A cold, damp spring depressed plant sales in the UK, but help is at hand from the ‘Glastonbury festival of the gardening world’

The sixth-wettest April on record has not been kind to Britain’s gardens or its 1,600 garden centres.

So far this year, with most of the key selling season over, garden centre sales are up just 2% on last year and down 11% on 2022, after the sodden spring depressed sales of shrubs, trees, bedding plants and seeds.

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© Photograph: Jordan Pettitt/PA

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© Photograph: Jordan Pettitt/PA

If you would like to plant a tree in your yard but you’re not sure that you have the space because you've heard it's a bad idea to plant a tree too close to your house, you’re in luck.

While some types of trees definitely shouldn't be planted near your home because their roots can damage your foundation, other varieties actually are safe to plant, even relatively close to a structure. Here are five of your best options, as well as a few to avoid.

Crabapple

Crabapple (Malus sp.) trees usually mature at a height of about 20 feet and have a non-invasive root system, meaning it’s not likely to damage your foundation. There are about 1,000 varieties of crabapple, of which about 100 are commonly available for planting in the U.S. These trees can thrive in U.S. agricultural zones 3 through 8, and will produce white or pink flowers in spring, and fruit that’s usually less than two inches in diameter. If you choose a plant that’s native to North America, like Malus coronaria, Malus fusca, or Malus ioensis, the flowers are good for pollinators and the fruit is good for native birds, so they can bring wildlife to your yard as well.

Dogwood

Twelve species of the flowering Dogwood (Cornus sp.) are native to North America and can flourish in USDA zones 5 through 9. They grow at a moderate rate, about 12 to 24 inches a year, and reach a height and width of 15 to 20 feet in the sun, and 40 feet or more in the shade. Because of their slow growth rate, relatively gentle roots, and easy pruning, dogwood trees are considered safe to plant near your house.

Serviceberry

Serviceberry (Amelanchier sp.) is native to North America, and there are varieties that can thrive in USDA zones 2 through 9. This tree can grow as small as six feet or as tall as 25 feet, and between four and 25 feet wide. They can be trimmed to the size and height of a shrub, or allowed to mature to their full height. Their relatively small size and non-invasive root structure makes them good for planting near your house, and the flowers, berries, and autumn foliage color make them a wildlife friendly and aesthetically pleasing addition to your landscaping.

Crape Myrtle

You can plant varieties of Crape Myrtle (Lagerstroemia sp.) trees in USDA zones 6 through 11, and they can grow to be anywhere from six to 30 feet tall and between four and 15 feet wide. These trees, with their brightly colored blooms, are good for planting near structures because their roots aren’t invasive and they tend not to get big enough to cause damage. If you have limited space, you will need to stay on top of pruning the tree, as they can grow up to three feet in a single season. Also take care to check the specific variety of tree you’re choosing to account for the space you’ll need.

American Holly

While the American Holly (Ilex opaca) tree can grow up to 60 feet tall, it can also be pruned and kept to about 25 feet in height. This variety of holly is native to North America and can be planted in USDA zones 5 through 9. It will produce light green to white flowers and its signature bright red berries and is an evergreen, for winter color. It’s known to be safe for planting near structures and makes an excellent habitat for local wildlife.

Trees to avoid planting close to your house

Trees to avoid planting near your house include the white ash (Fraxinus Americana), poplars (Populus sp.), and weeping willows (Salix babylonica). These trees have wide-spreading root systems that can damage foundations, sewer lines, driveways, and slabs. Give them a wide berth of at least 40 or 50 feet from structures to avoid damage.

Houseplants spark joy. They add a splash of life and color to any indoor space, and if properly chosen and cared for, they can thrive just about anywhere. Anyone who’s ever started an indoor garden knows that tending to houseplants can quickly become a way of life, if not an addiction. Caring for living things is meditative and therapeutic, and the design aspect they bring to your living space drives you to keep growing your plant collection.

There are a lot of apps and gadgets that can help you care for your plants, but eventually, you’ll probably want to go full mad scientist and make your own plant babies. Propagating plants is not only cost-effective, it’s also a lot of fun—and will help you steps up your indoor gardening game significantly. While it might seem intimidating at first, growing new plants from cuttings, buds, or roots is a lot easier than you think, especially if you choose the right plants to work with. Here are 15 of the easiest houseplants to propagate.

While one point of gardening is to be enjoying the great outdoors, using tech doesn’t take anything away from that. In fact, I’d argue it enables being outside, because you don’t have to be tethered to paperwork or books—all you need is on your phone or tablet. Although I had long embraced using spreadsheets for charting what I was planting in seed trays or Adobe Illustrator for mapping my garden beds, I was slower to embracing gardening apps. I had, somewhat naively, waited for “the one,” the app that would do everything, for while I’d happily pay for. What’s happened instead is that I use a variety of apps in small ways for almost every aspect of gardening, depending on what I need.

The best, free way to identify plants

It never fails to amuse me how many friends send me pictures of plants asking me to ID them, because usually, I have no idea what I’m looking at. In my own garden, I figure out what I’m looking at by using a plant ID app, and I benefit from Plantnet weekly. It has rarely disappointed me in being able to identify plants, even from a less-than-stellar picture, and immediately links to information about the plant. You can use it offline, too, so you don't need service. 

ADHD-proof succession planting

Succession planting (or planting crops every few weeks so you have crops ready to harvest at various times instead of all at once) is a test of best intentions. Keeping track of when you should seed, when you should harvest, and then actually following through is a test for anyone, but I really struggle with it and need reminders to stay on track.  While Seedtime is advertised as a planting app to help manage your whole garden, and is incredibly popular, I really just use the succession planning aspect. While you could much of the same result using spreadsheets, Google Calendar and your own research, Seedtime does a lot of the legwork for you, plotting out a customized calendar based on the crops you want to grow. There are paid tiers, but you can remain on a free plan and get a lot of the functionality, including one planting calendar. Paid tiers will net you more functions to use Seedtime as a gardening journal (which is a great idea) and the ability to save more data from your gardens, like yields and germination rates. 

Eliminate crowdscaping

Almost every gardener I know grows or buys too many starts and then packs their beds too full. It’s easy to do when the plants are so small—the beds can look sparse at this point. Apps like Planter help you understand how much space each plant really needs, as they all grow to different sizes, and some grow vertically while others grow horizontally. To really get a sense of what you can pack into a particular bed, this is the app I use to help me come back down to earth and get real about spacing. Like Seedtime, Planter tries to be an app that does everything for your garden, so you can also use the growing calendar, but I think Seedtime does that aspect better, while Planter is better for planning your beds. Planter has plans that start about $1/month, which is great, but you’ll get most of what you need on the free plan. 

