May Garden Activities:
- Time to start planting our plants that can stand a little bit of cold weather: broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, celery, Swiss chard, leek, lettuce, onions, parsnip, peas, radishes, rutabagas, turnips.
- Tune up your lawn mower if you didn’t do it in the fall. Remember a sharp blade cuts the grass better than a dull blade.
- Plant you summer flowering bulbs like canna, caladium, dahlia, gladiolus.
- Direct seed annuals that like cool weather: sweet peas, forget-me-nots, larkspur, calendulas, and bachelor buttons.
- You can take the mulch off strawberries, but be on the watch for early morning frost. Either recover or set up a garden sprinkler and plan to water at a rate of 1/10 inch per hour. Just enough to protect the blossoms.
- Harvest your asparagus spears and look for asparagus beetle damage.
- Check your Asiatic lilies for lily leaf beetle. The parasites mentioned in the earlier article have not moved to our area yet so you will need to either hand pick or spray an insecticide to protect your Asiatic lilies from this pest. Remember the daylilies are not affected by the lily leaf beetle.