May Gardening Check-List

May is one of my favorite months of the year. The grass greens, flowers begin to bloom, the days warm, and signs of life pop up all around! Winter comes to and end and spring is upon us. Let’s take a look at whats on my May Gardening Check-List!

I am sharing monthly garden to-do lists here on the blog for two reasons: for my future self to refer back to and for fellow gardeners to see the types of things I’m doing each month to stay on top of the garden. Go back and check out my Gardening To-Do List | April and Gardening To-Do List | March to see what I was up to in the previous months.

Here’s what I’m planning to do for the garden this month:

Tilling needed spaces.
Adding a weed tarp barrier to certain sections of the garden.
Plant beans, watermelon, popcorn, and cucumbers in the garden.
Transplanting tomatoes and peppers to the garden.
Installing the electric fence.

I’d like to share the tasks on my garden to-do list for May. This is a very busy month of the year for most gardeners! Curious what other gardeners do during the spring in preparation for the new gardening season? Continue reading and I’ll share my list with you. I also plan to share a list like this one for each month of the year, so come back for more all year round!

Tilling:

Someday I would like to establish a no-till method for my garden, but we simply aren’t there yet. Let’s be honest, everything can’t always be our ideal, but it doesn’t mean we should do them anyway…my garden is a good example of this!

We till our garden each spring before planting in order to remove the heavy weed pressure we experience. My husband takes on this task and I am so thankful for this willingness and manpower!

Thankfully, our landlords own a tiller and are more than willing to let us utilize it. This makes the job much easier than hoeing everything by hand! Tilling is easily one of the biggest tasks on the May Gardening Check-List!

Adding Weed Tarp:

Weed tarp is something we experimented with for the first time last year. I was pregnant with my second and knew that I wouldn’t be able to devote much time to weeding with a newborn on me and a two year old running wild…so weed tarp it was!

The investment was more than worth it for us! While we didn’t cover the entire garden in tarp, we utilized it around the tomatoes, peppers, and some fall crops. I can’t even begin to estimate how much time it saved my husband and me on weeding!

All that being said, we will be using a tarp on certain sections of the garden again this year. This means we need to remove one section of tarp where the popcorn will go and add a section to a new area where our tomatoes will be transplanted into.

This may not sound like too much work, but removing old tarp stakes, adding new ones, and fighting the wind to get the tarp lined up can be challenging!

Planting:

In Missouri, our last frost date is April 15th, so the end of April should be safe for planting into the garden. I said all of this in my previous to-do list for April, but we soon decided to wait a bit longer to plant into the garden. This ended up being a good choice because we received two late frosts!

May plantings include:

Beans
Watermelon
Popcorn
Cucumbers

Transplanting:

It’s time to transplant all the tomatoes and peppers than I started indoors way back in February! I’ve already Hardened Off all the indoor starts, so they acclimated to the outside conditions and ready for that lovely garden soil.

Installing the Electric Fence:

We have found that an electric fence is a vital part in the success of our garden. Previous years have shown us that a wide array of pests will make themselves at home in our garden if it is left wide open. An electric fence does not keep everything out, but it certainly helps!

I had absolutely no clue how to install an electric fence until we needed to do so during our first year of gardening. We Started Our Seeds Indoors, worked hard to Harden Off Those Same Seedlings, and tackled many garden-prep chores such as Letting Our Chickens Till Our Garden. There was no way I wanted to risk losing everything to pests! So, thanks to my husband, I learned how to install an electric fence for the very first time.

I explained how to Install an Electric Fence in the Garden in a previous blog post, so check that out if you want all the how-to details before you add this to your May Gardening Check-List.

May Gardening Check-List