May Gardening Tasks

May is when my tropical plants move back outside to my deck. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

May Gardening Tasks

What a lovely spring we’ve had so far. I garden in USDA Hardiness zone 5b although we didn’t have much of a winter. Until mid-April, when a last gasp snow storm blanketed us for several days, a last hurrah off sorts of the cold season.

Where I live in mid-Missouri, the last frost date is usually around Mother’s Day. If your spring crops didn’t make it, try again; there still should be time for at least one sowing of lettuce, spinach and radish seeds.

And onions, it is always a good time to plant onions. I grow several crops throughout the growing season. Onion sets planted around roses make good bug deterrents and are fun to harvest as long as you remember to leave a couple on bug patrol. And can find your roses!

The forecast is that we will have a wet May so take the opportunity to get tree seedlings planted.

This is also a good time to divide and move perennials. Be careful of disturbing newly emerging, self-sowing annuals. Learn to distinguish the sprouts of bachelor buttons and other carefree annuals so they can regrow all on their own.

Mark daffodils you want to dig up and move later this fall.

May is a wonderful time to stop and enjoy lovely sunsets. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

As daffodils and tulips continue to fade, don’t mow the leaves down with the lawn mower until they turn yellow. The bulbs turn sun into sugar stored in their bulbs. If you cut down the greenery too early, they will gradually become smaller and you will not have any more blooms. If you don’t like the fading greenery, plant something to hide it like daylilies.

See ants on your blooming peonies? Gently shake them off if you want to bring cut flowers inside, otherwise leave them alone.

If you don’t compost, this is a good month to start. Place a small grocery bag in your freezer and add kitchen scraps. When full, take outside and bury in a garden corner. As you get into the habit of saving kitchen scraps, it will be easier to then make your own compost area or buy one, then start adding leaves and grass clippings to the kitchen scraps, some water, and mix. After a few weeks, you will have black compost ready to add to your flowerbeds.

Summer plants started inside in containers can start to spend a few hours a day outside on warm, sunny days before you transplant them into your outside garden.

Shop for natives to add for mid to late summer flowers. Good choices include Purple Coneflowers, Black eyed Susan, New England Asters and any plants with low water requirements.

If you don’t have grass planted, plant clover instead. If you do, consider how to minimize the golf course-look greenery and add more varieties of blooming flowers through the growing season. Better yet, start a vegetable plot in your front yard, they can look amazing. Add flowers like zinnias to encourage pollinators.

Charlotte

Coffee Pod Pots

Cocktail tomato starts in coffee pod pots getting ready to move outside. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

Coffee Pod Pots

A neighbor last year gave me a little collection of her used coffee pod pots. She said she thought they would make good starter pots for plants, and she was right. To give them a test, I grew one of my favorite vegetables, tomatoes.

And not just any tomatoes, these are the pricey cocktail tomatoes, a semi-determinate variety of cherry-like tomatoes that grows only one foot tall and one foot wide. These are the perfect tomatoes to grow inside. i picked one up last year but it didn’t make it through winter so I planted the last little tomato in the mother pot to get a new start.

Once big enough, I moved the starts into the individual coffee pod pots. To ensure they were settling in, I first poured water into the potting soil, then used stick to make a hole in the center where I could easily add the tiny plants.

Now I don’t drink coffee so coffee pod pots are hard to find in my kitchen. Instead, I make planting pots out of toilet paper rolls, which gives me a similar sized planting pot for new starts. The challenge with the toilet paper ones is that they tend to fall apart before I get them in their permanent spot in the ground.

The coffee pod pots will need to be separated from the outer shell before planting.

Cocktail tomatoes are nicely growing in these repurposed coffee pods. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

You can buy a variety of planting pots but why do so if you can recycle what’s already in your kitchen.

Charlotte

Japanese Rose

Japanese Kerria, also called Japanese rose, has lovely double yellow flowers. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

Japanese Rose

Of all of the plants I share online and through my blogs, this is the one I get the most questions about. Kerria japonica, commonly known as Japanese rose or Japanese kerria, is a deciduous shrub in the rose family Rosaceae. It is native to China, Japan and Korea and grows well in my USDA Hardiness zone 5 limestone hillside garden.

Just as bright and cheery as Yellow Standing Cats Quilts, Japanese kerria brighten the spring landscape with their yolk yellow flowers.

