13 Garden Tasks You MUST Do In May

It is May in the garden, my friends. I got this beautiful cabbage by my side. We're going to do some chores in today's video. Myself, Jacques, Meg, and Aaron on the Epic Gardening team are just going to share what we are focused on right now in our gardens across the country in May to hopefully inspire some chores for your garden. Before we get into the video, I want to let you guys know we have our crazy sale. It is our buy three birdies beds, get one free sale for Memorial Day. It ends on the 27th of May, but some styles are already going out of stock. If you already have birdies beds, you can get up to 50% off the rest of the entire store. Shop.epicgardening.com until May 27th. Let's get back to the video. When I think of May, I think of sort of the last hurrah of spring. It's before it gets too hot, too dry in the summertime. And my garden starts to struggle a little bit for water. So today we are talking about mulch, specifically when it's appropriate to mulch and actually when I choose not to mulch like is the case in this bed over here. But the first and foremost problem that we have to deal with here today is this pathway because the soil is exposed, which means it is now drying out very rapidly. All the rains that we got over the spring months, I want to actually lock that moisture into the ground for as long as possible. Cause even though I'm not growing plants directly in this pathway, the plants that are planted on the edge of the path are still getting water from there. So let's go ahead and spread out some wood chip mulch. Wood chip mulch is something I've actually switched to over straw for my pathways because last longer, it holds moisture longer. And it also is more pleasant to the eye, at least in my opinion, it's less glary and reflective. So the pathway is done and it looks much better. I'm happy to capture all that water, but now we need to talk about mulching vegetable beds. Now straw is still my favorite for vegetable beds because this will break down very rapidly, feeding the soil and the plants that are in there. The nice thing about it, which is also the curse is that it's a very reflective material. I'm sure you guys could see it right now. And that reflectiveness actually pushes the heat of the sun away from your soil. So it'll actually cool your soil substantially. That is exactly why this bed over here has no mulch because it is all pepper plants. Pepper plants thrive in warm soil. And in the early spring months, it's actually just not warm enough for them to grow as rapidly as I want. So instead what I did is I did mulch it in a sense, but I mulched it with my own compost. This material is much darker. It actually feels hot to the touch right now. And it's going to heat up the soil much faster, allowing these peppers to thrive. Now, once June, July comes, I will mulch this to keep it cooler. But for now, I want to trap the heat as much as possible. Now in contrast, we have garlic here. Garlic is not a hot weather crop and it has very short stubby roots. So this bed will benefit from mulch at any time of the year. And right now is a good time to do it because I don't want my garlic to be stressed as it's going into its bulbing stage. I don't want it to be lacking any water. I want it to have access to water nutrients at all times so I don't get stunted bulbs. So this will be getting the mulch treatment, but my pepper bed is not going to be getting any mulch for another month or two. As summer comes closing in, our plants are growing much more rapidly. They're using up all of those nutrients in the soil from the compost that we hopefully applied back in the spring. And we can help them grow bigger, better and stronger by staying on top of their nutrition needs and hitting them with just a little bit of fertilizer. I like to go with something really gentle, like an organic granular or liquid fertilizer. And for an organic granular, I really like this Garden Tone by Espoma. It's a slow release fertilizer. So you will work it in at the base of the plant and as it rains or as you water your garden, these nutrients are going to seep down into the soil. They'll get to the roots and they'll slowly fertilize your plants over time. And I like to apply this once a month or so. Eat something a little more instant. Say you have some plants that aren't looking too hot. They need fertilizer ASAP. I really like to go with a fish fertilizer. Fish fertilizer is basically fish poop and dead fish parts, kind of like a dead fish stew. It's an instant fertilizer because you can mix this with water. You water your plants with it. Those nutrients go directly to the roots and the plant takes those up right away. You can also use this as a foliar fertilizer. You can mix with water and actually spray directly onto your plants. And I personally love to do this. I really do feel like it gives my plants a little bit of a boost. And if you ever see me out in the garden with a pesticide sprayer backpack, it does not have any pesticides in it. It just has fish poop in it. And I'm about to make my garden stink for an entire day. But I really do love it. And I try to do this every two weeks or so, or honestly, just whenever I have time and whenever I'm thinking about it. Hey, everyone, it's Erin, the Impatient Gardener. And boy, am I excited about May because here in my Zone 5B, 6A garden, that really behaves more like a Zone 4 garden when it comes to waking up in spring because of this weird microclimate that we're in. One of my must-do jobs