Companion planting on the fly

Over time, you can learn what crops benefit from being planted together, and more importantly, which crops can’t be interplanted. While there are great charts to detail this, they’re hard to refer to while out in your garden. Instead, I use the Seed to Spoon app. I can quickly, from the garden, look up a specific vegetable or flower and get data on what to interplant and what to avoid, as well as a bunch of other growing info about a particular plant. There are some other features I like about this app, like the general reminders about what to plant now, or what to plant soon, on the home page, but mostly, I use this app as a reference library for interplanting. Seed to Spoon can be used for free, but you can upgrade for $47 a year to get access to more features, like an AI garden chatbot. 

Take advantage of free online tools

While not an app, Johnny Seeds has a ton of free tools that you should use. I use the seed quantity calculator to figure out how many seeds or starts of a particular plant I should get based on the space I have. There’s also a seed planting scheduler that does many of the calculations for you based on frost dates. Take time to peruse the tool list for planning, growing and harvesting. Gardenate is a free online tool that will tell you what to grow in your zip code right now, and whether to direct sow or plant starts. 

When you think of farming or gardening for food, you think of the great outdoors. If you want to squeeze a fresh orange or lemon in the morning, you’ll need a certain amount of outdoor space for those trees, after all.

Except sometimes you don’t. In addition to the houseplants you're familiar with (and the more unusual plants, like wasabi, that you probably aren't) a wide variety of fruit trees also grow well inside. This means you can combine the decorative beauty of indoor plants with the practical benefit of being able to reach over from wherever you’re sitting and grab a delicious, healthy snack.

There are two things to keep in mind if this sounds like your next indoor gardening project: One, in almost every case you should be looking for the “dwarf” varieties of the fruits plants you’re targeting, as they don’t require the space their full-size cousins need. Two, buying a mature tree and transplanting it to your home will always increase your odds of actually getting viable fruit. Planting from seed can work, but it will usually take longer to produce less.

That all said, here are your best choices when it comes to growing fruit trees inside—but be aware that, as with all plants, some varieties may be toxic to your pets, so make sure to consider that before getting started.

Fig Tree

The ficus carica “Petite Negra” fig tree will start producing fruit relatively quickly (usually when it’s still less than a foot tall). As a dwarf plant, it only gets to about 4-6 feet tall at most (the size of the pot you put it in will determine how large it eventually grows), and the figs it produces will be a rich purple color, and delicious. It’s an easy plant to care for, as it’s naturally pest-resistant and drought-tolerant, so forgetting to water it for a few days won’t kill it. An alternative variant is the “Brown Turkey” fig tree, though you may have to aggressively prune to keep it from taking over your space. Misting either variety regularly is a good idea, as figs typically thrive in humid climates.

Citrus (lemons, limes, oranges)

Dwarf versions of most citrus plants will grow well indoors—the challenge isn’t getting them to grow, but rather to produce fruit. You’ll have your best luck with calamondin oranges (citrofortunella mitis), Meyer lemons, and Key Limes, all dwarf varieties that tolerate the indoors really well. Keep in mind that while calamondin oranges grow best indoors, they’re not particularly sweet fruits—though they can be used in a wide variety of recipes. Citrus in general like humid conditions, so mist them regularly unless you want to turn your house into a moldy jungle. They also need a lot of sunlight, so position their pots someplace where they’ll get exposure all day long.

Apricots

Dwarf Moorpark apricots are easy to grow indoors. Like a lot of “pit” or “stone” fruit trees, you can grow one from the pit, but if you do, you can expect to wait a few years to get actual fruit from it. A better idea is to buy a young tree and simply transplant it to a pot. Moorparks need to be pruned regularly or they will get too big—but even when pruned, they will reach about six feet in height, so make sure you have the room before you commit. Keep the soil damp and make sure it gets a lot of sunlight; a tree that’s two years or older should begin fruiting within the first year.

Bananas

Be careful when selecting a banana tree variety, as many will grow well indoors, but not all of them produce fruit you can eat. If a sweet snack is your endgame, choose the dwarf Cavendish variety. These banana trees are easy to grow and will produce bananas within a year or two if grown from seed, and buying a mature plant will skip that part. Banana trees like a lot of water—like, a lot—so you need to water regularly and thoroughly. But you also need to let the soil dry out between waterings, so don’t overdo it. They also like a bit of misting since they’re tropical plants, and you’ll want to place your tree in a spot that gets a lot of sun.

Mulberries

Dwarf Mulberry trees can be “trained” to be more like bushes or hedges, making them a good choice for indoor growing. Look for dwarf varieties; the Everbearing Mulberry and the Issai Mulberry are good choices that won’t get too large. Both require aggressive pruning, however—left to its own devices, for example, the Everbearing variety can grow to be 15 feet tall. Make sure they get a lot of sun, and water them regularly at first. When they’re established, you can slack off on the watering and they won’t mind a bit.

Coffee

Yes, coffee is a fruit—the beans we roast and grind to make our life-saving Go Go Juice is the stone of the coffee cherry, actually. And you can grow coffee indoors and even make coffee from it—assuming you are able to go through the process of skinning, soaking, drying, roasting, and grinding your beans once harvested (there’s a reason most people just stumble to the local coffee shop or Keurig machine). The coffea arabica plant is easy to grow (just avoid direct sunlight, which can burn the leaves) and will produce fruit within the first year, along with pretty white flowers and a beautiful fragrance.

Kumquat

Kumquats are citrus plants, but they’re generally easier to grow than lemons or oranges, and several varieties are more or less designed for container living. If you want a kumquat similar to what you find in the grocery store, grow a “Nagami” variant, which will give you small, olive-sized fruits. If you want larger fruit, choose a “Meiwa” variety. But you won’t go far wrong with any kumquat tree—when grown in a container they won’t get too large, and all they need is a lot of sunlight and moderate watering.

Ground cherries

These are sometimes called Cape Gooseberries, and they aren’t at all like the standard cherries you think of when you hear the name—they’re more closely related to peppers. The taste is actually kind of hard to describe; it's not bad at all, but...unique. Ground cherries actually do well when started from seeds, for a change: Give them full sunlight and moderate watering and you’ll soon have a large-leafed plant that will gift you plenty of delicious fruit. These plants are annuals, so you’ll need to replant every year if you want more.

