Posted on 05/01/2008 10:06:23 AM PDT by Gabz
May is a wondrous month, bursting with life and growth and energy, with color and scent and sound, a bittersweet taste of what the Garden of Eden must have been like before the fall from grace. Flowers are coming into their own, birds are nesting and hatching their young, puddles are full of tadpoles. Everything is celebrating the passing of winter and preparing for the long, hot summer ahead. With it’s perfect weather, May is the month to enjoy just being alive.
May is time to plant the vegetables that need warmer weather. The soil temperature needs to be at least 60 degrees for the warm season things such as okra, butterbeans or limas (whichever name you prefer), field peas (or crowders), peanuts, and sweet potatoes.
With the advent of warmer weather, be on the lookout for insect pests as well. Not just the ravenous for people ones like mosquitoes and gnats and yellowflies, but the starved for fresh vegetables ones like cut worms, beetles, leafhoppers, grasshoppers, cabbage loopers, and all the other ones, too numerous to name. Different weather conditions bring different insect problems. The wet, cool weather we’ve been experiencing the last few springs encourages mealybugs and aphids, not to mention lots of diseases and funguses. Dry, hot weather brings a proliferation of spider mites and a whole new set of problems.
Mid to end of May is time to spray your azaleas with a systemic insecticide to head off azalea lace bugs. By the time you see the damage, it’s too late. Early May is the time to spray your crape myrtles. Aphids absolutely love tender, new growth on crapes. With the aphids, comes the black, sooty gunk on the leaves. No aphids, no black, sooty gunk! Check your other shrubs for black, sooty gunk, otherwise known as sooty mildew. Aphids and mealybugs and sometimes scale, have a symbiotic relationship with the sooty mildew. Sooty mildew is a fungus that feeds off the honeydew secreted by aphids and mealybugs and covers leaf surfaces. Sooty mildew can eventually kill a plant as it covers the leaf surfaces and prevents the leaves from getting any light. No light, no food.
Gardenias have been especially hard hit the last few years, so make sure you check them for sooty mildew, and apply the systemic insecticide. Check the undersides of the leaves for tiny, flat insects. These are scale. The leech of the plant world, they attach themselves to the underside of the leaves and sometimes branches and suck the life out of the plants. If only a few leaves are affected by sooty mildew, they can be washed off with a mild solution of soapy water or plain alcohol. If the shrubs are large and completely infested, prune first, making sure you get rid of all the trimmings, and then spray. If the infestation is really bad, you may want to follow up with an additional spraying of systemic insecticide in about ten days or so.
Speaking of insecticides… Wouldn’t it be cool if we had completely species specific insecticides? That way you could put out insecticide to kill, say, just aphids or just mealybugs. Know what feeds on aphids? Ladybugs! So when you put out spray or dust to kill aphids, you also kill the beneficial insects. Seems to me the beneficial insects are akin to the tomatoes and other vegetable plants we want in our gardens—fragile and much more vulnerable. We waste a lot of time trying to kill tough weeds in our gardens while at the same time trying to ensure the life of the much more delicate plants we want. It would be much easier to just grow the weeds in the first place. They’re much hardier, way more prolific, don’t care if they have fertilizer or water-in fact they thrive on neglect! Too bad they taste horrible!
Berries of all kinds will be ripening and delighting us with their mouthwatering explosions of flavor. Strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, mulberries. A bounty of colors and shapes with tastes to please any palate, enjoyed by wildlife as well as humans. In our joy at their abundance and diversity, we tend to forget their purpose—berries are seed carriers. Wonderful, bite size, edible seed carriers. We have them available year round and forget how important they would have been to earlier peoples. The arrival of the first ripe berries signaled the true end of winter, of the starving time, ensuring that our ancestors had survived another cold winter. Their importance is handed down to us in recipes for jams and jellies and preserves, some of the only ways they had of enjoying berries year round.
If you’re going to put your houseplants outside for the summer, remember to ease them into it. Don’t just throw them out in the bright sunshine and hope they make it! Think about it this way—all winter you’ve been wearing warm clothes. Long sleeved shirts and jeans, covering and protecting as much skin as possible. Your skin is pale and tender, unused to harsh sunlight. You wouldn’t don your shorts or bikini and go to the beach for the first time this season and stay from sunup to sundown, not without painful results, anyway. Plants are the same way. They’ve been inside all winter. They’re used to controlled temperatures and low levels of light. Put them outside, but use common sense! Put them on a porch or under a carport for a few days, let them gradually get used to more light. Some of them will need partial shade all summer, some can take more direct light. Inside your house will look bare for awhile, but they’ll all be coming back in sometime in the fall! Don’t forget to keep watering your plants once you move them out, and they will probably need more water while outside. Saucers underneath work great for helping hold water, just remember to dump the saucers if we get a lot of rain so your plants don’t drown.