is pruning boxwood shrubs. Now, you can do this at different times of the year, but I like to kind of take the lazy man's approach. And I like to prune these once and that's it through the whole year. And I accomplish that by waiting for the spring flush of growth to grow out first. So I haven't touched them yet. And also, you never want to prune your boxwoods too late in the year because what happens in winter is that then you get winter damage because it puts on fresh growth that just isn't hardened off in time for winter. So I find that that late May timing accomplishes everything I need to keep my boxwoods looking really nice for the whole year. And it's the only time I have to prune all year. Now, I tend to use a hand pruner. If you have a ton of boxwoods, you could absolutely use a hedge trimmer or something like that. I like to have the control that that's something like this shears allows. And I don't clip my boxwoods too tight. You can run into problems with that if you do clip your boxwoods really tight. And even if you don't, you might want to occasionally take your hand pruner and cut a few branches and create just a few little sort of holes in here. What that does is help get some light on the inside so you don't end up with a shrub that only has foliage on the outside. Then before you move on to your next boxwood, disinfect your blades. It's a really good idea to do this with any time you're pruning the same type of plant multiple times over. You never want to carry any diseases. And as you probably know, there are a lot of diseases these days that are kind of plaguing some types of boxwoods. So I like to use a can of Lysol to disinfect my blades. You can also use a bleach solution or a rubbing alcohol solution to clean your bays and sterilize them so that you're not transferring anything one of your boxwood shrubs might have to the next one. Ever since I built my compost bin, actually my five compost bins, I have been on compost management. So let's chop the roots off of this cabbage. Not composting this, I'm saving this for later. But what I've noticed is I need to be turning my bins a little bit more often. So this one is clearly full. And the way that one of these compost systems works, generally speaking is you have your least broken down material on the left side. And as it breaks down, you kind of migrate it down the system until you get to the end, which is your fine or finished compost. So this is clearly my non-broken down area, but I want to call your attention to this bin here, which is lower and also has a thermometer in it. So what I can do is check my temperature. With composting, you generally want a hot compost. There are other ways to do it, but the method I'm choosing is hot compost. And so I want to see this thermometer in the active range. Right now, I see it just below steady. So my compost has gone cold. If I have so much new material here, this is a great time of season to be turning my compost pile. So I'll show you how I do that. So because this pile is overfilled, what I'm going to do is take a little bit of this material off and I'll store it in my little wheelbarrow right now. But what we're doing is we're rebuilding the layers of compost. Compost generally being composed of what are called brown and green materials or carbon-rich and nitrogen-rich materials. As a compost pile starts to break down, it can go cold because there's just less biological activity as it does get broken down. So we're going to basically relayer our compost bin by turning this one over into this one. I can actually see on this thermometer that I am in the active range. So that means that I've got an okay pile right here. So if I dig into this second pile, I can see that I've got some okay broken down material here. There's still some larger chunks and this isn't quite full yet. So I think I'm just going to shortcut my process a little bit and just turn some of this new material into this lower bin. And then I'll use my fork to incorporate it and then I'll cover it back up. We'll see if it heats up. What you'll notice is I've got some straw material in here. A lot of the times, especially when your garden starts to kick off for the season, you have a lot of the green materials like your little celery stalks or your cabbage leaves, whatever, but you don't have enough of those browns, dry leaves, straw. So sometimes I like to put a little filler in there with that straw to help keep that carbon and nitrogen ratio in balance. I like this particular bin design. We built it last year because it has this front slat system. So if I have a smaller pile, I can just remove some slats or I can easily access the entire front to shovel it all out to do a really full turn. If I wanted to, or I can just put the slats back in and fill it all the way up. So all I'm doing now, and I'll admit I'm a bit more of a hybrid of an active versus a passive composter. You got guys like Charles Dowding who almost never turn their piles. I'll rotate and I'll manipulate sometimes. And sometimes I will do a full turn where I pull the pile out and I rebuild it from scratch. I didn't do that here, but surface area is just so important with composting. So I like to take my machete and just chop some of these larger materials down. You'll notice if I just keep doing this for a little bit, it will sink in. And that extra surface area just means more area for microbes to consume and reproduce and break down. So you'll tend to find your compost develops a little bit faster. So what I've done now