10 Crops to Direct Sow in May, Wherever You Live!

It's May and there's a lot to plant, so let's get right into it. The first choice is squashes and melons. Squashes and melons are fun crops to grow, but depending on where you live, they could be a challenge. If your garden is visited by squash bugs or vine borers, you know they can devastate an entire crop seemingly overnight. Summer squash, winter squash, and melons all prefer to be sown directly into the garden instead of being started early indoors. They've got sensitive root systems and don't like being transplanted, which can slow their growth. They're fast growing plants and heavy producers, so waiting until your last frost date has passed before you sow the seeds, it's still going to give you plenty of time for a great harvest. Squash and melons prefer rich soil, full sun, and a constant supply of moisture. Squash and melons being heavy feeders, they'll benefit from a good amount of compost added to the bed before sowing, with bi-weekly feedings of a balanced organic liquid fertilizer. The most dreaded pests for squash and melons are squash vine borers and squash bugs. The squash vine borer moth lays an egg on the stem of the plant, and when the egg hatches, it immediately burrows into the stem and starts eating the stem from the inside out, eventually cutting off the plant from the soil and in turn from water and nutrients. To help with this problem, as soon as you sow the seeds, you can cover the entire area with a fine mesh netting. That'll keep the moths away from the plant. Now you'll need to keep this netting on for most of the season, if not all season. Another option is to wrap the stem with aluminum foil from the first leaves down to the soil, and then mound up the soil around that foil. The barrier will need to be adjusted as the stem thickens. For zucchini and summer squash, you're going to want to pick them young. I pick mine when they're around eight inches long. If you wait any longer than that, they're going to start to get seedy and possibly bitter, possibly tough, depending on the variety. For melons and winter squash, you're going to notice that the skin will go from a glossy look to a more matte look. That'll tell you it's time to pick, or you can take your fingernail and try to make an indentation in the skin of the melon or the winter squash, and if you cannot really get a dent into that skin, you'll know it's ready. My second choice is from the same family, but it's cucumbers. There's nothing quite like the taste of a cold, fresh, crisp cucumber on a hot summer day. Cucumbers have a reputation for being difficult to grow, but they don't have to be if you know what they like, and if you know how to prevent the pests and diseases that like them. They can make beautiful plants for growing up a trellis, where they can show off their blooms and display their hanging fruit. Cucumbers like hot weather, so you should wait until a couple of weeks after your last frost date to put them out into the garden. You can start the seeds indoors four to six weeks earlier to get a head start. Cucumbers like full sun, really moist, really rich soil, which means you can never add too much organic matter to them. However, they are thirsty plants, so you never want to let the soil dry out. You also don't want to be sitting in wet, softy mess, so you got to have good drainage too. You'll also want to apply a well-balanced organic fertilizer every couple of weeks throughout the growing season. That'll give you healthy plants, great production. Cucumbers are a vining plant, so they can be grown along the ground. They take up a lot of space because they do kind of ramble, so a great option is to grow them up a trellis. Growing them vertically also keeps the fruit off the ground and away from pests that like to munch on the fresh cucumbers. Another reason to grow them vertically is it gets them up off the ground. The flowers are right there where the pollinators can see them, and it does make great airflow through the plants, so they stay a little more disease-free. I harvest mine when they're about six inches long, more on the small side. If you wait a lot longer than that, depending on the variety, they can get seedy, they can get bitter, and the skin can get thicker and tougher. Third choice is one of my favorite things to grow of all time, and that is sweet potatoes. Now, contrary to popular belief, sweet potatoes are not related to regular potatoes. Sweet potatoes are in the morning glory family, and potatoes are in the nightshade family. Sweet potato vines do spread and take up a lot of space, but they can also be grown in large containers. Sweet potatoes need a six to eight week head start before your last frost. So like I mentioned last month, in most climates you should have already had those started, and traditionally they're grown from slips, meaning the vines that grow from a sweet potato. To start slips, you'll need an organic sweet potato. Organic ensures that it wasn't sprayed with a sprout inhibitor, and a shallow container with drainage filled with indoor potting mix. In a separate container, dissolve a thousand milligrams of vitamin c in one quart of water. Submerge the sweet potato in this mixture for 15 minutes, and then nestle it lengthwise into the potting mix, so that only half the potato is buried. Keep the potato moist and warm in a sunny window. In a week or two, you should see sprouts start to form. Once the sprouts or slips are about six to ten inches