Miracle berry

If you want an indoor fruit tree that doubles as a party trick, grow synsepalum dulcificum, aka Miracle Berries. The party trick is that after you eat some Miracle Berries, anything you eat afterward will taste sweet, no matter how sour or bitter the food actually is. The effects last anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, so be careful, as mistiming your snack could ruin your next meal. They grow easily indoors; all they need is lots of indirect sunlight and plenty of misting, as they thrive in humidity. If your plant looks a bit wan, you can wrap it in clear plastic for a bit to raise its humidity levels.

Avocados

Avocados will sprout from their pits if you follow the famous “toothpick in a glass” technique, but there’s a caveat: Avocado plants grown from pits will almost never fruit. In other words, you’ll get a nice, healthy plant, but you will die of old age before it gives you a single avocado. Your best bet is to get a starter plant. The “Day” variety is the easiest type of avocado to fruit in a pot, so look for one of those in your local nursery or garden section. It still may take some time before you get an avocado or two, but it will happen a lot faster than never, which is how long it will likely take if you start from the pit.

Spring is a time of high anxiety for gardeners all across the U.S. We’ve spent the winter consuming seed catalogs like porn, stalking garden centers like pervs, and now we are jonesing for one thing: fifty degree soil.

It's not unusual to hit up a garden center in March and see legions of people dressed like abominable snowmen with carts full of tender tomato and pepper plants, and hearing the same refrain from the cashiers at the checkout: “It is still too cold for these plants, they need to stay inside at least until Mothers’ Day.”

If you’ve ever checked the back of a seed packet, they all contain one phrase: “before last frost”: Plant six weeks before last frost, direct seed outside after last frost, start inside 12 weeks before last frost. It's enough to make you think last frost is like Tax Day, a set calendar event. But it’s not, and that, friends, is the bane of existence for every gardener out there.

Gardening is a gambler’s game, because we have to hedge bets in February, trying to decide when to plant those seeds with little clue of when spring will break. A late spring is a problem, because plants continue to grow in the greenhouses and there’s just not enough room for them. They are college graduates hanging around too long in the roost; they gotta go somewhere. Last April I had 400 flower seedlings in my living room with no other place to go. They certainly were not going outside; I learned my lesson the year prior when I went to check on the seedlings I’d left outside for the first time and saw a blanket of snow on April 14 that had arrived with no warning.

How to know when it’s time for plants to go outside

Most of the vegetables and flowers we associate with summer—tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, squash, cucumbers, etc.—are tender. They require heat to germinate and to grow. They cannot survive a frost. The seeds won’t even germinate at under 50 degrees, and they really need 60 to germinate in any reasonable amount of time. For seedlings to survive outside, we’re looking for consistent soil temps in the sixties.

A soil thermometer is the way to go. While your local gardening group will be abuzz with the news regardless, its good to know your own yard. Different areas of your yard will be ready at different times. Make sure you’re testing at least eight inches deep in your soil. When you’ve got at least a week of 60 degree soil temps, you’re likely safe to plant those seedlings in the ground.

How to extend the greenhouse season if you need to

Your living room floor isn’t ideal. Plants need heat and light and water to thrive. If you’ve run out of room inside, it’s time for more greenhouse space, and the easiest way is a popup greenhouse. I prefer the kind that run low to the ground, because the tall, cheap models don’t do well in wind or at keeping the cold out. Couple this popup with some agribon, and you’re going to keep your seedlings cozy outside until you can start to harden them off.

I add a few layers of agribon or row cover to the top of the greenhouse, and then a sheet of plastic (painters’ plastic is fine). It acts like a blanket, and depending on the agribon rating and how many layers you use, it can really keep the cold out.

How to harden off your plants

Your plant babies have grown up in an incubator—a cozy heated mat under them and warm lights overhead in a hot, humid greenhouse with consistent water. Even with sixty degree soil, the outside is going to be a brutal wakeup call to these Goldilock babies, and as a result, your plants can go into shock and become stunted, get diseased easier, or just die. We need to make that transition softer. That process is called “hardening off,” in which we slowly start introducing your plants to the hard cruelties of the real world over the course of a week or so.

Even in the cocoon of safety that is your greenhouse or grow environment, you can prepare your plants for the outside by ensuring the stems are strong. Use fans to lightly circulate air in the greenhouse to promotes stem strength. Run your hands over the seedlings often—it’s good for both of you—and tells the seedlings to get some core strength. Water consistently, but only as much as needed: The most common problem is overwatering. Bottom watering, which is just giving the seedlings a little water in your bottom tray, is ideal. We want the seedlings to be as independent as possible. Give the seedlings as much light as you can, as close as you can to the leaves, so they don’t become leggy.

Now, if you bought plants from the garden center, chances are they’ve been hardened off for you. But if the garden center is still keeping them in a greenhouse or covering them at night, you’ll need to do it.

Day 1: Field trip

Take your seedling trays outside and put them into a shaded space in the middle of the day for a few hours. The shade is really important, because the break from the sun gives the plants a chance to recover from the shock. They’re not really for a zillion kilowatts just yet. Take them out, give them some time to chill in a protected shady space, and then bring them back inside, and remind them to enjoy these last days.

Day 2: Introduction to the big ball of fire

Today, place your seeds someplace outside where they’ll get some sunlight, but not a direct hit, for a few hours. They’re still not ready for primetime, but they need more exposure than yesterday. Then they come back inside for their nightly tuck in.

Day 3: Here comes the sun

Today’s the day! We’re going full sun, baby, for a few hours. Make sure your seedlings are hydrated before they go out, but the sunhat is coming off; it’s time to get some Vitamin D. After three to four hours, bring them back in.

Day 4: Suns out, buds out

Back out they go, and into the full exposure; today, let’s leave them out for five to six hours before bringing them back in.

Day 5: School’s out for summer

It’s the first full day off from the nursery, so take your seedlings out first thing and don’t bring them back in until the sun goes down. Tuck them in for the last time, read them a bedtime story about the Little Tomato That Could, and say goodnight.

Day 6: Heigh ho, heigh ho...

Take one last pic with your babies because this morning, they’re being pushed out of the nest. Take them back outside, check on them at sunset, and then leave them outside overnight. Nighttime is when the critters roam around your garden, whether it be slugs, rabbits, squirrels or voles, so elevate them if you can.

Day 7: Independence day

It’s all going down today, as you plant your babies in the ground. Ideally you’ll plant them in the late afternoon, so they can recover from the trauma without the sun blazing overhead. Planting in the morning or height of the day means they’ll be in full sun when they’re most stressed, which isn’t ideal.

Though Mother’s Day is traditionally when tomatoes and other warm weather plants go in the ground for many zones across the U.S., email promotions from all the gardening companies are already talking about fall. Bulb catalogs have started landing in my mailbox, and it’s perfect timing—because, believe it or not, right now, amidst the craziness of getting your summer garden in, is when you need to plan for fall garden tasks.