is I've kept this pile that I know is pretty active, mostly intact, but I've taken some of that overage and brought it over here to incorporate a little bit more material. I'm not quite ready to use this compost yet. So I'll mix this in over the course of the season. But my first chore is done. Here in San Diego, our tomatoes are really starting to put on a lot of growth and I'm very happy to see it, which means that we also have to start doing our pruning and maintenance of our tomatoes. So what am I looking for at the early season in terms of pruning and maintaining these tomatoes? Well, the first and foremost is I want to make sure I prune any of these leaves that are capable of touching the ground. When it touches the ground, a couple of things could happen. First of all, they could get diseased directly from the soil contact on the leaf. Second, you'll generally find that those leaves get munched up by little pests like roly polies or earwigs that live on the floor, come up, bite your leaf, open a wound, and then now disease could also enter into your tomato plant. So the main thing I'm looking for, like I said, is any leaf that touches the ground. I will be pruning. Now the cool thing is, is that you don't have to prune all the way at the base of the plant. You could just prune the tip of the leaflet. So the whole leaf is maybe this big. I just prune the end where it is actually rubbing up against the floor. You don't have to remove the whole leaf. You will over time have to, but as the tomato plants are really small, removing a giant leaf like that can slow your tomato plant down quite a lot. The other thing I like to do is actually remove any suckers that form on the bottom foot of my tomato plant. I don't want this tomato plant branching like crazy early on in its lifespan. So right over here is one of these suckers that I'm talking about. Suckers are just extra growth that happened in between the leaf nodes and the stem. The suckers are totally fine. They will produce fruit. A lot of people think they don't, but that's not true. This is just a clone of the plant. It's another branch and it's totally capable of growing into a tomato plant and producing plenty of fruit. But early on, I want to focus on growth getting up off the ground so I could get maximum airflow at the ground level. So that's the first thing I'm doing here. The next thing is I'm making sure I am trellising this as it grows. If you wait too long to trellis your tomato plants, one thing that could happen is that it'll lean too far. And when you try to trellis it back up, you could actually snap the branch. So right here I have a Florida weave set up, which is pretty basic. All you need is two vertical supports for every two to three tomato plants. Tie off your string on one side. Once that's tied off, you're going to alternate the string with one plant going behind the next plant. You go in front and then you cross over. Once you get to the post itself, wrap it around a few times, and then you do the exact opposite. So in this case, I went in front. Now I'm going to go behind this one. I went behind, I'm going to go in front and then I just need to tie it off to the end of my post. And what happens is, is this string creates a containment for my tomato plants so they don't flop over and they continue to go vertically. This task is everyone's least favorite. And I might go as far as to say, it's the bane of every gardener's existence, but it's still really important. And that is weeding. If you allow weeds to grow freely in your vegetable garden, the weeds can try to rob your crops of nutrients. They can sometimes even out-compete them and cause them to underperform or in extreme cases die. So it's best just to suck it up, take some time to get it done, especially next to your crops. There are some tools you can use to help you with the task of weeding, to make it a little bit easier on you. There's a lot of really cool standing weeders. There's some handheld ones. They usually have a really sharp tip that kind of just dig right into the root of the weed and you can easily pull them out. Or if you have a lot of repressed anger, you can just grab the weed with your bare hands and rip it out of the ground. You know, whatever works for you. I think it's also important to learn how to identify the weeds that you're pulling out. Especially if you're a chaos gardener like me, we're always sprinkling seeds everywhere and we don't want to accidentally pull out something that we meant to plant. So Google Lens is like my favorite tool for this. I just snap a pic of the weed before I remove it, identify what it is and kind of just get familiar with it. And if you have chickens, they love scratching around in a big pile of weeds, but you want to make sure that you're giving them things that they can eat and nothing that's toxic for them. This is also great practice because some weeds are actually edible and medicinal like these cleavers or also called sticky willy. What a name. But if there's something edible and medicinal in your garden and you aren't using pesticides, you may want to actually eat it. Now May is also the sweet spot for dividing and planting perennials. And that's because the soil has started to warm up, but our temperatures aren't super hot. So there's plenty of time for plants to acclimate to the new area and really grow like gangbusters this summer. Now there's a lot of reasons to divide perennials. Sometimes a plant will tell you that it needs to be divided because there will be sort of a