Posted on 05/01/2008 10:06:23 AM PDT by Gabz
May is a wondrous month, bursting with life and growth and energy, with color and scent and sound, a bittersweet taste of what the Garden of Eden must have been like before the fall from grace. Flowers are coming into their own, birds are nesting and hatching their young, puddles are full of tadpoles. Everything is celebrating the passing of winter and preparing for the long, hot summer ahead. With it’s perfect weather, May is the month to enjoy just being alive.
May is time to plant the vegetables that need warmer weather. The soil temperature needs to be at least 60 degrees for the warm season things such as okra, butterbeans or limas (whichever name you prefer), field peas (or crowders), peanuts, and sweet potatoes.
With the advent of warmer weather, be on the lookout for insect pests as well. Not just the ravenous for people ones like mosquitoes and gnats and yellowflies, but the starved for fresh vegetables ones like cut worms, beetles, leafhoppers, grasshoppers, cabbage loopers, and all the other ones, too numerous to name. Different weather conditions bring different insect problems. The wet, cool weather we’ve been experiencing the last few springs encourages mealybugs and aphids, not to mention lots of diseases and funguses. Dry, hot weather brings a proliferation of spider mites and a whole new set of problems.
Mid to end of May is time to spray your azaleas with a systemic insecticide to head off azalea lace bugs. By the time you see the damage, it’s too late. Early May is the time to spray your crape myrtles. Aphids absolutely love tender, new growth on crapes. With the aphids, comes the black, sooty gunk on the leaves. No aphids, no black, sooty gunk! Check your other shrubs for black, sooty gunk, otherwise known as sooty mildew. Aphids and mealybugs and sometimes scale, have a symbiotic relationship with the sooty mildew. Sooty mildew is a fungus that feeds off the honeydew secreted by aphids and mealybugs and covers leaf surfaces. Sooty mildew can eventually kill a plant as it covers the leaf surfaces and prevents the leaves from getting any light. No light, no food.
Gardenias have been especially hard hit the last few years, so make sure you check them for sooty mildew, and apply the systemic insecticide. Check the undersides of the leaves for tiny, flat insects. These are scale. The leech of the plant world, they attach themselves to the underside of the leaves and sometimes branches and suck the life out of the plants. If only a few leaves are affected by sooty mildew, they can be washed off with a mild solution of soapy water or plain alcohol. If the shrubs are large and completely infested, prune first, making sure you get rid of all the trimmings, and then spray. If the infestation is really bad, you may want to follow up with an additional spraying of systemic insecticide in about ten days or so.
Speaking of insecticides… Wouldn’t it be cool if we had completely species specific insecticides? That way you could put out insecticide to kill, say, just aphids or just mealybugs. Know what feeds on aphids? Ladybugs! So when you put out spray or dust to kill aphids, you also kill the beneficial insects. Seems to me the beneficial insects are akin to the tomatoes and other vegetable plants we want in our gardens—fragile and much more vulnerable. We waste a lot of time trying to kill tough weeds in our gardens while at the same time trying to ensure the life of the much more delicate plants we want. It would be much easier to just grow the weeds in the first place. They’re much hardier, way more prolific, don’t care if they have fertilizer or water-in fact they thrive on neglect! Too bad they taste horrible!
Berries of all kinds will be ripening and delighting us with their mouthwatering explosions of flavor. Strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, mulberries. A bounty of colors and shapes with tastes to please any palate, enjoyed by wildlife as well as humans. In our joy at their abundance and diversity, we tend to forget their purpose—berries are seed carriers. Wonderful, bite size, edible seed carriers. We have them available year round and forget how important they would have been to earlier peoples. The arrival of the first ripe berries signaled the true end of winter, of the starving time, ensuring that our ancestors had survived another cold winter. Their importance is handed down to us in recipes for jams and jellies and preserves, some of the only ways they had of enjoying berries year round.
If you’re going to put your houseplants outside for the summer, remember to ease them into it. Don’t just throw them out in the bright sunshine and hope they make it! Think about it this way—all winter you’ve been wearing warm clothes. Long sleeved shirts and jeans, covering and protecting as much skin as possible. Your skin is pale and tender, unused to harsh sunlight. You wouldn’t don your shorts or bikini and go to the beach for the first time this season and stay from sunup to sundown, not without painful results, anyway. Plants are the same way. They’ve been inside all winter. They’re used to controlled temperatures and low levels of light. Put them outside, but use common sense! Put them on a porch or under a carport for a few days, let them gradually get used to more light. Some of them will need partial shade all summer, some can take more direct light. Inside your house will look bare for awhile, but they’ll all be coming back in sometime in the fall! Don’t forget to keep watering your plants once you move them out, and they will probably need more water while outside. Saucers underneath work great for helping hold water, just remember to dump the saucers if we get a lot of rain so your plants don’t drown.
The dirty little ditty on the card read:
Hurray, Hurray The First of May Outdoor (fill in the blank) Begins today
howdy everybody!
I went back through last week’s thread and my freepmail and I think I got everyone added to the list that requested on it.
I did manage to get 13 varieties of hot peppers seeds started this week, although I have been slightly hampered with having a sick child at home...........the fun never ends!!!
Since I never had a “normal” TV station on (stuck with Animal Plannet and Disney) on Monday it was not until I got to the Moose Lodge around 6pm that I found out we were under a tornado watch and parts of the Hampton Roads area of Virginia had been devastted by tornados.