The blooms you see now were planted in fall

Gardening, I find, is about backtracking. If you want sunflowers in July and they need six weeks to grow, you need to start them in early May. If you want tulips and color next spring, you need to get those bulbs into the ground this fall, and to have the widest selection available to you, you need to shop now. By the time fall rolls around, you’re incredibly unlikely to remember what bulbs you need or what areas to fill in, because they bloomed so long ago. Now, while bulbs are still blooming or have just finished, is the perfect time to take note of what you’ll need, marry it to what’s available for fall planting, and place orders. 

Start record keeping all spring and summer

I’ve advocated for garden journaling multiple ways. I have a well-worn notebook where I jot down observations, plans and garden sketches, but I also keep a visual diary of my garden every week or so. No matter what kind of learner you are, there’s a method out there that will fit you—whether it’s voice notes or making a list. The idea is to take a record of the garden as it changes, so you have notes to refer back to long after the season has changed. Your garden is an always-evolving landscape.

For instance, though there are hundreds of tulips in the ground at my house, we had an unusually hard winter this year and many did not come back. The ice also caused many colored tulips to revert, a process in which tulips that were bred from red or yellow to be wilder colors will go back to standard red and yellow. I’ll be adding and replacing some bulbs this year, but since they’ll have died back by September, having overhead photos of the areas I want to replant, with the bulbs in bloom, is essential. Otherwise, I’ll be flying blind in the fall. Even if I can find the bulbs in the ground, I won’t have any idea what color flowers each one produces without these photos. This process of taking photos to help you plant in fall is really important for blank spaces you want to fill in. While they seem obvious now, they won’t be in fall as they fill in with summer blooms. 

Build in earlier blooms

Spring is when bulbs start to pop up—the irises, tulips, and daffodils. To extend the season longer, begin planting bulbs that bloom earlier, all the way into late winter. There is a dazzling array of crocuses to be planted, across a color spectrum of purple, blue, orange and yellow. Snowdrops may seem pedestrian, but in late winter any sign of life is welcome. Anemone follow shortly thereafter, with flowers that look like low poppies, and then come the parade of daffodils. If daffodils seem too generic, you have to see the new varieties where shades vary from pale pinks to orange, and double-blooming faces have all sorts of distinctive characteristics. Use a bulb blooming calendar to start blooms as early as possible. 

Define a color band for your garden

For a long time I wasn’t deliberate about my color choices and indiscriminately threw flowers in the ground. If you do this, you’ll come to notice that your garden is mostly white, pink and purple flowers. Over the last few years, I’ve developed a rule that white flowers are no longer allowed. But more specifically, I only plant bold colors: orange, red, yellow, purple, blue and magenta. When I choose bulbs, I ensure that they’re within my palette, and I try to ensure they’re distributed in a way that works: an ombre across the front yard, or a solid line of purple and red up the driveway. This can only be achieved by keeping notes year to year as everything blooms. For instance, as much as I love my yard flooding with irises right now, they’re universally purple blooms. I’ll be pulling out about two thirds of them this fall and replacing them with blue, red and yellow irises for more variety. I have made arrangements to trade a few of my pink peonies for yellow and red versions that gardeners nearby have. 

Add planters to help move color across the yard

Bulbs like tulips and peonies tend to come up when the rest of your yard is still sleeping from winter and looks bare. This color helps make the yard look alive, but only where you have bulbs planted. Planters can help fill spaces with color where a planting bed doesn’t exist. Pay attention to the yard now, looking around where a pop of color would help your yard look more alive. Grab a colorful ceramic planter while on sale this summer, and then come this fall, use a lasagna method to plant it with bulbs. 

Bulbs will still be available in the late summer and fall, even if some varieties are sold out. You don’t have to rush right now to place orders. What you do need to do is stop and take a look around every week or two—literally stop and smell the roses. Take pictures and notes, enough reference material for you to go back to in fall, when you are ready to make a plan and place orders. The payoff in spring is worth it.

As long as people have been gardening, they’ve been trying to find easier ways to do it all. The first few times you try to grow seeds, you’ll inevitably be bad at it: not enough light, leggy starts, mildewed roots. But eventually you’ll find a system that works. Even so, we’re all looking for ways to make it faster, more efficient and cheaper. I had stumbled upon the trend of snail seeding or seed snails on TikTok and was curious if it was a viable cheat for seed starting. After four weeks, I can say that while seed snails work, they’re not more efficient, cheaper, easier or faster than traditional seed trays. I can’t find a good reason to choose this method over regular methods. 

What are seed snails or snail seeding? 

Seeds need three things to sprout: heat, moisture and a medium like soil to grow in. For home gardeners, it’s pretty simple. You just have to put the seed in some soil, keep it warm on a heat mat, and keep it watered. Some seeds need to be buried deeper than others, some need to go through a period of stratification where they’re exposed to colder temperatures that simulate winter, and seeds germinate at different rates. Cucumbers sprout in days, while snapdragons take weeks to germinate. Still, the process is mostly the same.

Snail rolling gets rid of the seed tray (sort of—more of that in a moment). You just lay out paper towel, roll it up packed with damp soil—an earthen cinnamon roll of sorts—and then stand the roll on its end and plant seeds in the exposed soil, which will look like a spiral. Once seeds have sprouted, you carefully unroll the snail, and pluck your seedlings out and plant them outside. Seems simple enough. 

I was pretty sure this method would work, since it consisted of putting seeds into soil and watering them. The challenge was whether it worked better than traditional methods—specifically regular ol’ seed trays. So I planted one tray of zinnia seeds and a few snail rolls' worth of the same seeds to see what would happen. 

How to set up a snail roll

I used standard, unprinted paper towels, and folded them in half lengthwise, resulting in a double ply length of paper towels about three feet long. Using seed starting mix (which is not the same as potting soil or compost), I ensured the mix was damp enough to hold together when I squeezed it in my hands. I packed it onto the paper towel from edge to edge, flattening it, not unlike making a sushi roll. Here is where you need to use some judgment, because how thick that application of soil is depends on how big the seeds are. Small seeds like marigolds need less thickness than pumpkin seeds, which are quite large. It was clear to me that packing it all the way to the top and bottom edge was folly—the soil was already falling out a bit. Then you start at one end and carefully roll the paper towel onto itself, forming a jelly roll, and keep rolling until the end of the paper. Here’s where this process hits some snags. 