The double yellow flower are delicate but last long as a cut flower. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

This lovely, shrub with double flowers that resemble roses, is named after William Kerr, who introduced the cultivar 'Pleniflora'. It is the sole species in the genus Kerria.

Japanese rose can be trained to grow over a lattice. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

Now this was given to me a couple of decades ago by a local landscaper as a vine. I do grow it over a couple of arbors and my garbage can surround but it’s a better free-standing shrub. In addition to blooming a couple of times a year, the shrub has branches that maintain their green color through winter.

The other advantage of this lovely shrub is that it’s happy to bloom in shade.

The most challenging part about this shrub is keeping the plant from expanding. Since my garden is informal, the bushiness of the plants fit right in.

Japanese rose is a shrub that can be kept small by removing the outside growth. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

Japanese rose bloom about the same time as forsythia, another favorite yellow spring bloomer, and sometimes confused for each other.

Charlotte

April Gardening Task

April Gardening Tasks

It’s “daffodil land” days in my Missouri garden, the name one of my former neighbors gave to my limestone hillside garden currently populated by a number of these wonderful spring bulbs. I didn’t buy most of them; they were either rescued, with permission, from old home sites or frequent flyer bulbs, bulbs that came from family gardens in other parts of the country.

We had what-I-hope-was our last cold spell earlier this week. Eastern redbuds and native Missouri flowering dogwoods may be showing their colors once again at the same time this year. I have to confess I have gardening tasks to complete but I tend to dilly-dally and enjoy the spring weather. But when I get focused:

Clean out composters and add to flower beds and fruit trees. Mix with existing soil for now; you will mulch this later. Leave a good bucket of finished compost as starter for the next compost batch and start adding leaves, grass clippings if you have them, kitchen scraps and water. Don’t forget to mix.

Put up your birdhouses if you haven’t already. Songbirds are natural pest control and add so much interest to our gardens. 60% of all bird species depend on insects for their food so if you have a lot of birds, you should naturally have less pests.

Prune lilacs immediately after they bloom. If you wait until later in the season, you will be cutting off next year’s blooms.

Continue to sow lettuce, spinach and radish seeds every 10 days or so for fresh spring salads in your pot garden. Call it your garden in pots, if you prefer.

If you like to grow peas, this is the last month to plant sugar snap peas and snow peas, they prefer cooler weather conditions. To keep their roots happy, mulch with cardboard to keep them cool, then add a layer of wood chips.

As daffodils and tulips continue to grow and bloom, sprinkle compost around them to keep the bulbs well fed. When the flowers fade, remove them by snipping off the flower heads. Leave the greenery until it turns yellow; the green leaves help the bulbs store energy for next season’s blooms. Don’t mow the leaves down with the lawn mower until they turn yellow or the bulbs will gradually become smaller and you will not have any more blooms next spring.

If you have a vegetable garden area, this is a good time to add cardboard to kill off any growth prior to summer planting. Don't till, the prevailing thought now is that tilling damages the soil ecosystem. Kill the plants you don’t want, make holes to plant the ones you do, or make trenches to plant seeds, and cover. Easy peasy. Who doesn’t like easy gardening??

Start your summer plants inside in containers you can transplant outside later; tomatoes, peppers, watermelons, squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, zucchini.

Don’t forget companion plants to reduce crop damage; basil is a good bug deterrent for a lot of plants and grows easily from seed.

Plant for pollinators as well. I love zinnias and so do butterflies and bees. Native plants such as New England Asters, yarrow and purple coneflowers are good choices for pollinators because they have long blooming seasons. For another good annual, try sunflower seeds. Birds will love the seeds in the fall.

Plant more native trees along with compact dwarf fruit trees. Although planting native flowers is still good for pollinators, trees provide better, and more reliable, pollen sources for bees. The smaller fruit trees are good pollen sources as well and, when pollinated by bees, will also give you easily accessible fruit to pick.

Charlotte

My Latest Favorite Catalog

Baker Creek claims to be the world’s largest seed catalog: 500 pages. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

My Latest Favorite Catalog

I can’t believe this sat in my magazine basket for so long without my spending time wandering through the lovely pages. I remember when it came in, I quickly leafed through it and said to myself, well the pictures are larger than I remember.

Actually this Whole Seed Catalog 2021 from Baker Seed out of Mansfield, Missouri has added more interesting information and tidbits about their seeds including some history, a few recipes and these truly delicious photos.

