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We are entering May, and everything is drenched with last month's rain. The soil is totally saturated. It's a joy to watch the lush plant growth and blooming flowers, but keeping up with the growth is a challenge. There is so much more to do now, and no time to waste!
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| Crested Iris blooms in late April. |
Vegetables Harvests and new plantings
A number of salad greens sowed last fall and harvested over the winter and early spring are now ready to bolt. Those will be harvested and the space will be replaced with summer crops as space becomes available. Keep garden beds filled with plants, and allow the roots of previous plantings to stay in the ground to maintain the structure of the soil.
Trying a winter garden was a new experiment, and although a number of plants failed, the beds produced plenty of fresh greens, in addition to the asparagus, to feed to the family with fresh greens from late March through April at a time when spring plantings are too small for any harvest.
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| We have had multiples harvests from our salad greens in March and April, which were sowed last fall. |
Many cool weather crops were transplanted out in March and April, and have put on healthy growth! Pak choy, lettuce, and spinach are close to harvest. The broad beans and peas are flowering, so crops are expected from them in the upcoming weeks as well.
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| New transplants of broad beans, spinach, lettuce, and cabbages. |
One cool season flower to grow is German chamomile, which is now in full bloom. Pull off the heads, and bring them into the house to dry for a lovely tea.
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| Chamomile is ready for harvest. |
Many seedlings are still waiting to be planted from March and April sowings, and new plantings of okra, sweet potatoes, beans, melons, tomatoes, peppers and other heat loving vegetables will go in as soon as the ground dries.
Keep sowing seedlings all year for multiple harvests throughout the year!
Seed Germination
I have tried now out two methods for seed germination. One is the baggie method, which you can read about here, and the other is with seedling trays, which I wrote about in The March Garden.
The baggie method is much cleaner and easier to use, but I have heard concerns about damage to the roots with this method. I will experiment a bit on this, so stay tuned for what method I eventually stick with.
Cover Crop
This is another experiment. I want to see how effective a cover crop is, and whether this can be done "Low-maintenance". My go-to bed preparation is simply to mulch heavily.
As much of the garden beds are currently dedicated to perennial crops such as asparagus, strawberries, and orchard fruits, space was created for about five new 4' x 40' beds for annual vegetables. A cover crop was utilized over winter to prepare the ground for plantings for the upcoming summer.
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| Clover and Winter Rye cover crop prepared in my garden bed. |
While it's uncommon for regular home growers to use cover crops, the strategy adds nutrients to the soil and also structure to the soil when the cover crop is not tilled. This keeps the community of soil microbes and other creatures in place while the plant tops are chopped up as mulch or put in the compost.
After an initial till last fall, crimson clover and winter rye were sown into the plots. The clover and rye can be purchased at your local farm seed store. It felt a little silly walking in there, being just a home gardener, but the ladies at the counter were very helpful, and measured out exactly what I asked for. They get their products in bulk, so I was able to get a very nice price on the seed compared to what I found in online gardening shops.
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| Black Plastic placed overtop the newly-mowed cover crop. |
The cover crop was allowed to grow overwinter to mid-April, after which it was mowed down and covered with black plastic to kill the crop. That will remain in place for another week or so, when the beds should be ready for planting.
You can buy long-lasting tarps specially made to withstand the sun over many years, but black plastic also will do the job, for ordinary gardeners not wanting the expense. I use 10' wide 4 MIL black plastic, which is about the thickness of the heavy duty garbage bags you can buy at a grocery store. This allows me to cover two garden beds.
With good recommendations and price point, I purchased Film Gard Black Plastic Sheeting. Click here to research this product.
Grass Mulch
There has been enough sun and rain to begin mowing. My husband blows the grass clippings from our large yard into piles, which are then given a few days to dry out.
Then the kids gather up and bring these piles over to my garden using rakes and a wheelbarrow. This is an easy chore that all my kids help out with, and so much easier than asking them to weed.
Even my one year old comes along. He mostly just plays in the grass!