tall, they can be separated from the potato. Some of the slips growing from soil level may have already rooted themselves, and you can plant those in the garden straight away. Sprouts that are above the soil line can be clipped off, put in a jar of water, and in about a week or two, you're going to see roots filling the jar. At that point, they'll be ready to plant out. Now, they like warm weather. They like full sun, consistent moisture, and well-draining soil. Sweet potatoes are pretty self-sufficient. When the leaves yellow, it's a sign they're ready to harvest. Using your hands, carefully dig the tubers out of the ground. If you're using a shovel or a fork, be careful. There will be tubers over a foot from the plant. Wash any soil from the potatoes and set them in the sun to dry for a full day, and then transfer them to a warm, well-ventilated location that's at least 85 degrees for 10 days to cure. After curing, they can be stored in a cool, dry place for several months. My fourth choice is beans. I'm going to talk about two different kinds of beans, bush beans and pole beans. Having two types means no matter what size your garden is, you can fit beans in. You'll need to grow runner beans on a trellis of some kind. They can grow on a teepee or even against a fence, and bush beans are really prolific. You're not going to get less of a harvest being a smaller plant. You can plant a whole row of them. You can plant them in and among other larger crops. You can even plant them in a container, and they don't need a trellis. Bush beans are compact plants that grow between 12 and 24 inches tall and usually require little to no staking. Runner or pole beans, however, can grow up to 10 feet tall or more and require a trellis or teepee to climb on. Both have the same requirements. Full sun, warm, moist, rich soil. Giving them those things will help them produce well and keep the diseases and pests to a minimum. Beans should be sown directly into the garden. They don't like their roots disturbed through transplants. After any danger of frost has passed, sow seeds for bush varieties six to eight inches apart, and for pole varieties, sow two seeds a couple of inches apart at the base of each pole of a trellis or teepee. Keep them evenly moist until they germinate, and keep the moisture level high, but not soaking wet throughout the growing season. Beans don't need much fertilizer if they're sown in fertile soil to begin with because they are nitrogen fixers, meaning they take nitrogen out of the air and store it in nodules on their root system to use throughout the rest of the season. You will eventually see bean flowers replaced by tiny little beans that will grow very, very quickly. In the height of summer, you may be harvesting every single day because you've got to keep on top of them. The more you harvest, the more they'll produce. Now for eating fresh, you want to pick them about six inches long depending on the variety, but you want to pick them before you start to see many of the seeds inside the beans developing, so kind of more flat. Once those bumps start to develop, you're starting to wait a little bit too long. At that point, they're not going to be as tender and the strings will start to form. Now if you're planning on drying your beans, you want to make sure that those beans inside the skin are fully formed and completely dried off when you pick them. If you're growing for dried beans, you want to have lots of plants coming along at different times because once the beans dry on the vine, the plant feels it's done its job in reproduction and stops producing. So you either want to wait till the end of the season, pick them fresh all season and then toward the end of the season, let them start to dry off or have many generations of plants coming along every few weeks so that when one gives up, you've got the next one ready to go. I consider tomatoes the reigning royalty of the summer garden. There are literally hundreds of varieties. They're definitely the most popular crop grown at home and for good reason. There's absolutely no comparison in taste between a homegrown tomato and a store-bought tomato. If you're like me and spent most of your life hating tomatoes, grow your own and see if you don't change your mind. I strongly recommend growing tomatoes from seed and choosing an heirloom variety. And while I'm not a huge fan of red tomatoes, my favorite are the yellow orange tomatoes like Kellogg's Breakfast. That one tomato alone made me love tomatoes. There are many ways to grow tomatoes. I'm going to show you the way I grow mine because it produces the biggest crop with the least amount of trouble. You'll want to start your tomatoes indoors four to six weeks before your last frost date. There's a special way of sowing that will get your plants off to a flying start. I'll link that in the video description. After any danger of frost has passed, it'll be time to put your tomatoes out in the garden. Tomatoes love full sun and need at least six hours to thrive and do well. Eight hours or more, even better. Unless you live in a super hot summer climate like the south, Texas, I'm looking at you, then you might want some shade cloth for that part of the day. You'll want rich, well-draining soil to plant in, so be sure to add lots of organic material like compost prior to planting. Plant your tomatoes deep. Hopefully your starts are 10 to 12 inches tall at this point. If so, dig an 8 to 10 inch deep hole to plant them. At the bottom