My zucchini and cucumbers are flowering and producing and my tomato plants are flowering again after removing the first buds. My Cherry tomato has 2 fruits about the size of a large pea and many more flowers blooming. And my Sugar Baby watermelon plants are thriving. No runners off them yet but they are leafing out well.
I have already picked a first crop of radishes (20 or so). There is another crop sprouting.
I’m sure you were..........I know how you are about your chocolate!!!!
Snowed 6 inches in about 20 minutes this morning in CS, then the sun came out and melted it all away...now snowing at 3:49 pm...don’t have to water the lettuce I seeded 5 days ago!
LOL the other girl who workd with me came back from lunch yest and held up a pack of dark choc bars. I looked up and said, “Ooh, you got choc for me!” She burst out laughing and replied, “US! US!”
I found the most wonderful chocs at Walmart. Cranberries, blueberries and pomegranetes covered in dark choc.
I don’t know if I could stand choc mulch or not! I might wake up and find myself grazing! LOL
I’m so glad your fig is in recovery mode!
My green beans are up a couple of inches—43 here last night but I don’t think it hurt them. Potatoes look great—I was sure they had drowned. Got the cukes and squash and watermelons and canteloupes and hot peppers planted.
I love fresh field peas. They are small, a little greenish/purplish/brownish pea. My Aunt always cooked them for the big family gatherings,they were really tasty with corn bread. I wish I knew where she got them. No way I can grow the quantity I would need.
I’ve got some Blue Lakes going for canning and some Roma’s for fresh. The Roma’s taste great but lose their flavor when you can them. Blue Lake is what Del Monte plants, and what we’ve always planted.
Field peas are known by a bunch of other names—crowders, etc, and by variety names. Try your local seed store. Dixie Lee is a good one to plant if you want shells and snaps. Mississippi Silver/purple are good ones for shelling. So is Colossus. Stay away from Iron Clay peas. All they’re good for is cover crop. It’s just about time to plant field peas. You want to fix the cornbread, or should I?
Sorry your tomatoes didn’t make it. My dad lost a bunch of tomato plants as well. Good thing you’ve got lots of backups.
I’d like to plant out my tomatoes and other plants soon, but I’m still a little nervous. We’ve had three nights of freezing temps in a row this week. Thankfully it was just in the low 30’s though, not the 20’s. That should be the last of it, but the weather’s been strange lately.
A local orchard in the town I grew up in closed last year after they lost their whole crop. Hopefully the freeze wasn’t deep enough this time to do as much damage.
That's very good to know. What sauce tomatoes keep their flavor well when they're canned?
Also, I tried canning corn. It processed properly, no problem with spoilage, but the corn was all dingy looking and the quality wasn't as good as I expected.
I checked my canning guides and they say to use a variety that cans well. Gee, that's real helpful. I tried googling it and couldn't come up with anything.
Does anyone know what varieties of corn can well, keep their color and quality?
RD and I were talking about roma green beans. The roma tomatoes can great and they make really good sauce. Lots of meat and fewer seeds. They also juice well. A friend of mine used to can hers, minus the seeds, and put a jar in with her baby green limas. Yuummmyy!
Corn—I don’t know. We always froze ours and used Silver Queen, so there wasn’t much color to lose. :)
43 isn’t cold enough to freeze green beans! I plant about 165 plants a year in Colorado Springs, and have even been down to 32 and didn’t kill ‘em.
Concerning Monday's tornado in Suffolk, was watching the weather reporters with a bit of trepidation. Didn't know where that storm was heading. Suffolk is not far from the Beach. I now have a better understanding of what it must be like in tornado alley. My prayers are with them.
Bookmark for me for after final Suday
Good thing! They were just sprouting. Have had them come up blind if they got too cold—just a straight stem that never develops leaves. Damn squirrel has decided to dig them up now! Have 3 rat terrorists but they do more damage peeling rubber than the squirrel does with his digging!
So we have another chance for frost or freeze again early next week.
Time to punt to save the tomatoes.
The buckets and straw helped some with a frost and didn’t do a thing for our freeze, but 22 is pretty tough on most stuff, except the peas. Didn’t bother them at all.
Anyway, I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of some way to insulate the tomatoes against the cold without resorting to those overpriced water holding tomato shields.
My new brainstorm is those cheap styrofoam coolers you can get in the supermarket for summer picnics. I think if I place a bottle of warm water next to the plant and cover it with a cooler and make sure there’s no gaps at the soil line, they should keep it warm enough to get through the night.
I’ll let you know how it works.
But man I hate to find another reason to justify keeping junk......
Now the sun is coming up and I get to go out in a few minutes and pullllll offf all that covering and spend more time folding after I allow the moisture to dry off than it took to unfold and cover.... Fun, I sure hope I get some strawberries....
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.