Paper towel is delicate

First, even though the paper towel was doubled up, it still tore, because that is what paper towels are designed to do, and so rolling was frustrating. You could keep going, if the tear happened in the middle of the roll, because subsequent parts of the roll would keep things together. But if it happened at the end of the roll, you were out of luck— the roll fell apart. As you roll, soil falls out, so you lose a lot of it. You want the soil damp enough to stay put, but not so wet the paper towel is destroyed; it’s a delicate balance. You want to keep the thickness of soil consistent, too. At the end of the rolling process,  I was surprised how easy it was to take the entire roll and upend it into a tray. It’s helpful if you do a few, so the rolls hold each other up—a deep tray helps. I used a standard 1020 tray—that's a tray that is 10 inches by 20 inches, comes in many depths and designs, and is incredibly common. While making a roll certainly didn’t take long, it did take longer than filling a seed tray, which takes less than 10 seconds. You just spread soil over the top, tap the tray on a hard surface, top the soil off and wipe off any excess soil. 

Harder to seed

To seed the roll, you insert seeds of your choice into the snail from the top, as it’s standing in the tray. Depending on the kind of seed, you plant it shallower or deeper—the instructions are always on the seed packet. This part wasn’t hard, but it was harder than using a regular seed tray. Generally, as you plant, you go row by row, and since everything is flat, you can see where you’ve seeded and where you haven’t. This was much harder in the messy snail rolls. It was also less efficient. If you’re seeding an entire tray of one kind of seed, then you don’t need a seed chart to understand which seed cell of the tray holds what kind of seed. For instance, an entire tray of pink Benary’s Giant Zinnia—easy. But usually, home gardeners don’t need a whole tray of one seed, so a tray can hold many kinds of seeds: a row of pink zinnias, then a row of green zinnias, red zinnias, yellow, etc. One of my brassica trays will hold 20 different kinds of seeds, and a chart helps me understand what is in each cell. In a snail roll, there is no way to tell what’s what; it’s just all jumbled together. This means you also can’t tell which seeds didn’t sprout, which is much easier in trays—you just see which cells have no sprout in them and then consult the chart to see what failed. In a snail roll you wouldn’t even know something failed to sprout. I also didn’t like how much soil was used in the snail roll process, which was much more than I used for the same number of seeds in a tray. 

Can’t regulate moisture easily

Once the roll is seeded, you have to keep the seeds moist. While you start with damp soil, you have to keep it moist, but not so wet it mildews. There are a few ways to do this—n a traditional tray setup, you’d use a humidity dome, a clear plastic shell over the top. As water evaporates, it condenses on the lid and then falls back down onto the seeds. There’s very little water loss. Eventually, once the seeds sprout, you remove the dome and water the seeds from above with a water mister (they’re too delicate for a watering can) or from below, which means you give the tray the seedlings sit in a shallow amount of water (the soil will suck up the water as it needs it). The snail method doesn’t really allow for a humidity dome since the rolls are so tall, so I loosely tented the snails with plastic wrap after a good misting. I placed the trays onto my heat mat, the snails on one side and the traditional tray on the other side, and just watched. Ten days later, my zinnias in the tray had sprouted consistently, and were well on their way to forming their first true leaves, which is the signal to remove the humidity dome. The snails had sprouted inconsistently, and the paper was growing some mold from the humidity. One snail had collapsed partially. The plastic wasn’t doing much to keep moisture in; I had to water them far more often than the trays. Still, at three weeks, I removed all the plastic and started bottom watering the snails just like the trays. 

Poor germination rates

Because I had kept track of how many seeds were in the rolls and the trays, I could calculate precisely how much loss I had in each. Out of 50 cells in the trays, only two did not germinate. Of the 50 seeds I planted in the snails, 18 seeds did not germinate. We had a clear winner. 

The zinnias in the seed trays could chill in the trays until it was time to plant them, which was weeks off. They need a strong root system to survive transplant shock, and seed trays allow them to build those roots, without those roots getting too tangled with their neighbors’ roots. The snails were deeper than the trays, giving them more vertical space to grow roots, but not as much horizontal space, since the cells of the seed tray were larger. So, I began adding plant foot to the bottom water of both the seed tray and the snails, and gave them another 10 days. While under usual conditions I’d have let them go a few more weeks, for the purpose of the experiment, it was time to see what was going on, root-wise. 

Transplant shock

To pop a seedling out of a seed tray, you just use your finger, from the bottom, to push the seedling up. The roots will be contained in the soil around the seeding, and you can easily transplant it into the ground. For the snail rolls, you have to delicately undo the roll. This proved hard, since roots had grown through the paper. As you unrolled, you tore roots. The roots of each seedling were enmeshed in the roots of all the other seedlings in the roll, which meant you had to carefully pluck apart the roots to do the least damage. The soil, which would have been held onto the seedling by the roots then fell off, mostly, so you were now planting bare root seedlings, which would surely struggle. 

While it’s too soon to tell how each seedling will do over the summer, it’s likely that the seed tray transplants will do better. The snail roll transplants experienced a lot of root shock. Again, while snail rolling clearly works, there wasn’t a single part of the seed starting process where it was easier, cheaper or more efficient than regular old seed trays. While seed trays might cost more than paper towels, they’re reusable, and once you calculate in the cost of extra soil for snail rolling and loss rates of seeds, you come out ahead using seed trays.

Here’s a secret: Gardening isn’t about plants. Plants don’t need us puttering around or deciding where they should live; they do a better job of it on their own. Gardening is about our hopes and expectations: planning a summer yield of tomatoes with nary a bug bite, or a solid hedge of sunflowers that the squirrels won’t use as scaffolding. For inspiration, we check out Instagram accounts of flower gardeners holding impossibly large snapdragon bouquets standing in a flower field, or the kitchen potager out of a Meryl Streep movie where the garden was so perfect, it turns out it was achieved using an entire team of gardeners who glued vegetables in place. Instead of aspiring to an impossible garden standard, I say we embrace chaos gardening as a way to reduce stress and bring fun back to growing things. 

You can't control plants or the weather

The reality is that gardening can get messy. To realize a precise plan you have to be constantly weeding and feeding and pruning and planting, all within the tight confines of the summer season. You can’t control the sun or snow or rain in any given year, nor can you do much about viruses or fungus. If a crop fails, it can feel like personal failure. While gardening has been shown to reduce stress, it can also certainly cause it if you are too rigid in your plans, as many new gardeners are. Chaos gardening suggests that you just start sticking plants into empty spaces and see what happens. 