hole in the middle of it. And that's a good sign that that plant has gotten congested. That center has died out, but all those bits that are growing around the outside can become great plants. Now, sometimes we just want more plants for our garden and dividing is the easiest and probably the cheapest way to accomplish that. Now, how you divide a plant depends a little bit on how that plant grows, but for the most part, you can dig it out. Now, some plants have very fibrous roots that are better to kind of pull apart and tease apart into different plants, but a lot of plants just need a good chop with a spade. So you pull it out, put your spade right through the middle of it, or however many sections you're going to need to do, make a strong, decisive cut, and you have your new plants. And of course you need to water and take care of those new plants just a little bit more than you probably do your established perennials. Now, this probably isn't the time to be dividing things that bloom very early in the year, because you probably are going to lose your opportunity for flowers if you do that. Now you certainly can divide them if you don't mind losing the flowers, but if you want to have that flower show, those are generally best divided in fall. For me here in San Diego, zone 10B, May is a time where I actually need to change the garden over a little bit. What you see in front of you are a bunch of Brussels sprouts, some good, some not so good. This one, I'm leaving. I'm actually seeing some Brussels sprouts forming on that. But some of these just for some reason or another did not really form great sprouts. And it's getting to that point of the season where it's just too hot for them to have a chance at thriving. So this is what I like to call selective garden maintenance. I like to kind of pop in and out different plantings and not necessarily fully clear a bed out and just have a bit more of a variety, something always planted. So what I'm going to do is come through and I'm going to cut out one of these Brussels. You really don't have to use a machete in your life, but I'll tell you a little anger management skills gets all that stress right out. So that's going to go to the hens. But what you see here now is I have some Lenaria sprinkled through here. I have some Zinnias. There are actually some really clever plantings of onions in this bed. And I want to clear some of this out, do a mini reset and I'm going to plant something in here for summer. If you're wondering why I'm actually ripping some of these roots out, I don't do this all the time, but for really large root systems with very big main stems, I tend to take out at least what I can see. Above the soil, I feel like it just speeds up ease of transplanting in a new bed if I'm going to reset it. And I'm about to do that with a pepper. So I've got a couple peppers here. They're perhaps a little bit taller than I would like them to be, but not a big deal. The thing I love about this sort of more laissez-faire style of planting out a vegetable bed, especially if it's in ground, but you can do this in a raised bed as well, is your garden just looks more full more of the time. So I have an early jalapeno. I'm just going to base space them out right here. I have a Jimmy Nardello, which is a really nice and productive pepper. One of my favorites over the last year or two. And then I have a Joe E Parker. In fact, I have two, but I'm only going to put one in. And so spacing becomes less of a stress, less of a concern. I just want to come in with my trowel and stab this in where it seems like it makes the most sense. So right where that Brussels sprout was, seems good. I can actually see some really great soil life down there. Some good mycorrhizal fungi, good growth. So in I go. Low stress. I'll stab another one right here in between these two onions. Now the thing about these onions, they actually would prefer to kind of be a little bit more by themselves, but I just pepper these onions in as a multi-plant. I don't stress too much about getting them because I have a dedicated area where I really want my onion production. The rest of these are kind of just a little bit of a bonus. So in I come. What I really want to stress here is just getting your garden to be a little bit more in flux, a little bit more tasting and changing things around instead of full clear reset, full clear reset. Just as an added tip, you can root these suckers that I talked about earlier. Here's how I like to do it. There are a couple of different ways of doing it. The first thing I always do regardless though, is I remove any of the lower leaves. I just want to leave really one big leaflet. Now, if there are any flowers that are forming already, like right here, this is what a baby flower looks like. I'm also going to remove that because I want the plant to focus solely on rooting and growing. Actually could even remove this whole entire leaf. It only needs one or two leaves really like this. To grow. So what we need to do is take a pot of soil like this one here. It's already nice and moist. We're going to poke a hole right into the middle here. It's just a little bit easier if you use something else, shove it into the dirt like so, and then press very tightly up against that cutting before finally watering it. Now I have this one here, which was rooted this exact same way. And just as a caveat, you want to make sure that you water it a lot at the beginning. And it's going to look really sad for like the first week before it starts rooting. And