May Gardening Guidelines
April showers bring May flowers, and lots of gardening opportunities along with typical plant puzzles and problems. Let’s take a look at some of the gardening possibilities and opportunities this great time of year might present in the yard and garden.
For starters, don’t overlook a couple of great opportunities to learn a lot more about making your yard more interesting, beautiful and attractive. This Saturday is the Spring Home Garden Tour in Tyler, sponsored by Smith County Master Gardeners. This group of volunteers for Texas AgriLife Extension Service has arranged for 5 private home gardens to be opened for you to visit on this one day. This is a great way to see how other folks have approached their own yards and applied attractive and practical solutions, which just might give you some ideas for your own yard. For more information, see the Tour announcement elsewhere on this page, or go to the Master Gardener web site at http://scmg.tamu.edu where you will also find a map of the home tour sites.
If you have ever wanted to attract more flying flowers, better known as butterflies, to your yard, then come to the free 1st Tuesday in the Garden program. That’s subject of this month’s IDEA Garden noontime program. Learn about butterflies, their requirements, and some of the plants to attractive these flying jewels. This free program, sponsored by Smith County Master Gardeners, is Tuesday, May 6, during the noon lunch hour in the IDEA Garden, located in the southeast corner of the Tyler Rose Garden. Seating is limited, so bring a lawn chair if you have one.
Of course, the Tyler Rose Garden is in glorious color now and well worth a trip to see. Besides the main Garden and the IDEA Garden, be sure to also visit the Heritage Garden in the southwest corner – I’ve never seen it so pretty as it is right now!
May Gardening Tips:
Lawns. Fertilize centipede and zoysia grass this month. Both of these grasses do best with a mowing height of about 1 1/2 inches, which is lower than St. Augustine. Get your mower blade sharpened for clean cuts and healthy grass.
Occasionally yellow spots show up in lawns at this time of year. Quite often they go away on their own. There could be several different causes, including pH or nutritional imbalance, diseases, and possibly cultural problems. Don’t just throw on more fertilizer, hoping that will help.
Vegetables. Once tomatoes and peppers begin to set fruit, lightly apply nitrogen fertilizer (called sidedressing) every 14 days. This supplemental feeding keeps the plants vigorously growing, allowing them to set and mature the maximum amount of fruit. Bell peppers also need the extra foliage to shade the fruit to prevent sunscald.
Cool season vegetables, like lettuce and spinach, will begin bolting (flowering) and quickly go down in quality. Harvest them soon and replant empty spots with warm-season vegetables like okra, sweet potatoes, pumpkins or watermelons.
Onions will be ready to harvest after their necks soften and the leaves fall over. Pull the bulbs, and let them dry in a shady, airy location. Once the tops have dried, clip the roots and tops, leaving about 1 inch above the bulb. Onions which put up a flower stalk will have a hollow center and will not keep very long, so eat them first.
Flowers. This cool spring has prolonged the display of cool season plants, but it’s getting time to replace snapdragons and pansies with heat-loving plants. It is not too late to sow directly into the flower bed seeds of sunflower, zinnia, morning glory, portulaca, marigold, cosmos, periwinkles, gomphrena, cleome (spiderflower) and gourds.
Other annuals to try in your garden this year include summer snapdragons (Angelonia), wishbone flower (Torenia), fanflower (Scaevola), floss flower (Ageratum). Think about using some of the colorful foliage plants, such as copper plant or sweetpotato vine (give them plenty of room to spread). We were really impressed last year with performance of the SunPatiens® - impatiens hybrids that thrive in sun - in the demonstration gardens in the Rose Garden. They made a bright and colorful show in full sun all through the heat of summer.
For shady spots, use these color plants: impatiens, annual salvia, coleus, caladiums and begonias. Flowering tobacco (Nicotiana) and pentas are great fragrant annuals for partial shade.
Allow foliage of daffodils and other spring flowering bulbs to mature and yellow before removing. Don't cover them or tie them up in an attempt to hide the foliage. Next year's flower buds are being formed right now and the leaves need to continue to perform their function of making food to supply the floral display of 2009! If the clump did not bloom well this year and is crowded, dig and divide them once the foliage has turned yellow or brown, or mark them so you can find them in late summer to dig and divide. Once the foliage is gone, it can be hard to find the bulbs.
If your azaleas need taming, now is the time to prune them back. If you find you have to severely prune them every year to manage their size, then consider replacing them with a smaller growing variety that requires less maintenance.
Pest watch. May is when bugs abound. Remember that not all bugs are bad. Actually, there are more species of beneficial insects than there are pest species. The problem is the pests occasionally outpace the beneficial population. Before reaching for a targeting solution, correctly identify the problem. If you discover insects on a troubled plant, identify them first. Holes in a plant may not have been caused by the insect you currently see resting on the leaf.
Once a pest has been identified, use the most environmentally friendly control measure first. That may be hand-picking, strong blasts of water, or, doing nothing if the population is already decreasing. If chemical control is deemed necessary, use the least toxic and most target-specific product available. Remember, you don’t want to kill off the good guys in the process of controlling the pests.
On plums and peaches, brown rot and plum curculio are the 2 most devastating pests. For control options, use the online publication, “Homeowner’s Guide to Pests of Peaches, Plums and Pecans” – E-145 at the Texas AgriLife Extension online bookstore (http://agrilifebookstore.org)
For those of you who have a commercial size planting of pecans, a new pecan nut casebearer prediction web site is now available. This resource takes into account trap catches and weather data to give growers a window of time to begin scouting trees for this major pest that can greatly reduce the crop. The prediction site is at: http://pncforecast.tamu.edu A related web site – http://pecankernel.tamu.edu is a newsletter that provides timely information on the pecan crop and latest status of pecan pests in the state. These tools allow growers to better manage their crop, avoid unnecessary spray applications, and with more accurate timing with the most effective pesticide products when they are required.
Keith Hansen is Smith County Horticulturist with Texas AgriLife Extension Service. His web page is http://EastTexasGardening.tamu.edu His Blog is http://agrilifeblogs.tamu.edu/mt/etg Texas AgriLife Extension Service educational programs are open to all individuals without regard to race, color, sex, disability, religion, age or national origin.
