’m eyeballing adding a water feature outside my kitchen window. I’ll lay out a few different sizes and shapes and with an old rope to help imagine the finished product. I’ve already bought a native red twig dogwood for this area, and plan on collecting more as I find shade tolerant interesting specimens.
Support your hobby
Vines like cucumbers, indeterminate tomatoes, climbing beans, clematis, or morning glories, need their trellises now. Taking too much time to put your supports in place can lead to some veggies, like cucumbers, contracting diseases or attracting pests from the soil. Spiking supports later in the season also could injure needed roots. Trellises for naturally vining plants help them produce more flowers and more fruit.
Start or edit your compost pile
Keep Athens-Clarke County Beautiful supplies plenty of information on how to compost on the www.acc.gov website. There’s a bin for purchase and plans for different DIY bins available on the website. Like gardening, composting is about gaining experience, making mistakes and figuring out what works best for you. Late spring is a good time to attack this project because with some care and attention, you could have usable compost by the fall.