here I'll even dig this one out just for you guys. So you can see what it looks like. Just as I buried this one, you could see it's growing roots over here. You can also see it's growing roots out the bottom, but this entire stem that's buried is capable of producing roots, which is exactly what it's doing. And that is an easy way to clone a tomato plant that you might really like, but you just didn't have enough starts at the beginning of the season. Well, now you've got an exact copy right here. There is nothing more disappointing than planting a bunch of delicious herbs, getting a couple of really great harvests from them. And then they just suddenly bolt on you and you have no backups, especially when you live in a really warm climate like here in North Carolina, where herbs just tend to bolt often. And that's why I am always making sure to succession sow my herbs this time of year. I like to succession sow my herbs every two to four weeks, just whenever I can kind of remember to do so. Sometimes I'll have like a six cell of basil, just ready to go. But if I forget or I get behind, I'll just do a little bit of chaos gardening and I'll just sprinkle some herb seeds in any kind of gap that I can find in my garden beds. Some herbs can just be so short lived. And some notorious ones that always tend to bolt really early for me and my climate are basil, cilantro and dill. And it's not their fault. Like they're just plants and they want to flower. But we, as humans, we don't want their flowers. We want their leaves to use in the kitchen. So staying on top of succession sowing those quick growing annual herbs that tend to bolt early can just make sure that you have a continuous harvest of them all season long. However, at the end of the season, I always let all of my herbs just bolt away. It is great for the pollinators and they go to seed and you can collect those seeds and save them for next year. Now this is obviously a spring container that I made, and I'm going to be enjoying this through most of May because the time to plant out ornamental containers is definitely in May, but often not until later in May. Now I really like planting containers in May because after the nighttime temperatures do warm up enough for those plants to be outside, I want to get them out because I want to enjoy those containers all summer. Because if you're in a Northern zone and a cooler zone, you probably have pretty short summers and we want to make the absolute most of what we can get out of that. But it's also important not to jump the gun because if you plant things out before those nighttime temperatures are warm enough, they're going to get into pots and they're going to sulk and they're going to be very unhappy about it. And a lot of times if a plant gets a bad start in when you plant it out, it's really hard for it to recover and it will eventually, it just takes several weeks. And now you've wasted a couple of weeks of our precious summer growing time. So planting ornamental containers out in May is a really good idea. Just often you might need to wait until later in May to do that so that you can make the most of that season. But still give those plants exactly the temperatures they want as they start their life in your container. May is the perfect time of year to check up on your perennials and see if they need anything from you. While they are perennial and they will live for many years, that doesn't mean that you could just leave them there forever and they'll always do well. This guava tree in particular has been really slow to leaf out while the rest of my guavas have not only fully leafed, but have begun to set fruit. So today we are going to be repotting this perennial plant, putting it in a new container, investigate and see what's wrong with it. And I'll also show you how to know if your tree is actually dead like this one. So I do have some advantage here because I know that my other guavas are doing well and this one isn't. So how are we going to determine whether parts of this tree are dead? We're going to take a knife like this one over here and you're simply going to take the blade, scratch the bark. If it's immediately brown underneath where you scratched it, then that branch is dead like this one here. It's hollow, it's dry, it's never growing back. Whereas up here where I have leaf growth, if I were to scratch this just light enough to break the bark, it's green underneath. That means that that branch is alive and it has the potential to not only grow, but it should grow. So we might prune up some of these dead branches at the end. But first we have to take this out of this pot and put it into a new container and see if there's anything wrong with the roots. Cause that's really my only guess. Now the way we're going to get this out of the pot is actually using this little thing I got at Ikea. It's a cake spatula designed to spread frosting, but this is really good as a pot knife as well. A pot knife is just something you take, you slide between the edge of your pot and your plant itself and it helps separate any of the roots that might be stuck on this actual plastic. So I'm going to just run this along the edge here. You could try to get a little deeper if your pot doesn't have a ledge like this, which is annoying. So instead what I'm going to do is just tip it over at this point and we're going to smack the sides of this pot. That should help loosen out any of these roots that are still stubbornly attached. And then I should be able to just pull the tree right out. So