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| Grass mulch placed over the ground around rasberries. |
People have asked about grass seed getting in my garden with this method. Yes, where the mulch is thin, grass will grow from any seed in the mulch. However, keeping a good 4"-6" of mulch smothers the seed.
Any weed that does grow up in the thicker mulch pulls up fairly easily, I have found, as the weeds need to devote more energy to upper plant growth to find sunlight. Or you can just plop more mulch overtop so long as the weeds are small.
One weedy place that needs to be addressed is in the root vegetable beds. These plants are directly seeded into the ground since many tap root vegetables, like carrots, do not transplant well.
As mulch smothers seedlings from getting sunlight, the mulch is removed to directly sow into the ground. Then potting soil is spread over top, rather than the natural clay, so the carrots can easily sprout.
Clay hardens very quickly when exposed to the sun, creating a hard barrier that seedlings cannot penetrate when they germinate.
As you can see, this method worked well for me this year, as I got plenty of carrots to germinate!
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| Successful germination of carrots and radishes in a garden bed of clay. |
The hoe is put to good use in my root vegetable beds, which is fine because the weed seedlings are still small. Once my carrots and other root vegetables get a little bigger, I will again add mulch.
On My Bookshelf
You can learn more about mulching and the easy way to garden with the authority, Ruth Stout. Find her book on Amazon, Gardening Without Work.
The Home Orchard and other fruits
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| Apple tree on a fan, ready to bloom. |
I took advantage of the few sunny April days to apply fertilizer and mulch to our garden orchard trees to ensure healthy and robust growth. You can read more about my orchard pest prevention methods here.
Along our orchard fence, I noticed a couple apples growing on our oldest tree, which is three years old.
Last month, we had flowers on a few of the trees that are too young to flower, so the blooms were pulled off and used to manually pollinate the older tree.
After the flowers dropped, the trees are getting ready to produce fruit, and this is the time the trees really benefit from fertilizer.
For those interested in organic products, I use Down-to-Earth organic fertilizer. Click here to view prices for this product.
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| The strawberry patch needs work. |
The strawberries are also in bloom. These beds got out of control last year; there are too many plants. The patch should be cleared to about one plant per square foot to ensure good fruiting and prevent disease. There are also some large weeds that need to be removed. I pay the kids by the bucket, which is usually good incentive to get the job done.
Flowers and Landscape
This weekend the Missouri Primrose started to bloom. It is a fantastic native flower which first blooms in the evening to attract moths and other night-dwelling pollinators. A few are placed next to my Wild Blue Indigo, also in bloom, which I wrote about in a previous post.
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| Missouri Primrose in bloom. Deadhead the flowers to keep it flowering in the summer. |
I am particularly happy with this south-facing garden bed, as it was a bit hard to find plants that would grow in this hot and dry location. As a low-maintenance gardener, I do not coddle landscaping plants, so it's important to find plants that prefer the local conditions with minimal inputs on my part.
Other summer perennials are just waiting to bloom. The front yard has a few native garden beds, which don't get too much mulch as many prairie natives need more structure than the "loamy" soil mulch creates. Seedlings, both from my native plants and weeds, are rampant, so I will have to go through and tidy those beds up.
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| Black iris and sage in bloom. |
We planted several new trees in our yard when we first moved to Missouri nearly four years ago. The youthful fringe trees, which are late spring bloomers, are in flower now. Two newly planted Eastern White Pine trees are both taller than me now. It's exciting to watch the growth.
A Challenge and kittens
A lot of time was spent in April pulling up weeds along garden boarders with what I think is bent grass, a perennial enemy. It creeps along the ground, inserting its thick root system into any bare ground it can find. In certain locations, I poured boiling water to kill it, which did a good job. This method does take time, but otherwise does not harm the soil. However, where the grass has grown with my other plants, that is not an option. Placing cardboard down, and laying a grass mulch overtop slows the growth, but the area still must be watched to prevent invasion.
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| Grass mulch is added to the berms to slow weed growth into the native garden beds. |
Our mother kitty had a litter towards the end of March, and has brought them out to our back porch for our family enjoyment. So cute.
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| This little cupcake was born at the end of March. |
That is the garden in May! I hope you are enjoying yours.
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