As the last Spring frost was calculated to be late April for Southern UK, this SHOULD mean that your precious seeds and seedlings are safer outdoors now.

It’s starting to get busy for food growers, but there’s no need to be daunted, and remember if you’re new to it, keep it simple – less will be more if you want to sustain your motivation. Remember, year one is more about learning and growing in confidence than it is about reaping an entirely self sufficient harvest.

Here’s our checklist for May:

Maintenance:

Keep an eye out for weeds and remove them regularly

Don’t let the ground or your tubs / troughs dry out (not much chance of that looking at the weather forecast) – use water collected in a rain butt if you can.

Sowing:

Make new "successional" sowings of lettuce seeds every ten days to yield a constant supply of salad leaves throughout the summer.

Try "potting on" some lettuce seedlings into invidivual tubs to encourage them to grow fully, eventually planting them into the ground if you have space. The other seedlings you can leave crowded into pots together where they started life. As they get bigger, you can steal baby leaves from each of them when you’re making sarnies, and they’ll keep producing new ones. It’s called "cut and come again" apparently! Eventually these plants will get "irritated" by being crowded and having their leaves stolen, and then they go "manky" (technical term), at which point it’s best to compost them.

May is also the time for sowing: cauliflower, purple sprouting broccoli, kohl rabi, climbing varieties of bean, and leeks.

Excitingly, May is also the time to plant butternut squash, pumpkin and courgette directly into the ground.

One happy butternut squash plant will easily spread 10 feet or more as a ground trailing plant, so don’t plant too many. And to keep them happy, use manure. Squash is pretty easy to grow as long as the earth is relatively moist.

Planting out:

Prick out and pot on your tomato seedlings if you’ve started them indoors…

Make sure you have canes and string ready to keep them well supported, and keep an eye out for and remove "side shoots" – these are little growths that start between the main stem and the major "trusses" or branches off, and which sap the plant of the energy required to produce strong and bountiful fruit.

For the tomatoes, and anything else that you’ve started indoors, it’s best to practice "hardening off" for a week before you move the seedlings outdoors permanently. Hardening off is acclimatising your seedlings to the outdoors by placing them outside during the day and bringing them in at night.

Nurturing:

If you’re growing broad beans … Make sure the broad beans are being supported enough by the string / canes put around them. And get ready to "pinch out" their tips once they start to flower, to deter the evil blackfly.

When the plants have flowered (these flowers are beautiful, by the way), and you can see tiny bean pods forming you can pinch the tops off, that will make the plant concentrate on making beans instead of growth … plus it helps deter black fly.

If you do pinch them off and there are no black fly, you can eat them as well. Just steam for about 10 mins and they taste just like the beans.

If you’re growing carrots …

Now is the time to take precautions against carrot fly, which can be SUCH a pain. Make sure the carrots are well thinned (lots of space between plants), put shields, like bought or home-made (from clear tops of plastic drink bottles) cloches over the seedlings, and maybe experiment with companion planting – in particular, onions and tomatoes are thought to discourage carrot fly.

Over to you…

We’d love to hear about your successes so far this year, and any lessons that you’ve learned, perhaps the hard way!

Also, if there are any keen companion-planters out there, do drop us a line, as we’d love to share some of your tips in future supplements.

Categories: seasonal eating, vegetables

Tags: featured listings, garden, grow your own

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