I started perusing the catalog looking for a picture of Trifolium incarnatum, which is crimson clover, to show previous beekeeping students who were given seeds at earlier beginning beekeeping classes.

Red crimson clover is an excellent soil conditioner and bee food source. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

After finding what I needed, I got side tracked by the other lovely photos. From beautiful staple vegetables to unusual varieties, I got caught up in the page descriptions.

Cucumbers and pickles, who isn’t ready for a taste of summer? (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

Half way through this page that included several hyssop varieties, a bee favorite, I decided it was perhaps best for my pocketbook that I had not discovered this catalog in the middle of winter.

As it is, I have a rule that I can only bring one pack of seeds home per home and garden center visit. It’s amazing now how many things need fixing around the house.

Hyssop is an excellent source of bee food. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

I may need to try one of those this year.

Not only did Baker Creek have unusual varieties but some even included interesting essays. I mean who doesn’t want to know what kind of pumpkin Cinderella ended up with for her coach?

This is the background to Cinderella’s pumpkin. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

In addition to the marvelous photos, there are recipes sprinkled throughout so if you want to try an unusual variety you have something you can do with it once you grow it.

Gardening catalogs fall in the same category as recipe books for me. I may not grow, or make, some but I sure do enjoy reading about them!

One other reason to order this catalog; it’s an excellent free reference source. Now excuse me, I need to finish the article on Cinderella’s pumpkins.

Charlotte

Grow Strawberries

My home grown everbearing strawberries almost ready to pick. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

Grow Strawberries

Summer is officially here when I start seeing locally-grown strawberries, usually several weeks before the official start of summer. In USDA Hardiness zone 5B, where I live, strawberry season begins in June. Or maybe I should say strawberry shortcake season. It continues for several weeks, or months, depending on the strawberry variety.

My family goes back several generations as Hungarian strawberry farmers. That may explain why most of us siblings love strawberries just as they are. Commercially-grown, strawberries usually end up on the top 10 list of plants raised with harmful chemicals so growing them at home is an excellent option.

Types of Strawberries

There are a number of strawberry varieties. Here are the two most popular types of strawberries:

• June-bearing strawberries provide strawberries for 5-6 weeks starting in June.

• Ever-bearing strawberries bloom 3-6 months starting in June.

For example, the ever popular Quinault and Ozark strawberries are ever-bearing strawberries.

How to Plant Strawberries

Strawberries are heavy feeders, which means they take a lot of resources out of the soil. To get ready for my first strawberry plantings, I added both compost and manure to ensure the soil microbes were reinforced.

For those flower beds where I used strawberries as border plants, they also were given extra mulch and compost.

Strawberry plants can easily be used on flower borders. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

Last year, I planted a good 60 or so new ever-bearing strawberry plants as flower bed borders. This way I can easily pick strawberries as I walk by.

Strawberry plants in their first year can appear small. It normally takes a year for plant roots to get established.

You should also remove the flowers in the first year. You want to concentrate the plant’s energy in getting roots established.

Here’s another border where I included strawberries. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

I also added June-bearing plants in a couple of flower beds. Those are honestly for the visiting turtles that somehow know when the berries are ripe.

Now the more traditional way to grow strawberries is to have separate planting beds. To grow strawberries in beds, they need to be rotated 3-4 years to give soil time to recover.

Separate strawberry beds are the traditional way to raise berries. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

After planting, add straw under the leaves. You don’t want the berries touching soil or they will rot.

Charlotte

Delicious Nasturtiums

Nasturtiums come in single and double varieties. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

Delicious Nasturtiums

I can’t remember the first time I planted nasturtiums, they have been on my “must do” list for decades. Like zinnias, nasturtiums are easy seeds to grow and give so much back.

First, narturtiums are pretty. Their colors range from beige to a deep burgundy in both single and double varieties with several shades of yellow and gold.

They are also entirely edible, making for pretty additions to salads and to embellish dishes.

These charming flowers are also easy to grow.

• You can start the seeds indoors 4 to 6 weeks before the last spring frost. 

• Plant nasturtium seeds in moist, well-drained soil in full sun. They can grow in partial shade, but they will not bloom as well.

• Nasturtiums prefer poorer soils and they do not need fertilizers.