what I'm looking at here are a bunch of roots that are black. Black roots are generally ones that have drowned so they haven't had enough oxygen. They've been sitting a little bit too wet. Everything down here, for example, see how it's literally black. That's, that's not a good sign. These are roots that have sat in water for too long. They smell a little bit funky because they've been basically in a swamp. So what we're going to do here is actually cut off the bottom quarter of this potted soil and all the roots associated. We'll rough up the edges and we'll move it into a new container with new soil. Now the other thing I'm seeing here is a bunch of this white material. This is mycelial growth, which is good, but overall the plant is not healthy. So there's a little pocket of mycelium here, but this part has none. And the roots themselves are all dark. So let's get a knife. We'll cut this root ball out, rough it up and fit it into a new container. So here's what we're taking off. It's very heavy, very wet. That's where all that wet water was sitting, killing the roots. Let's get that out of the way. And then all I'm going to do now is just rake the outside of this. I'm also going to take this knife and cut off some of these roots up here that are spiraling. Now, if you do it too heavy, if you go too heavy handed here, you can harm the tree. But in this case, it's a guava. They just want to grow. I'm not too worried about it. Definitely make sure you don't have a plant with sensitive roots because they're not going to recover from this. While it's definitely not the most beautiful container here, it does have a lot of drainage holes, which I'm going to be very grateful for because I think this guava tree was definitely drowning. So as we could see here, we have to start with some amount of new soil. So let's go ahead and fill that up. So all I'm doing here is adding a bunch of high quality potting mix to the bottom here and compressing it a little bit because I don't want it to settle. So what's happening is that the other pot was wider. So all I'm going to do here is cut off a little bit more of these roots. I wouldn't recommend that you go this hard on a repot unless you know that your tree has a problem. A simple refresh is all you really need. What I'm doing right now is just roughing the top surface up so we could get rid of all this old material. We'll add a little bit of fertilizer. It doesn't matter what you use. Just any high quality organic fertilizer. We'll do just fine. After the fertilizer, we want to cover up any of that material with some fresh soil. I have to say this tree put up a little bit of a fight here, but this is well worth it. This is now going to thrive in its new container with more drainage, fresh soil and that extra dose of fertilizer. The last thing I'm going to do is walk around and just trim off any of these dead branches. This is a great thing to do to your perennial plants, especially if they don't seem to be performing after one year to the next. This will give them a lease for new life. My fruit tree orchard is one of the most satisfying parts of the garden, but it does require a good amount of maintenance every single season. So right now I'm by my peach tree, which is far and away my most productive stone fruit tree in the orchard. What I did before you're watching this video is actually cut the height down quite a bit, maybe about two feet cut down. And I also thinned out some of the branches just to have a nice sort of open vase style structure to the plant. But what I'm doing today is actually finishing up a chore that I started a couple months ago with my friend Tom Spellman. He is my backyard fruit mentor. And we came through and did some pruning here of these stems, the stems that, in fact, that you see the peaches on right now. Some of them we cut down to size because take a look at this stem. Do we really think that this single stem can support one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, 13 or so peaches? No. And one just fell off. And that's the tree saying this is too many for me to support on this particular plant. So I actually do something kind of weird. I do a bit of a shake sometimes to see what wants to come off. Those all wanted to come off. They probably were going to get aborted anyways by the plant. But a good rule of thumb is to thin maybe one every three to five inches or so. And I'm going to go with largest first. So this one to me has to go. This one, too small. And one of these three has to go. This one's closest to one that I definitely want to keep. And this one's furthest. So even though it's the smallest, I might actually decide to remove this one right here. Which you can just twist off or cut off. And I'll remove this one right here. And then I will actually also remove one of these two. I think I actually will remove this one here. So now I'm going to have way less resources being required. And I'm going to have two really nice juicy peaches instead of 13 kind of mediocre peaches. So what I'll do now, and in fact, probably will take me a little bit of time so you might not see it, is I'll come through and do this to my entire peach tree. Is this mandatory? It is not. You don't have to stress, but I find you get a better fruit and you also damage your tree less cause you won't have as many branches breaking. So these are our chores for May. If you want to figure out what to plant in May, check this video right here. Hope you like this format and good luck in the garden and keep on growing.