Zone 5 Landscape & Garden Checklist: May
With new flowers bursting every twenty-four hour period, butterflies emerging, and migratory birds arriving, May is the time to frolic amid the springtide. Caught in the rush of scents and colors, it's easy to forget the important tasks that will ready your garden up for success. Here is a checklist of May gardening tasks for Zone 5!
Bring the Bloom Garden to Life
Your gardening plants have been waiting for this calendar month all winter. Now they're springing to life, basking in the sunlight, and growing vigorously. In Zone five, yous can begin or proceed to plant perennials and annuals, likewise as move your houseplants outside once the temperatures are consistently warm:
- Plant Perennials and Annuals: get-go planting frost-hardy annuals at the outset of the month and the frost-sensitive ones, like impatiens, by the end of May. You tin can also exhale new life into the garden by planting perennials hardy to Zone v anytime.
- Motion Houseplants Outside: once nighttime-time temperatures commencement to warm up by the end of May, you lot tin brainstorm to take them outside for the summer. Make sure you harden them off gradually and give them an expanse protected from wind and afternoon sunday.
- Allow Spring Bulbs Yellow Earlier Cut Them: this allows the leaves to feed the bulbs while they're still light-green, giving them more than energy for adjacent spring.
- Plant Summertime and Fall-Flowering Bulbs: such as gladioli, caladium, dahlia, calla lilies, and others.
Establish New Trees and Shrubs
The ground has been set up for planting new trees and shrubs since March, but May is nonetheless a practiced time to swap out old plants that need to be refreshed with new ones—whether they're berry bushes, fruit trees, evergreens , privacy belts, or flowering shrubs. Cull a cloudy day to avoid the heat and dig away!
Prune Spring-Flowering Shrubs
Recollect to prune spring-flowering shrubs like forsythia, lilac, azaleas, rhododendron, and viburnum after they flower. You lot have a window of 2-3 weeks before they commencement to grow side by side year'southward flower buds.
Amidst the surge of sap and anarchism of new blossoms, planting and pruning are the chief gardening tasks at hand.
Continue Planting Your Vegetable Garden
Longing for homegrown vegetables this year? They're the healthiest nutrient you'll ever eat, they sense of taste amazing, and they cost about aught. In Zone five, you can begin planting in April, go along in May, and plant frost-sensitive vegetables after May 15th:
- Sow or Transplant Cold-Season Vegetables: yous can keep to sow beets, carrots, spinach, kale, lettuce, and other frost-tolerant crops. If you plant them successively, you'll enjoy staggered harvests throughout the season. And you can transplant cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and other seedlings that don't mind a little frost.
- Sow Warm-Season Vegetables: after the run a risk of frost passes—typically around May 15th in Zone 5—you lot tin sow frost-sensitive vegetables like beans, corn, squash, and pumpkins.
- Transplant Warm-Flavor Vegetables: you can start to harden off your love apple, eggplant, pepper, and cucumber seedlings at the starting time of the calendar month and transplant them outdoors after May 15th.
Thin & Harvest Vegetable Garden
If you've planted seeds already, you may accept a flake of gardening to do, likewise equally some bounty to bask:
- Sparse Beets and Carrots: monitor them as they first to grow and thin the seedlings equally necessary. Sending them to the compost pile? Toss them into a salad instead.
- Harvest Vegetables: rhubarb and asparagus will already be ready to start harvesting by the end of the calendar month in Zone 5.
- Weed Vegetable Garden: information technology'due south already time to commencement weeding. Y'all'll have to distinguish the weeds from your sprouting vegetables every bit they come up up.
Backyard Maintenance
As the gardening season gets underway, you'll begin a mowing routine equally well. Consider leaving your grass on the longer side this year. Longer grass prevents weed seeds from accessing the soil and develops deeper roots to access water, allowing you to water less. Another tip: leave the grass clippings as you mow equally a style to add nutrients to the lawn.
Gardening Maintenance
Most ongoing gardening tasks begin this month in Zone 5, such as edging, weeding, watering, deadheading, and adding mulch where needed. Staying on top of your gardening saves you time later on and lets yous get exterior in May to bask the flowers.
Welcome the Birds
As you were gardening in April, you may have already seen or heard sparrows, thrushes, flycatchers, and kinglets. Both April and May are high fourth dimension for migratory birds passing through Chicagoland . Keep an eye out for colorful flyers like Baltimore Orioles, Xanthous Warblers, Indigo Buntings, Scarlet Tanagers, and more. The males have shed their brownish wintertime plumage and are now sporting vibrant feathers for the mating season. If you want to adore birds right in your g, consider planting and gardening for a bird habitat !
This is the calendar month we've all been waiting for—hither in Zone five and everywhere. Amidst the surge of sap and anarchism of new blossoms, planting and pruning are the main gardening tasks at hand. With your gardening checklist ready, you're set to become out and enjoy the flavor!
Platt Colina Nursery is Chicago's premier garden center and nursery.
Source: https://platthillnursery.com/may-gardening-checklist-zone-5/
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