It helps to know about co-planting and invasives

Before you give in to total chaos, there are some rules you might want to think about. First, some plants coexist better than others. For instance, fennel does not enjoy the company of other plants. Brassicas prefer to stick together, as do nightshades. But within companion planting are wonderful bedfellows: Cucumbers love being with beans, and onions and tomatoes grow spectacularly together. Sweet alyssum and flowering dill benefit the vegetables around them. While thinking too hard about companion planting can be overwhelming, it can be as simple as looking at the empty space where you’re about to plant, say, a cabbage and seeing what’s around it. If there’s an eggplant, plant the cabbage somewhere else. 

You should also know if a particular plant will spread easily, like mint, foxgloves or berry canes, because they can easily take over a space. Invasives like bluebells can seem charming at first, but they’re very, very hard to control once they take root. While herbs like dill and parsley can perennialize, meaning they just spread and come back year to year on their own, they don’t take over a space and crowd out other plants like mint does. You can use plant identification apps to tell you what you’re planting, what’s near it and if it will spread. 

If you keep throwing plants at the ground, some are going to stick

What you plant will always be a mix of perennial and annual plants, meaning that some will come back year to year, and some will likely die after a season. It’s been my personal experience that if you just keep sticking plants into empty spaces, over time spaces feel fuller as the perennials take hold and you’ll find a few plants that should be annuals that perennialize anyway as you’re trying them in different spots. That’s the thing: Plants are excellent at finding the right spot for themselves. 

Chaos gardening creates less vulnerable plants

By spreading plants out across the garden you eliminate monocultures. This means it will be much harder for a crop to get taken out by a pest or virus, because there isn’t one giant target to hit, and the plants are spread out, so problems can’t spread as easily. In fact, spreading the plants out is better for soil health and plant health. An entire bed of peas is great, because peas fix nitrogen, but it doesn’t benefit any other plants, like the corn next door that desperately needs nitrogen. But if you interplant, they can benefit each other. 

Through chaos gardening the landscape takes on a much more interesting texture of different colors and heights and patterns. Around every corner is a new discovery or delight and plants that aren’t doing as well don’t make the same impact. If something dies, tear it out and plant something else, doesn’t matter what it is. 

Parameters can make chaos feel more comfortable

If you still want some control, give areas themes or loose rules. The area in front of my house is strictly for cutting flowers, but there is no order to what kind. Perennial echinacea mixes with annual zinnias and bulbs of every height and texture.  My flower wall along the edge of the property has only one rule: planting is by height, so the tallest plants go at the back. Asparagus and artichokes mix with 16-foot sunflowers and free growing foxgloves and tulips. In the vegetable garden, slow bolting cabbage lives with Egyptian walking onions and shiso, resulting in a show-stopping mix of colors and structure. When the cabbage is done, I yank it out and plant something else that’s around. Each empty space is just an opportunity to grow something new. You can even designate some areas for chaos and some for more orderly planting, if it’s important to you. 

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that gardening, while addictive, is supposed to be relaxing. While formal gardens with clean lines and obvious themes are beautiful, entire teams are required to maintain them. If you can relax a little and embrace a little more chaos, you may find more joy in your garden.

Richard Slayman received the historic procedure in March. The hospital said it had “no indication” his death was related to the transplant.

Richard Slayman received the historic procedure in March. The hospital said it had “no indication” his death was related to the transplant.

By sequencing an enormous amount of data, a group of hundreds of researchers has gained new insights into how flowers evolved on Earth.

© Baker et al., Nature 2024

Lawns, mowed short, give us space for dogs and kids to play. They also keep our neighbors from making complaints to the town government or homeowners’ association. But a closely-cropped lawn is a flower-free monoculture. Some organizations are encouraging a “No Mow May” to allow wildflowers in the grass to bloom—benefiting pollinators—before we start cutting grass down for the season. 

There’s a huge caveat worth noting here: Ecological organizations say that No Mow May doesn’t do much for pollinators if all you do is let your grass grow for a month and then get back to your usual lawn care. (It can even be bad for your grass.) Instead, consider how you can help pollinators in your yard with other approaches, like a “slow mow summer.” 

What is No Mow May?

Originated by Plantlife in the UK, No Mow May is described as a movement that aims to “Provide a feast for pollinators, tackle pollution, reduce urban heat extremes, and lock away atmospheric carbon below ground.” 

Plantlife asks people to pledge not to mow their lawn during May, and they encourage participants to discuss plant diversity with their neighbors and on social media. Lawns have taken over areas that were once meadow, leaving pollinators with fewer flowers to feed on. People should really be cultivating gardens and meadows, not just lawns, the argument goes. No Mow May is a step toward that. 

Is it actually good to stop mowing your grass in May? 

According to most U.S.-based conservation organizations: no. The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation writes in a blog: “Let’s be honest, if all you’re doing is letting dandelions and other weeds bloom, that’s not good quality [pollinator] habitat—and any benefits will be canceled if you power up your mower and restart as if nothing has changed once June arrives. We can’t pat ourselves on the back and say, ‘Yay, we saved the bees.’”

The Bee Lab at the University of Minnesota agrees: “People should not take the catch phrase ‘No Mow May’ literally.” 

Minimal environmental benefits aside, No Mow May can potentially harm your grass. Lawns are healthiest when you only trim off some of their height, so you don’t want to let your grass get a foot tall and then chop it down to nothing. (That end-of-May cut isn’t good for your mower, either.)

What to do instead of No Mow May

Conservation organizations appreciate the sentiment of No Mow May, but prefer that we channel our energy into more holistic approaches like a Slow Mow Spring or Slow Mow Summer, extending the mission of No Mow May across an entire season.

Here are a  few things that can help your yard to provide more food for pollinators, and more beneficial habitat for other living things like birds:

• Mow less often throughout the season, and use a higher blade height on your mower. Longer grass keeps the soil moist, and the taller mowing height allows small flowers to bloom.

• Plant native and beneficial flowers in your lawn, like clover, selfheal, and violets. 

• Grow a mini-meadow or wildflower garden that is separate from your lawn.

• Grow other pollinator-friendly plants besides just the ones that grow in grass. Shrubs, garden plants, and window boxes can all contribute.

The Bee Lab also points out that careful timing of mowing can help, depending on what grows in your yard. For example, you can allow weeds like dandelions to flower, and then mow them before they go to seed. That allows pollinators to visit the flowers, but stops those particular weeds from spreading.

The U.S. is a wildly diverse landscape. Consider how different the northern landscapes of Michigan and Minnesota are from the deserts of Texas and New Mexico, or the dense forests of the Northeast or Northwest. While it’s common sense that these different landscapes wouldn’t support the same plant life, it doesn’t stop people from trying to grow cactus in the forest. Even within a similar landscape, say, across the Southwest, there are variances in what grew natively before we began introducing new species. The landscape was made to support those native species; in fact, the entire ecosystem revolved around those native plants. They attracted the local pollinators and fed the local wildlife—the digested plants become seeds and the cycle starts again. There’s been a movement in the last twenty years to refocus our landscaping efforts on native plants to help local pollinators and wildlife, preserve water, and keep invasive plants from taking over environments. 

