Flower Moon

May is uniquely lush with life force and inspiration for gardeners. Blood and sap are both coursing. The same force, which reawakens the plants, and blossoms in their fragrance and loveliness, moves in lovers. Feeling their hearts open again, they yearn for a retrieval of the magical awareness, which is love. Spirits of mischief haunt the budding woods.

The mystery of spring’s renewal from a barren winter landscape captures everyone’s heart by happy surprise. Freshly greening foliage of herbs and trees entices the soul of a gardener, as in no other time of year.

Cool mornings, warm afternoons and ten thousand things to do, appear, seemingly all at once. May is the busiest month in the garden. Setting out seedlings, fattening soils with amendments, pruning shrubs, dividing perennials, weeding and potting up plants will keep any gardener busy. With new life sprouting up all over, watering seeded beds and weeding are a part of my daily ritual, along with opening and closing cold frames. Pungent leaves of chives lead the way to greening vegetable plots. French Breakfast and Easter Egg radish leaves are the first to pop up from seed in my garden. Mr. Big Dorian peas, Sugar Ann peas, Bright Lights-Swiss chard and Jubilee Hysor broad beans follow.

I have made a couple of new 20-by-three-foot beds, expanding my vegetable garden. These will be used for heirloom varieties of melon, beans and squash. The beds are layered above ground. First, a half foot or better of fall leaves were spread to form the beds on a cardboard base. Onto that, I put a three-inch layer of compost, followed by a three-inch mixed layer of cow manure, wood ash and peat moss. A loose covering of hay brings the beds’ height up to a foot and a half.

Last season’s beds in this new vegetable garden were prepared similarly, and had shovel loads of cow manure set on them in the fall. These are being turned under, and supplemented with dressings of compost, as each bed is readied for production. Also in May, I will work phosphate rock and pulverized potash into the soil at a rate of about one pound per 10 square feet.

Pot up nasturtiums, pansies or sugar snaps now, for Mother’s Day. Beans, corn, cucumbers and squash may be safely sown in open ground after frost threats have passed. Biennial and perennial seeds can be planted by month’s end for next year’s bloom. I will grow a few different morning glory vines interspersed with climbing beans. I hope these will become a wall of green on the northern edge of the garden, with trumpeting blooms and colorful pods.

Houseplants can be divided and repotted. Seed cool season vegetables and root crops after mid-month (beets, beans, cabbage, carrots, chard, lettuce, onions, potatoes, radishes, turnips). At the end of May, plants going outside for the summer can be hardened off for a few days with tomato and pepper seedlings. Squash, pole and lima beans, and cucumber can be started.

Fortunately, early demands of the garden are softened, when seeing drifts of daffodils. Pools of golden sun shine on the cheery heads for weeks, and working outside is easier because of their parade.