May in the garden
- Sue
- May 1
- 5 min read
Hello and welcome to my May in the garden newsletter - but first some news of important changes.
This will be the last Newsletter from this website as I am migrating all of my writing to Substack from the beginning of May. In early June the website will close for good. I have attached a link to the newsletter on Substack here:
If you click on the link (or copy and paste it into your browser) you should be able to read the article in its new environment. For completeness I have also copied the full article here too.
May is one of the busiest months in the garden year for me and, after the wet weather (which is becoming the norm each winter/spring) and spells of sunshine and heat the entire garden feels like a greenhouse. Things are growing like mad - especially weeds those “mauvaises herbes” which always manage to outpace my seedlings. I am spending more time than usual in the herb beds pulling out invasive nigella, grass seedings and other uninvited guests before they suffocate the dill, chervil, coriander and parsley I am attempting to nurture.
But it is also the end of the hungry gap and we are harvesting in earnest - herbs, young root vegetables, baby garlic (aillet in French), rhubarb and salads plus the remains of last winter’s rainbow chard are all cropping well.
The first baby carrots and beetroot - much smaller than you can buy commercially.
Here is an outline of some of the things we will be doing this month in our garden:
The basics - Weed, water (ha!) if/when there is a dry spell and you can still mulch if the soil beneath is still holding plenty of water.
Tender edibles can go out into the garden now - tomatoes, chillies, basil, aubergines, peppers, courgettes can all be planted outside along with non hardy ornamental plants such as perlagoniums and other summer bedding plus tender annuals such as ipomeas, cobeas, cosmos and zinnias. To be honest we have had some of our frost tender plants outside for a few weeks - tender succulents and citrus trees for example. They have been against a west facing wall, but now I can confidently move them to a more exposed setting. When moving plants from indoors to outdoors you should always harden them off - or gently acclimatise them - to the tougher conditions. I do this in stages over about a week - outside during the day, then outside overnight, but in a protected spot, then finally outside in their destination place.
Seed sowing can continue apace. Sow successions of vegetable seeds so that you have a steady stream of young peas, beans, beetroot, carrots, radishes, salads to pick. Little and often minimises waste and it is surprising how much you can grow as a catch crop between plants which develop more slowly. You can also sow tender annual flowers directly into the ground now. Try opium poppies and Cerinthe major purpurascens along with the more common nigella, cosmos, tagetes and zinneas. They may be a little later in coming into flower, but the seeds germinate surprisingly quickly in the warmer weather.
Cerinthe major purpurascens - this plant grew from seeds sown late last summer, but will self seed and produce more plants later this year. It is a tremendous garden stalwart.
Plunder the local market ….it is a great source of young vegetable plants which you can plant out now. You don’t have to grow all of your vegetables from seed…and can still pick up some interesting additions to your potager which will soon be ready for cropping. At the end of April we bought some sweet potato (patate douce) “slips” as they are called and lovage plants (livèche) as we only want one or two of each, not a seed packet full.
A sweet potato slip - this variety has purple flesh, which is something we have never found before. We are only growing one, along with a several orange fleshed plants. The potato is a tuber and so stays underground but the plant has long trailing stems which we will train upwards to save space.
Herbs come into their own this month with dill, mint, parsley, tarragon, chives growing profusely and threatening to flower and set seed it you are not careful. Pick regularly - and if you can't then shear off the straggly top growth to slow things down. Similarly with shrubby herbs such as thyme, oregano, marjoram, rosemary and sage. In nature they are grazed by wild animals which keeps the plants small and tight with plenty of new growth. Hopefully wild animals are not too much of a problem in your garden, but you need to emulate their actions to a degree by shearing the new growth back if you cannot pick enough of it. This lessens the risk of the plant becoming leggy and promotes young growth.
My poor chervil is having to fight for survival.
You can preserve herbs by chopping them up and freezing them in ice cubes which you then keep in bags in the freezer. Borage flowers can also be frozen individually in ice cubes - they look good in a glass of Pimm’s.
Cut back spring flowering shrubs after they have flowered. A general rule (there are exceptions - lavender and wisteria for example) is that spring flowering shrubs flower on LAST year’s growth, so you need to prune them once they have flowered, allowing the new growth made this summer to produce flowers next spring. Shrubs which flower from July onwards are usually pruned the following spring as they produce flowers on CURRENT year’s growth. This month I will be pruning - or will have pruned already - spring flowering shrubs such as Ribes (flowering currants), Forsythia, Buddleia (done in February) and Cistus which is flowering its heart out as I write. I also need to prune our many Euphorbias, cutting out the long flowering stems and leaving the young leafy ones to add a green foil to the rest of the garden over the summer. But beware with Euphorbias - they have a noxious sap which can cause your skin to blister, especially if exposed to sunlight. Always wear gloves and a long sleeved top.
Beware the milky sap from a euphorbia stem - it irritates your skin
Cut off the leaves from spring bulbs such as daffodils, tulips and crocus and the leaves from Stenbergia (the yellow “crocus” which flowers in the autumn) once they have gone brown. The bulbs have now gone dormant and will remain so until next year (September for Stenbergia) when the cycle begins again. If you are planning to plant more in the autumn it is a good idea to decide where they will go now - while there is still visual evidence of where the current bulbs are.
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