May is a perfect time to enjoy the flowers and new growth in your San Diego garden. The rainy season if over, so make sure you’re irrigating and mulching to keep your garden healthy. Here are some San Diego gardening tips to help get your garden ready for warm weather.
Plant for Summer
This is the perfect time to start planting heat-loving annuals, perennials and vegetables. Try adding summer annuals like cosmos, marigolds, sunflowers, zinnia, coleus, verbena and rudbeckia.
For more permanent plants, heat-loving perennials like kangaroo paws, lavenders, sages, pincushion flowers, asters, penstemons and artemisia can be planted in May. And in your vegetable garden, grow beans, corn, cucumbers, melons, squash, peppers, and tomatoes.
Fight Ants and Aphids
Control aphids with non-chemical methods. You can use strong sprays of water to dislodge them from plants. Along with the aphids, you want to stop the ants that protect them. Ants farm aphids for the honeydew they secrete. Use sticky methods, like Tanglefoot, to keep ants out of trees, and try ant traps that allow ants to take the poison home to their nests. For more ant control ideas, see my previous post.
Deadhead
To lengthen the flowering season of your roses and other flowering plants, you can deadhead them. Deadheading is the removal of spent flowers so the plant doesn’t use its energy to create seeds. This fools the plant into producing more flowers.
You can just break off the flowers of many plants. If there are a lot of small flowers, give the plant a trimming with sheers. But avoid cutting into the woody base on plants like lavender. Here’s more information on how to deadhead roses. Once you’ve trimmed off old flowers, give the plant a light feeding which will help with new growth.
San Diego Gardening Tips Source
A lot of information for San Diego Gardening Tips comes from the Master Gardener Association of San Diego County. They are a great resource for all of your gardening needs including planting, pests, vegetables, and water use. They even have a free hotline where you can get your home gardening and pest control problems answered.