Soaking the seeds a good day before planting helps them to sprout. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

To get them off to a good start, soak the seeds for a good 12 hours prior to planting.

Plant the seeds about half an inch deep and 10 to 12 inches apart. Water. Plants should appear in 7 to 10 days.

I like to plant them in hanging baskets so I can move them around and enjoy the flowers before i add them to my dishes.

Nasturtiums have a fresh, nutty flavor and add a nice touch to any dish.

Charlotte

Homemade Potting Bench

Potting benches can be something simple to save your back. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

Homemade Potting Bench

Several years ago, I decided I wanted a potting bench on my deck. Something simple, where I could pot plants without hurting my back. A place where I could haul my cut flowers and still enjoy the outdoors while I was getting them arranged in a flower vase. Or two.

Dozens of websites later, I saw a wide range of potting benches from cute cottage style to elaborate, professional-grade florist potting tables. They were lovely. Some were very expensive. And none of them would fit on either my small deck or in my garage, where I wanted to store it for easy access.

Enter my handyman who saw me eyeing this lovely old aged wood plank. What are you going to do with that, he asked. I don’t know, I just like it. It’s old and weathered, like me. I wonder what stories it could tell.

A few days later, I found this very simple potting table waiting for me in my garage. It’s the perfect height to pot plants without bending over. It’s also narrow enough to easily get stored in front of my garage open shelving.

The legs were made out of remnant wood. The only thing we had to buy where the metal brackets that fit underneath to hold the table legs to the top.

If I don’t want to stand, I can now use a stool when I’m working on the bench. And I doubt there is any damage I can cause to the top.

Sometimes simple is better.

Charlotte

Zippy Zinnias

A bouquet of last fall’s zinnias brightening my kitchen. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

Zippy Zinnias

If you are just starting to garden and putting in some vegetables, don’t forget these easy to grow flowers, zinnias. Zinnias are an excellent pollinator magnet, bringing in bees to find your vegetables and increasing your yield.

You will find zinnias in a variety of sizes and colors where you find most seed packets. I like the miniature ones for pot gardens and the single taller ones for regular garden spots. Pick the ones that are single, those are the ones that will attract bees.

Zinnias are native to Mexico and now cover a region stretching from the Southwestern United States to South America.

Zinnias were named after the German Botanist Johann Zinn who first discovered them in Mexico and described the plants as being small and weedy. Zinnias are in the Asteraceae plant family which is referred to as the daisy or sunflower family.

They were brought to Europe in the 1750s and have since been bred and cultivated to include a vast palate of bloom types and colors. The earliest zinnia cultivars were reintroduced to the United States in the 1790s with double flower forms appearing in the mid-1800s. There was a renewed interest in zinnias during the 1920s when the first dahlia-flowered cultivars ‘Giant Dahlia’ and ‘California Giant’ were introduced. These cultivars have large, flat-flower heads and come in a multitude of colors.

Zinnias as they grow in a garden. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

There are single, semi-double, or double flower forms. Single-flowered zinnias are the ones to select if you’re trying to attract pollinators to your garden; the central flower is visible and produces viable nectar and pollen for visiting bees and butterflies.

Semi-double zinnias have several rows of petals with the central flower barely visible.

Double-flowered zinnias have been bred to where all of the visible floral structure produces petals. These can create quite the show in the landscape with the amount of color that is packed onto one stem.

There are several other types including beehive, button, and cactus type zinnias. The most common species grown are Zinnia elegans and Zinnia angustifolia. Zinnia elegans is grown primarily for cut flowers and can grow up to four feet tall and have single or double flowers in the colors of salmon, gold, yellow, white, red, rose, cherry, pink, lavender, purple, orange, and light green. These flowers can be solid or multicolored and range in size from one to seven inches in diameter. Common cultivars of this species include ‘State Fair’, ‘Lilliput’, and ‘Magellan’. Zinnia angustifolia has small, single, golden-orange flowers and have narrower foliage than Z. elegans.

The Lilliput cultivars are excellent for pot gardens and borders. The California Giants and Cactus will grow in most soils and bring a spot of color to any garden spot.

Once they finish the growing season, they may self-seed if the winter is mild. The seeds can also be collected and dried for sowing again the following year.

Zinnia seeds shared with my beginning beekeeping students last winter. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

If you plant only one flower this year, plant zinnias. They are very easy to grow and will make you want to plant more!

Charlotte