What are native plants?

Generally, native species are the plants that lived in a region before European settlement. The species proliferated at that point because the environment supported it; these were the plants that flourished under the conditions of the region. Even after all the remediation we’ve done to the environment, when the land is cleared due to natural or man-made conditions like wildfire or road construction, the plants you first see come back are the native plants. If plants are tuned to the environmental conditions, they require less support, like additional water or sheltering. Think about the cactus growing in the forest: It has to come inside for the winter, and needs additional light and heat, and might even require a dehumidifier. But a native fern requires none of those supports and would do just fine outside during the winter. In the Sonoran desert, the opposite is true: The cactus has all it needs to survive the winter and summer outside on its own, but a fern would not survive unless it had constant additional shade and water. 

Why native plants are important

It’s not just that native plants are tuned to the local environment. Local wildlife is tuned and accustomed to those native plants, too. They provide nectar for birds and bees, butterflies, bats—all your local pollinators. More pollination means more fruit production, which supports larger wildlife populations. 

As above, native plants need less intervention, which includes less fertilizers and pesticides, which results in less toxins introduced into our water table and environment, and they use less resources like water. They’re better suited to the soil, so they prevent erosion. They don’t require mowing, so they are responsible for less pollution. 

How to find native plants in your area

Naturally, Googling is a great first step to learning more about the native species in your area. The National Wildlife Federation offers a Wildlife Habitat Certification program, which is supported by volunteers. Certification is a multi-step process that starts with someone coming to evaluate your yard. The goal of certification (aside from a placard you can put in your yard) is to pass a variety of checks regarding how your yard is planted and how you use resources. A $20 donation covers the entire process, but even if you're not going to pursue certification, the evaluation will leave you with a number of suggestions on how to improve how your yard supports local wildlife. In addition to lists of local native plants, the NWF often has discounts with local purveyors to help you purchase plants; it also offers a tool to find local native species for your area. 

While I wish all nurseries had native plants, I’ve found some nurseries specialize in doing so, and you can call around to find them. There are also resource sites like Home Grown National Park that can help locate nurseries that support native plant sales. 

Once you know what your local natives are, you can resource them yourself through plant swaps and sales in local gardening groups, which proliferate on Facebook if you search for your area and the word “gardening.” This is the perfect time of year, since many communities support local plant sales and swaps at the beginning of summer. 

For a long time, I didn’t think about natives because, well, I like tulips. I liked my lemon tree that I toted inside and out every season. I wanted to grow whatever I felt like. In my mind, I’d decided native plants were boring and unlikely to be as visually interesting as what I was growing. Then I started reading what was native in my area and was surprised by how many plants I was already growing because they were so pretty: yarrow, goldenrod, lupine and lilies. When I finally had my yard evaluated for certification, the suggestions helped make areas come together that I’d previously struggled with because I stopped fighting the landscape. Natives quickly took over because they were suited to the area.

May is moving day for young seedlings. I am constantly moving trays of flowers and vegetables from the growing room to my popup greenhouse for more space, or hardening them off outside to get ready to go into the ground. As they move out, they make room to seed-start the next group of flowers and vegetables for the mid summer. If you catch me outside, there’s a good chance there are a few seed packs in my pocket to remind me to put something in the ground, too. Summer is just starting, but there are lots of seeds to be planted right now, either inside to grow into starts, or direct seeding outside.

Lawns

Take advantage of the last of the rains to help germinate lawn seed. If your lawn has patches that need some reseeding or you want to plant a whole summer lawn, work with your local garden center to find the right seed. Germination is really dependent on water, so you want to balance last frost date and warm enough weather for the seed you plant with there being enough rain so you’re not watering constantly. 

It’s not just traditional lawns, either. If you’ve got an eco lawn or clover lawn, you can flesh out the area by adding red and strawberry clover seed for the summer as well as English daisy seed. Ideally, you’re not creating a monoculture of one kind of seed, so other low lying flowers can be added in. 

Annual flowers

In most parts of the U.S., you’ll start to get enough sunshine this month to direct seed outside, which just means you’ll plant the seeds in the soil, rather than try to grow seedlings inside to plant outside later. If you’re going to try to direct-seed annuals like wildflowers, they can start going in the ground as soon as you’ve reasonably passed the risk of frost. Pay attention to the packet for instructions as to depth of seeds—many seeds can not germinate by simply being sprinkled on top of the soil; they need cover of soil. Your sunflower seeds, for instance, need a depth of an inch or so. A good basic rule is that seeds need to be planted as deep as their size. So tiny seeds like celosia and poppy are ok to be sowed on the surface, but marigolds and zinnia must be planted about half an inch deep. If you want to scatter the seeds to get a more natural look rather than poke holes for the seeds, scratch up an area so there’s soil contact for the seeds, then scatter them and cover them by sprinkling soil on top and patting it down. Finish by watering. 

Remember that summer is finite, so if you haven’t planted annual flower starts and you want to direct seed, you’ll want to do so before the end of May—although you may succession-seed another round of flowers later this summer, like zinnias or sunflowers. 

Vegetables

All of your tender summer vegetables benefit from going into your garden as seedlings, rather than seeds. The summer is just so short that that you want to ensure you have enough runway to grow tomatoes and eggplants and peppers before it’s over. Generally, most people either grow or buy starts for the rest of their garden as well, including pumpkins, corn, cucumbers, squash, and beans. But you can direct-seed these, and now is the time to do so. Direct-seeding has some upsides: You don’t need room inside to grow them or soil and pots. The downside is that seeds outside are a little more vulnerable to squirrels and birds, and those young shoots are vulnerable to snails, slugs, and squirrels. All this to say: You should over-plant (and remember to follow the seeding instructions on the seed package for the appropriate depth of different types of seeds). 

Be sure that you take advantage of the last spring rain to germinate additional rounds of carrots. Since they need constant moisture during germination, the rain can carry the load here. This time of year, I leave the radish, lettuce, green onion, beet, and kohlrabi seeds outside in a protected spot so I’ll remember to seed them once a week. You don’t need to put out a packet’s worth each week, just the number that you’ll eat. It helps to mark rows as you go so you don’t plant in a spot you’ve already seeded. 

