Potting, pruning, sowing …Gardening tips for early May

Hard to beat the first days of May for the sheer exuberant beauty and promise of the new season!

But while we wander around revelling in all the new shooting growth and fresh leaves, there are jobs to be done – some potting, some pruning, some sowing, some dead heading……….

Pampering the plugs

All the popular seed and plant companies are AWASH with offers on plug plants.  Summer bedding, vegetables, perennials, wildflowers, herbs……. all available in this format. Suttons, Thompson & Morgan, Van Meuwen, Mr Fothergills, Sarah Raven, Yougarden, Brookside …. many, many firms are using this method of selling their plants. You can get them in a great range of sizes from ‘garden ready’ (generally plants of 10-15 cm) right down to ‘postiplugs’ (5-9 cm), or even smaller.

As the name suggests, the smallest ones arrive in a tray small enough to fit through an ordinary letterbox.  They are very, very popular because they are easily the cheapest way to buy actual plants instead of faffing around with seeds. 

Even if you’ve never been tempted before, I urge you to buy some and have a go at growing them on yourself.  They are a much cheaper option than buying the grown plants and just plonking them in the garden, and oh! The satisfaction when you see them filling your garden with colour and know that you nurtured them almost from infancy!  Here’s what to do:

Use small pots or trays of modules and peat-free compost mixed with vermiculite or grit to keep the compost open. Fill the pot or module with compost, tap it to settle the compost a bit.

Now the baby plants need a gentle poke out of their miniscule modules, trying to disturb the roots as little as possible. Give the roots a little sprinkle of water if it looks like they might have dried out in transit. Make a hole in the module of compost with a dibber, and drop the plant into it. Gently tuck the soil around the roots of the little plant.

Give the little plants a good drink of water and leave them in a warm, bright place to recover from their exertions. Even if your mini-plugs are frost-hardy plants, don’t put them out in the garden straightaway – they have been germinated and growing in warm, humid indoor conditions – the sudden change in temperature might well prove too much for them and  kill them off.  

Bigger plants might need moving to larger pots as they grow – the best way to judge that is to gently tip the plant out of the pot and see if the roots are getting congested – if they are, it’s time to move them on.  If their stems have become leggy, it’s a good tip to plant them a bit more deeply into the next pot – a bit of magic here: they will grow more roots from the bit of buried stem and you’ll end up with a stronger plant! This is especially true of tomato plants.

Gradually get your plants accustomed to outdoor conditions by putting them outside during the day and bringing them in at night for a couple of weeks.  

There you have it – you’re all set for a garden full of colour, scent and edibles, without the challenges of sowing seeds, or the cost of buying garden-ready plants.  Roll on summer!

Spring-flowering shrubs

Hasn’t the blossom been wonderful this year! Somehow a combination of the wet winter and the recent warm sunny weather has produced a haze of glorious blackthorn, cherry, apple and pear blossom this spring which makes you gasp at times.  My own favourite is quince (Cydonia oblonga) – so fleeting but so crazy-pretty!

A lot of shrubs are joining the flowering fruit trees in their spring party, and many of these are best pruned or tidied up just after they have finished flowering, because they will flower NEXT year on the new wood they make this year.  Kerria (Bachelor’s Buttons), Ribes (flowering currant) and Spiraea benefits from having 1 in 3 of the older stems taken right out at the base. 

For obvious reasons, take out any spindly shoots – they are never going to contribute anything much – and any bits that look dead or diseased.  After that, just give the whole plant a tidy-up, trimming back unruly stems etc.  Yes, for the rest of this year they are just going to provide a backdrop to your summer fireworks, but they might as well look neat while they are quietly brewing next spring’s display. Other shrubs that really thrive on this sort of treatment include Deutzia, Weigela, Philadelphus and Forsythia. Daphne and Sarcococca (sweet box) appreciate a spring spruce-up too.

Gardening shorts

• My sister Laura gleefully told me this morning that they had their first homegrown new potatoes last night sprinkled with chopped chives – yum!!! When you’re chopping herbs, herb scissors are a game-changer. Use them for mint, basil, parsley and even sage or oregano, as well as chives. They don’t bruise the leaves like a knife blade might, and there is no chopping board to clear up afterwards 😊. Check them out in our shop, by clicking on the link below, and make sure you’ve got a pair handy for all those upcoming delicious spring dishes!

• I visited a gorgeous spring garden this morning and do you know what really set off the tulip-packed borders?  Immaculate edges. It was actually a very highly-maintained garden anyway but it did remind me to remind YOU that even if the beds aren’t as weeded and mulched as much as you’d like them to be, you can get away with a helluva lot if the border-edge is razor-sharp.  Repair worn-out sections by cutting out that section as a piece of turf, turn the turf round, putting the sharper edge next to the bed and the worn-out bit on the inside. Sprinkle soil and grass seed over the bare patch – it will soon green up.  For all the other edge sections, get that half-moon spade out – or the nail-scissors!

• Here’s a familiar tale of woe.  I sowed my cucumber seeds about 3 weeks ago in a propagator inside and was pleased to see the green shoots breaking the surface within a fortnight. Went to admire them the day before yesterday and every seedling was just a tiny stalk.  How had a titchy slug managed to get in????? Soooo annoying.  At least, I can still save the situation – it’s absolutely not too late to sow seeds of plenty of different flowers and veg. Carrots, beetroot, runner beans, lettuce, spinach, broad beans, peas, marigolds, cornflowers……..there are loads of plants that can sown outside even as late as June, even if their harvest is a bit later than normal.  Inside, you can keep sowing courgettes, cucumbers, sweet corn and even tomatoes.  With a slight growl, I have sown more cucumber seeds and will be inspecting their containers minutely for pesky critters every hour on the hour!

• How I love my tree peonies! Very flamboyant, totally over-the-top in fact, but such good fun at this time of year! Once their all-t00-brief period of glory is over, I will cut off their cockaded seedheads, quite interesting  though they are, because I want the plants to put all their energy into creating next year’s flowers rather than producing seeds which are likely to be not even viable since they have come from hybrid plants.

Here are those brilliant herb scissors I was telling you about:

The garden I visited this week was ablaze with tulips. Last year Laura made a video giving you some top tips on how to get the best out of these glorious spring bulbs. Do have a look at some of the other videos on our YouTube channel, too – we cover a wide range of gardening topics, you may find something right up your street!

Giving a welcome bit of height to your spring garden, this hardy perennial has attractive flowers as well as foliage. It’s Louise’s Great Plant this Month – want to find out more?

We are continuing our run-down of how to grow veg and this week it’s the turn of salads, courgettes, winter veg and leafy greens. Click on the links to read all about them, and remember that we’ve got the whole series of articles all together in our shop as a handy little book called Beginner’s Veg. It’s on sale at a great price!

Salad crops

Courgettes and squashes

Prepping winter veg

Chard, spinach and kale

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