May is a beautiful month to be outdoors, with all the spring flowers in full bloom and summer just around the corner. With everything bursting into growth, there’s plenty to do in the garden, and here are our top tips for gardening jobs in May.
- If you’ve been growing dahlia and canna tubers in pots, start hardening them off now, ready to plant out at the end of the month.
- Sow hardy annuals like cornflowers, Nigella and poppies for a fantastic summer display. Get the kids involved too, sowing sunflowers and nasturtiums outdoors or in pots.
- If your growing your own vegetables, May is perhaps the busiest month in terms of sowing. If you've prepared your outdoor beds, there's a lot now that you can sow directly into the ground including beetroot, carrots, parsnips, perpetual spinach, annual spinach, chard, radish, turnip, peas and runner beans.
- For Indoor sowing, winter cabbages, Brussels' sprouts, calabrese, kale, kohlrabi, swede, turnip, lettuce, scallions, spinach and chard can still be sown in modules for transplanting later.
- Keep on earthing up potatoes – it gives you a bigger harvest and also stops the sunlight getting to the tubers, turning them green and toxic.
- Get a headstart on summer by filling pots and hanging baskets with begonias, geraniums and other colourful bedding plants, but keep an eye on the weather forecast and don’t plant them out until all risk of frost is over.
- Sow basil seeds in pots on a sunny windowsill. They germinate easily, so don’t sow too thickly.
- Start hardening off tomato seedlings for planting out next month.
- Cut back the foliage on spring bulbs once it starts to turn yellow. Now’s a good time to lift and divide overgrown clumps of spring bulbs, while you know where they are!
- Prune early-flowering (Group 1) clematis like Clematis armandii and Clematis montana once they finish flowering, to keep them from getting too big.
- Prune spring-flowering shrubs like forsythia once they have flowered to give them plenty of time to develop flowers for next year. Cut any flowered shoots back to strong buds lower down.
- Harvest rhubarb, but remember to pick only one-third of the stems on each plant, to conserve the plant’s energy for next year’s harvest.
- Keep on top of weeds. Use a hoe on dry days to tackle annual weeds in borders and vegetable beds, taking care not to damage the roots of your plants. Dig out perennial weeds with a hand fork or daisy grubber. Don’t let annual weeds go to seed if you can help it – remember “one year’s seeding makes seven years’ weeding”!
- Mow the lawn regularly, but try to leave an area unmown this month to give pollinators and other garden wildlife a boost.
- With the soil warmed up and still retaining some moisture (with more likely to come in the next few weeks) now is the perfect time to plant perennials and shrubs, before we have any unexpected prolonged dry-spells. This will give them that bit more time to settle in without you having to worry too much about additional watering.
You can view most of our products online with a wider range available in our stores in Roscommon Town and Boyle, so why not browse our selection or pay us a visit as we're sure you'll find everything you need to prepare your garden for (hopefully) a beautiful summer ahead!