of each hole, combine two good sources of phosphorus like rock phosphate, bone meal into the soil. Adding a great general nitrogen-rich organic fertilizer like kelp meal, blood meal, or crab and lobster shell will also help give the plants a boost. Plant your tomato plant over that mixture and fill in the hole around the stem. You'll want to feed your tomatoes with a liquid organic fertilizer every couple of weeks. Now you might think you're finished at this point, but your tomato plants are going to need some support, and the way you do that depends on if they're a determinate plant or an indeterminate plant, and usually the plant tag will say, but if it doesn't, just google the variety and you'll be able to find out. Determinate tomatoes are like Roma tomatoes. They grow to about three feet tall, produce all their fruit at once, and then they're done. An indeterminate tomato, like most of the ones we grow, actually grow and grow and grow and produce and produce and produce until the frost comes to kill them. Now if you don't get frost or you have a really long growing season, that's just more tomatoes for you. The challenge of indeterminate tomatoes is managing the growth of these really vigorous plants. I do that in two ways, by pruning and trellising. Indeterminate tomatoes have a main stem and they also have side growth, sometimes called suckers. I grow my tomatoes up the main stem and prune off any side growth that appears in the armpit of the tomato plant. The armpit is where the leaf meets the stem. When you start to see new side growth in an armpit, you'll want to remove it to allow the plant to focus on producing fruit on the main stem, rather than producing a bunch of new leafy growth. The side growth will sometimes put on some fruit, but compared to the leafy growth, the growth will be negligible. Tomatoes can take six to eight weeks to ripen, so if you see it's a green tomato on the vine for a long time, it's just not changing color, have some patience. Tomatoes are ready to be picked when they've completely changed from green to the color they're supposed to be. You can pick a tomato before it's totally ripe and it will continue to ripen just as long as the tomato has developed some color before picking, but never, ever, ever put your tomatoes in the refrigerator, unless you like tasteless mushy tomatoes. The best time to harvest is in the afternoon, preferably after withholding water for a day or two. That concentrates the flavor. If you have just watered your tomatoes and picked them, it kind of dilutes the flavor and makes them a little more bland. The habit of the growth of tomato plants is along the ground. They want to sprawl and go as far as they can to drop their seeds as far away as possible. The problem is that means a lot of the fruit rests on the ground or near the ground and is eaten by bugs and other critters. To prevent this issue, you can train your plants up off the ground on a trellis. My trellising system is simple and requires just a few pieces of wood, heavy twine, and landscape staples. The tomatoes will be planted at the base of a link of twine. You want to carefully wind the tomato vines up and around the string every few days. Once the plant reaches the top of the trellis, cut the tops of the plants off at trellis height to redirect the plant energy back into ripening the fruit that's already set. In longer growing seasons, you can use the tomato hook method to train your plants on the trellis. Instead of cutting the plants off at the top like you would with trellising, the plants can be lowered every time the plant reaches the top of the trellis by letting out some string. This is going to allow them to grow much larger and support more fruit over a longer period of time. This method I just affix a hook eye at the top of where each string will go. The plant will grow up the string, but instead of cutting the plant off when they reach the top of the trellis, you'll remove the tomato hooks, unthread some of the string, put the tomato hook back. The only seasonal pruning that will be required is the removal of any lower leaves that show signs of yellowing or disease. The bottom few feet of your plant will look a bit naked, but it won't harm the plant in any way. Okay, that was a long segment, but tomatoes are worth it. My sixth choice is warm weather herbs like basil. Basil makes a great companion plant for tomatoes because tomato hornworms, the moth that lays the eggs that become the tomato hornworm, they find the tomato plant through smell. And if you mess up their sense of smell by putting something that smells even stronger than tomatoes, like basil, next to the tomatoes, they get confused and go somewhere else. I've been doing this for seven years and I haven't had tomato hornworms on my plant in that seven minutes. Space basil 12 inches apart on the sunny side of your tomatoes. They need lots of sun to thrive. Don't let them bloom. Leaves get bitter if they do that. So keep pinching and using it or propagate more by putting the cuttings in a jar of water. In a week you'll have tons of roots and plant more plants. Now bees love basil flowers, so I plant different kinds of basil, Thai basil, holy basil, red leaf basil around the garden, and I do let that go to flower because we don't need the leaves on that. It's strictly for the bees. The next choice is peppers and chilies. Peppers and chilies are fun crops to grow and come in a variety of shapes and colors. They vary in sweetness and