General

Welcome to Seasonal Gardening

Seasonal Gardening provides a month by month account of tasks that need to be done in the garden. Our free online guide is packed with hints, tips, helpful projects and useful gardening ideas for every season.

Covering the whole of the UK (Great Britain, England, Scotland & Wales).

What to do this month

Taking care of lawns & borders

Getting the best from fruit & veg

propagating your own plants

May Gardening Tasks

You will need to work hard this month to keep weeds at bay, especially with the wet weather sweeping the country. Keep pulling them out and hoeing off the bare ground until the borders fill-out with emerging perennials and bedding plants. Whilst weeding check for self-sown annuals, biennials and perennials that can be potted-up or transplanted for use in other areas of the garden.

Plant container grown plants, shrubs and roses now, taking advantage of the cool weather and plentiful spring showers to enable plants to become well established before the hot and dry summer months arrive.

Keep a Digital Record of New Plants

Plant labels often get lost, broken or fade with time. So if you are planting newly purchased plants this spring, take a picture of the plant with its label clearly visible, using a camera, smart phone or tablet, and store the image file for future reference. Then you will never forget what species and variety of plants you have and where they are planted in the garden. Image files also have an associated date stamp, letting you know exactly when they were planted.

Grow Drought Tolerant Container Plants

If you are too busy to water regularly and still want to plant containers, then why not plant-up some tender succulents such as aeoniums, crassulas, echeverias, haworthias or mesembryanthemums. These tough little plants will virtually look after themselves all summer, without the need for much watering once established. However, as they are all tender they cannot be put outside until all risk of frost in your area has passed. Be sure to use a free draining compost, such as cactus compost and top off with gravel, small stones or slate chippings to ensure that the succulent leaves and rosettes do not sit in damp soil.

Why Not Try a Little Topiary?

Evergreen shrubs and trees with fine leaves such as boxwood (buxus), lonicera nitida (shrubby honeysuckle) and yew are very hardy and quite drought tolerant, so can provide much needed interest in the garden during drought conditions when other plants are suffering. Many of these small-leaved evergreens can be easily trained into fanciful shapes and most can be cut back hard, sending out new growth, even from the woody base.

If you are starting topiary from scratch, buy compact, well-branched shrubs, making sure that they also branch out from the base. Simple balls, cubes, cones and pyramids, are ideal shapes to start with. However, if you have your heart set on a bird or a more fanciful shape, then select a young bush and use stout wires to bend the young stems in the desired direction or buy a preshaped wire-frame and grow the plant through it. Topiary is an ancient art that requires many years of patience, so don't expect to achieve instant results.