Gorgeous, fresh green and flowering May. Fragrant blossom everywhere. My favourite is hawthorn. We have lived in our garden for four years, and the house builders wanted to pull out the hawthorn – a horrible, half dead mess of branches – when we first moved in.
After an annual prune, plus digging in better soil, it is looking dense and green and beautiful now. And, it is full of song from resident blue tits, robin and blackbird. My second favourite blossom is a tree peony. It is one of the precious plants we potted up and moved with us to Rye. Its flowers are tissue-thin. Huge. Pink and purple and white. It feels like it only flowers for a few special days. My usual rule in our garden is “bee friendly and flowers must last at least four weeks.” But the tree peony is worth breaking all my rules.
Third, wisteria. Sort of a love/hate relationship. We seem to be pruning meters of growth from it all year. But then it rewards us with this incredible waterfall display of pink and purple and white and fragrance. So I forgive it.
May is finally the month that the greenhouse can be cleared of plants. This is much later than last year, which means we have cucumber almost ready to pick, but the plants are still stuck in tiny pots. Elsewhere in the allotment, we direct-sowed beans a month ago. Quite honestly, there doesn’t seem to be much difference between the size of plants in the allotment to the ones still being nurtured in our cold frame. I am trying to harden off vegetables, annuals, geranium and pots of succulents. However, some seedlings I planted out are already completely eaten by slugs and snails. Dahlia shoots, zinnia, lettuce and beans. In one night I have found only stems remaining. They are voracious eaters and putting my nurtured baby plants out to be eaten is horrible.
In desperate efforts, I have bought an enormous container of dried garlic from Jempson’s and I am going to try to spread garlic flakes around my favourite tender seedlings. I worry about using slug pellets as an alternative, given the baby birds now fledged from various nests in the garden don’t really know what to eat yet.
Potatoes are growing fast and need to be re-covered with more earth about once a week. As an experiment, we are growing all our onions from seed this year. They, like our leeks, are now pencil-size in width and ready to plant out. The bulbs are tiny. So interesting to see if they can win any awards in the Rye flower and vegetable show this year.
We continue to dig up plants which failed to survive the winter cold. I have taken cuttings from some salvia and lavender which still show life in a few branches, but the rest of the plant is woody and almost dead. Our resident blackbirds are now the proud parents of three fledged babies. As I weed and dig and decide what plants need replacing, I am trying to befriend the fledglings, and throw over the worms and slugs I uncover. Not so nice, and almost stealth-like in growth, is the bindweed that has found its way underneath our garden fence. I spend hours carefully unwinding its stem from roses, tree branches and fence. If you pile all these stems and leaves into a bucket and then spray with weed control, you can ensure precious plants close by won’t get sprayed by accident.
Image Credits: Abigail Cooper-Hansen , Kt bruce .