Here’s What You Can Prepare In Your Garden This May

Here’s What You Can Prepare In Your Garden This May

Need ideas for the garden? Here’s what you can start planting and prepping in May:

 

  • Prune back spring-flowering shrubs such as flowering currant and forsythia.

 

  • Watch out for late frosts. Protect tender plants.

 

  • Plant clematis to swarm up old fruit trees, disguise fences, or even add colour on a patio, over a support in a large container.

 

  • Earth up potatoes, and promptly plant any still remaining.

 

  • Buy a sweet pea six-pack and plant singly at the base of U-shaped canes or wigwams; for tabletop sweet peas, buy short-stemmed dwarf varieties that are perfect for pots, such as Knee High.

 

  • Plant out summer bedding at the end of the month. Water early and late to get the most out of your water, recycle water when possible.

 

  • Regularly hoe off weeds and open greenhouse vents and doors on warm days.

 

  • Mow lawns weekly, be sure to check for nesting birds before clipping any hedges.

 

  • Lift and divide overcrowded clumps of daffodils and other spring-flowering bulbs. Watch out for viburnum beetle and lily beetle grubs

 

  • Courgettes are easy to grow and offer big yields for little outlay: push one seed sideways into a cardboard tube filled with compost; plant out when frost risk has passed. Tube will rot in the soil and roots will remain intact.

 

  • Transform a terrace, patio or sides of garden steps with pots of bedding. Low-maintenance: pelargoniums, verbenas, fuchsia and New Guinea busy lizzies.

 

  • Buy seed packets of contrasting shades and textures of leaves – corn salad, frilly lettuce, chives, coriander – and sprinkle seeds on to compost in a seed tray, in broad stripes; keep moist and in light shade. Start picking leaves when small, three to four weeks after sowing.

 

  • Use water-retaining gel in containers to save on watering.
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