hotness and some even have beautiful variegated leaves. They're actually perennials and they can grow from year to year. In mild winter climates, you can leave them right where they are or put them in a pot under some eaves of the house. In a cold winter climate, you can bring them inside for the winter. I have a whole video on how to do this. I'll link it down in the description, but it gives you a really good head start the following year. You don't have to grow them from seedlings. You can just put them in the ground and they start to take off. Start peppers from seed indoors about six to eight weeks before your last frost. The hotter the pepper, the longer it will take to germinate. The bottom heat will cut the germination time drastically, so consider using a heat mat if you're starting them indoors. Peppers are heat lovers and shouldn't be planted outside until the nighttime minimum temperatures are between 55 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit. In addition to warmth, they like moderate to moist soil. You want to plant them about 12 to 18 inches apart in a spot that receives full sun, or if you do get intense sun, you do want them to have a little shade in the afternoon or they can get sunstroke. Peppers are heavy feeders and need very rich soil, so a shovel full of compost in each planting hole will really pay off, as well as fertilizing with a complete organic fertilizer every couple weeks throughout the growing season. Staking is usually necessary, especially once the plants are laden with fruit. They can get really heavy. A simple bamboo stake with some string should suffice, and you can harvest your peppers whenever they're green, or if you want to be a little sweeter or hotter, depending on the variety, you want to wait until they change color. Number eight is corn. If you never have grown your own corn, you have no idea just how sweet it can be. I remember as a kid, my dad grew a whole bunch of corn in the backyard, and I was shocked. I still remember how delicious it was. If you have extra space in your garden, try growing it just once. Sweet corn isn't the only type you can grow. You can spice things up with popcorn or with a real beauty like glass gem corn. Corn is a warm season crop. It doesn't like to be transplanted. Choose a spot with six to eight hours of full sun, and sow directly into rich, well-draining soil that's been amended with lots of organic material. Seeds should be sown 8 to 12 inches apart. Corn is wind pollinated, so you don't want to have one row of corn. If you've ever seen, you know what corn silks are. They're at the end of the corn cob, and at the top of the plant are the tassels. So the pollen from the tassels falls on the silk, and that's what pollinates the corn. But if you have a straight line of corn, and that's it, the wind blows the pollen off the tassels, but it blows across the corn, and the pollen goes over there, or over there, and doesn't come down here below. So instead of a row of corn, you want to grow a block of corn. So maybe an eight by eight spot, or a four by eight spot, all corn. That way, no matter which way the wind blows, it's going to blow the tassel pollen onto the corn silk. Corn grows very quickly as it is a grass. You will see corn ears starting to form, where leaves meet the stalk. You'll know your corn is ready to harvest when the silks turn brown. At that point, just pull back some of the husk to reveal the kernels. You want to make sure that they look fully filled out. You can also stick your thumbnail into a kernel, and if it pops with a white milky liquid, that means it's ready. As soon as you pick the ears off the plant, the sugars start to convert to starch. So the sooner you can cook it and eat it, the better. That's why store-bought corn isn't as sweet as it can be. I'm not kidding when I say take your boiling pot of water out in the garden to put your corn in. Number nine is okra. Now three out of four of my grandparents were from the South, and so I grew up eating okra. Pride, of course, and I still love it today. It's a really hot weather plant, so if you don't get very hot weather at all, you may have to skip this one, but you definitely don't want to put it out too early. You want to make sure you're several weeks past your frost. So usually in most places by the end of May, you're getting it. They don't take up much space at all and have beautiful flowers. They're very prolific and can be harvested in 60 days or less. Number 10, we're going to be talking about a companion plant that works well for most crops, and that is daisy-type flowers. Daisy-type flowers are members of the Asteraceae family, which includes over 32,000 different species. When you look at the flower of a species like a Shasta Daisy, you might think you're looking at just one flower, but in fact, you're looking at hundreds of yellow florets contained within a circle of white bracts, or what look like petals. Each of those florets contain nectar, and the entire inflorescence, meaning the complete flower head, is made to not only attract pollinators, but to give them a comfy place to sit, relax, and have a drink. Beneficial insects are also attracted to these flowers, like ladybugs, lacewings, and hoverflies. Good choices include Echinacea, daisies, sunflower, phalangella, cosmos, marigolds, and zinnias. That's my 10 choices. If you want to get a closer, more detailed look at how I trellis my tomatoes, take a look at this video right here. I'll see you next time.