Suffolk, the hardest hit spot is where my husband used to frequently work. If he were still working for IBM he would have been right there Monday afternoon/evening when it happened. I received an email message from the church secretary about the relief fund that has been set up by the diocese, as we are a part of the Souther Virginia diocese.
I’m not in a position to help out financially, but I am keeping all those people in my prayers.
That is HILARIOUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I always loved Hagar cartoons.
My daughter picked out a packet of carrot seeds, so once again I am going to attempt trying carrots.
Thankfully rabbits are not a problm for us -— I think there are too many foxes around — fat foxes!
LOL!
Husband rolled over and whispered that in my ear just this morning! (Great minds...)
Well, I tried with the tomatoes. We had a hard freeze last night; 22 at about 3 AM. Even though I covered them well, it wasn’t enough. I have plenty of backups though and the long range forecast into the middle of May looks good.
I sure hope that this didn’t take out the fruit tree crops. I don’t know where the trees were in setting their blossoms and all, but it will be a big hit for some of the growers if they lost their crop for the season.
Carrots are fairly easy to grow as long as you have plenty of loose dirt - about 6 + inches deep - and lots of sunshine.
My daughter always wanted me to plant the “baby carrots” until I told her they were actually regular carrots basically shaved down to that size.
Humpf.
It’s snowing here outside of Denver.
And probably will snow tomorrow, as well.
LOL!!! That’s funny.
It was nice this morning, but it is not outdoor weather right now — overcast and VERY windy.
EEK on the freeze.
I was talking to one of my farmer buddies last night, he’s been out plowing, but the weather is causing him fits.
All the recent rain we’ve had is causing me fits as well, most of my lovely plowed field has to be hoed and/or tilled again because the rain caused weeds........it’s very green in places I haven’t planted anything yet.
The ONLY “gardening” I’ve been able to do, aside from starting flats of seedlings, has been to pot up the big planters outside of the back door.
They were lovely; mixed leaf lettuces, alyssum, red pansies...they lasted TWO days until the chickens found them and that was the end of that!
So, the chickens are on “lock down” now and that’s the end of THAT!
I got four FREE bags of slightly leaking potting soil from work, so I’ll have little expense re-doing the planters again, but I’m going to wait until next week until the coming rain (three days worth they’re saying) passes. I also got four FREE bags of cocoa bean mulch (smells like chocolate!) and put that on the ‘Murphy Nyberg Memorial Flower Garden’ planted in honor of my late Lab, Murphy. It’s filled with yellow daffs and a Yellow Twig DOGwood. If she were still here, she’d be rolling around in it and digging up the bulbs planted in her honor, LOL!
This afternoon I plan on trimming bottom branches from my White Pine, which took a hit due to the amount of snow piled around it’s bottom this winter, and I think I’ll clean up the rock/herb garden, after I do a Grocery Run.
(My ONE day off each week is filled mainly with foraging for foodstuffs, LOL!)
I figured depth was my problem in the past with carrots.
9 year old “slave labor” will come in handy!!!! If she wants carrots, she can dig up the spot for them!!!
Hey, Gabz. Hope you had a better week this time. Ours has been better too. I spray very few bugs - the sawfly larvae with insecticidal soap and the peach tree scale with horticultural oil. Otherwise it’s pretty much strip them off, squish or stomp.
The deer now - I would spray them in a jiffy. My homemade repellent keeps clogging my sprayer even when I leave the eggs out. But the idea of paying something like $14 a quart for a bottle at Home Depot that has less than 1% capascin (cayenne), mint oil and rotten egg solids - forget it. I’m thinking of extracting the cayenne in oil, and mixing that, mint oil and a little detergent with Wilt-Pruf so it won’t wash off in the rain.
Everything is beautiful now but I’m still in a gripy mood. You read about getting rid of your lawn to save time and energy. Replace it with groundcover and shrubs. Well, I did that where the grass wasn’t growing too well, and now I’m trying to weed out several thousand maple, crabapple, multiflora rose and poison ivy seedlings out of my groundcover. In theory once the pachysandra and the hellebore get thick enough, they’ll shade out the seedlings. But the deer eat pachysandra, yes they do, and the hellebore are young little things needing help.
I am going to go out now and smell the lilacs, and look at the Virginia bluebells, the hosta, the bleeding heart, the delicate Green Pearl and Hawera narcissus and the new leaves pushing up, and enjoy the freshness and life of it all.
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Robert Frost
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.
OH NOOOOOOOOOOOOO..............
Snow should be outlawed before the beginn of May, IMO.
I managed to get most of my spring stuff in. Now working on the herbs. Can’t believe it’s almost time for the summer stuff to go in already being that we got down to 32 degrees yesterday morning!
And no mushrooms here so far either, but the blooms on the trees are OK so we’ll get fruit for the first time in 2 years.
Years ago, many years ago, the entire city of Dover would smell like chocolate because of the General Foods plant. Back in the 60's & 70's probably about half the town either worked there or knew someone who did and everyone had cocoa bean mulch. But that ended when they moved the Baker chocolate manufacturing to somewhere else.
Last year we had a promo at work where customers received these AWESOME designer chocolate bars when they bought $25 worth of cocoa bean mulch.
We were all in Hog Heaven while that promo was going on because the main office sent us LOTS of extra chocolate bars...just in case. :)
Good for you!!!! And I love Robert Frost's work!
Our temps haven’t dipped that low, but we did have to light a fire in the woodstove Sunday evening because it was downright chilly in here.
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