Gardening possibilities expand greatly in May. Frost is no longer likely and soil has warmed up enough for planting most anything you want.
The time has come to stock your garden with summer flowers. Heat-loving annual flowers such as begonia, canna, caladium, vinca, marigold, nasturtium, flowering tobacco, salvia and zinnia are the ones to plant this month.
Conditions are also good for planting herbs of all kinds. The easiest ones to grow by sowing seeds directly in garden soil or a pot of soil mix are dill, basil, parsley, chives and cilantro.
It is buyer-beware when shopping for herbs. Stores are now selling small pots of dill and cilantro for $3.78 each when you can get 15,000 dill seeds or 1,000 cilantro seeds for about the same price through mail order.
To fill tubs, window boxes and other containers, you need some kind of soil medium that has good drainage and aeration. Ordinary garden dirt does not give satisfactory results when you pot up plants with it.
Most of the major brands of potting soil contain a mixture of sphagnum peat moss and perlite. These two combine to make an artificial soil that benefits plants by holding moisture while also allowing air to fit in between the soil particles.
You can ignore the out-dated gardening advice about putting a layer of gravel in the bottom of a pot to improve drainage. This practice has been shown to actually make the pot’s drainage worse.
Crabgrass began germinating…
