Gardeners Checklist: Here Is What to Do on This First Week of May

By Ron Kujawski

• Put “Help Mom” at the top of your To-Do list for next week. Giving Mom a helping hand with her gardening tasks may be the best Mother’s Day (May 13) gift; certainly, it will be the most appreciated.  

• Thin early sowings of carrots, beets and radishes. Save the thinned beets for their greens, which can be added to salads.

• Use the “cut and come again” technique for harvesting leafy greens. With a sharp knife or scissors cut off the young leaves just above the crowns of the plants. New leaves will continue to emerge from the crown of each plant, yielding many more harvests.  

• Don’t worry about getting a late start on the vegetable garden. There’s still time to sow seeds of cool season crops, including beets, carrots, chard, kohlrabi, late cabbage, leaf lettuce, mustard, collards, turnips, radish, spinach, onion and shallot sets, onion seeds for bunching onions, peas, and potatoes.  

• Apply organic mulch around newly planted trees but avoid creating mulch volcanoes. A mulch volcano is a high mound of mulch piled as high as ten or more inches against the trunk of a tree. It may take a few years but eventually a mulch volcano will cause serious and often fatal damage to the tree trunk. Keep the depth of mulch at no more than three inches and never pile it against the tree trunk. Leave a space of about 6 inches between the base of the tree and the inner edge of the mulch.  

• Check the surface of soils of potted house plants. Soils with high content of peat moss can become crusty and shrink when the soil gets too dry. As a result, water applied to the pot runs off the surface of the soil (does not penetrate) and down the inside of the pot without wetting the soil. Break up the crusty surface.  

• Follow the one-third rule when mowing lawns. The rule states that no more than one-third of the length of leaf blades should be removed at each cutting. So, if grass is 3 inches tall, cut it back to no less than 2 inches high.

There’s no better time to plant a new perennial garden than now. However, it’s always wise to create a planting plan first. I speak from experience when I say that without a decent plan the end result may look like the garden from hell. Woefully lacking any design skills, I now rely on plans I find in books on perennial gardens or in popular gardening magazines. As a friend of mine once said, “Being original is admitting defeat.”

Ron Kujawski began gardening at an early age on his family's onion farm in upstate New York. Although now retired, he spent most of his career teaching at the UMass Extension Service. He serves on Berkshire Botanical Garden’s Horticulture Advisory Committee. His book, Week-by-Week Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook, is available here.