My favorite tip for having a summers’ worth of lettuce is to direct seed a long, low trough planter of lettuce, but you can just pick a corner of a planting bed. Dump the whole packet of seeds in and be sure to mix it with the top layer of soil so it’s distributed evenly. Water the packet and as it germinates, you'll have a planter packed with lettuce. But if it's too packed, it won’t grow much, so each week, I grab a scoop from the end of the planter, separate those seedlings, and plant them out in the garden beds. The planter acts as a holding space for lettuce most of the summer, and each week I pluck out a few to plant. 

Succession planting

Back inside, it’s time to get your mid-summer starts planted. This can be more lettuce if you prefer to grow it inside, but also chard, brassicas, beans, cucumbers, and mid-summer flowers. Again, you can direct seed these or grow them inside, which is a far more controlled environment.

May is when all the work you’ve put into your yard over the years starts showing. Suddenly, what looked sparse and barren just five weeks ago is filled out with greenery and signs of life. May is a heavy work month in the garden, but if you put in the time and effort now, you’ll have a summer full of blooms and fruit. 

General garden maintenance

Watering systems may have taken a hit during winter storms, so now is the time to ensure that the controller is working, that none of your underwater pipes have burst, and that all your above-ground connections are intact. Go zone by zone and test each of your lines. If you use a hose bib setup, get it up and running, and then check it. It can still be raining in many parts of the country, but very soon you’ll need your irrigation in place. For plants growing in full sun, you want to aim for one to two inches of water a week by watering in the morning.  

Your established beds can benefit from a layer of compost, which will act as a general fertilizer, as well as create volume back in your beds if they’ve experienced erosion during the winter. Follow the compost with a layer of mulch. Spending this time spreading the compost and mulch will give you the opportunity to size up each part of your garden, so take notes as you go for which areas need weeding, are experiencing pests, or have plants that look like they might not have survived the winter. 

Shrubs, trees and vines

A number of shrubs go through blooming cycles in spring, like lilac and forsythia. Once they’ve bloomed, you can prune them back, and in some cases, like lilac, this may trigger a second bloom later in the season. In either case, it will take one fall task off your list and keep the garden looking tidier. 

This is a good time to plant new woody shrubs and trees—the weather is mild, and the ground should be soft from the rains. For your existing trees, make sure you feed them with a fertilizer that is appropriate for them this month. Your garden center can help identify which fertilizer is best for the trees you have. Each of these trees will be creating shoots this month, and you should prune them back as necessary to maintain the shape of the tree and to keep fruit to an amount the tree can reasonably support. Ensure you are only using clean pruners or loppers—carry diluted bleach or Lysol with you in a spray bottle while outside. 

Climbing perennial vines like clematis, roses and honeysuckle should be coming out of their slumber at this point, and you’ll want to ensure you’re supporting them by tying them loosely to their trellises as they climb. 

Annual flowers

Garden centers should be full of annuals at this point of the year, including petunias, lobelia, marigolds and begonias. Annuals are a bit more tender than perennials, so you want to wait until you are past the risk of freezing to plant. Annuals can fill an area with color in the space and time between perennials blooming, and are ideal for window boxes and planters, where it might be hard for annuals to survive the winter. Most hanging baskets have annuals for the same reason—they’re just too exposed for perennials or anything else to survive winter. You can plant your baskets now, but you might need to wait until it’s warm enough for them to come out; you want to focus on overnight temperatures and soil temperature to determine the right date. 

Perennial flowers

Most people will have tulips in bloom or just completed at this point—remember not to cut them down after bloom. Tulips need their leaves in order to come back next year, so let them compost in place. Once the foliage has yellowed, it’s ok to divide or move the bulbs. Once the tulip has bloomed, it’s a great time for a bulb fertilizer, so they’ll be strong next year. You can also plant summer bulbs like dahlias and cannas now, if the risk of frost is gone.

If you didn’t get new perennials planted in April, you can still do so now, or divide the perennials you have. The ground should be very workable now, and you may be noticing which plants are ready to be divided as you move about the garden. If you’d like them to bloom this summer, you’ll want to get this task done in May. As you plant, ensure you’re using slow release fertilizer in the ground where you plant. 

Your roses need a spring fertilizer and might need some shaping at this point or help attaching to the trellis. Look for signs of stress or pests and ensure you’re treating them with appropriate treatments. Your garden center can help. 

Vegetables

Many zones across the country will start putting vegetables in the ground sometime in May, depending on the soil temperature, overnight temperature and the risk of frost. Begin hardening off vegetables like tomatoes, pepper and eggplant as appropriate.

Perennial vegetables like asparagus and artichokes should be active now. Remember to harvest asparagus daily, taking only spears that are larger than your pinky. Once spears become thinner, it’s time to leave the plant alone for next year. Watch your artichoke plants for ants or aphid infestations, which may be sprayed off, but will return without further treatment like neem oil or nearby trap flowers like nasturtiums. Both asparagus beds and artichokes will benefit from a spring fertilizer. 

By mid to late May, almost all regions should be planting their warn weather crops. Tomatoes, eggplant and peppers, but also beans, corn, cucumber and everything else. Your beans and corn can be direct seeded, as can melon, pumpkin and both winter and summer squash, but using starts will give you a leg up for the summer.

If you planted potatoes in the spring, it’s likely time to hill up earth around the sprouts. 

Thin out your strawberry beds of runners. Strawberry plants can either focus their energy on producing these runners or on fruit, but aren’t very good at doing both. Each spring the beds much be thinned to create better and larger fruit. You can give away the runners or plant them elsewhere.

Pest control

Reduce snail and slug populations by putting out traps and going on regular evening hunts. Doing this now, as the rains cease, will greatly reduce problems later this summer. Hang pheromone traps in your fruit trees now, which will control pests this summer and protect your fruit. 

Even as we move into gardening seasoning outside, I am keeping all of my indoor gardens going through the summer months. I've been surprised by how handy it is to have these gardens nearby and how it leads to me using crops like fresh herbs more often. The side effect I didn't expect was how much I enjoy having the actual plants and greenery around in my bedroom and living room: The gardens produce a calming tickling-water sound, like a creek, and I love the smell of the plants. If gardening outside isn't for you, you might find one of these indoor gardening sets that require almost no skill to be just the trick.

These commercial sets include everything you might need, from the seed cups and growing medium, to the lights, and the use a pump to recirculate the water at regular intervals. Small sets like the Aerogarden Harvest or Letpot can sit on a countertop and large ones like Rise need their own space on the floor. Here are the tips I’ve developed to use these gardens more effectively. 

Buy a level

Hydroponic gardens work by keeping the roots of the plant constantly hydrated either in a pool of recirculating water or by routinely “watering” them via a pump. For this to work effectively, the entire system has to be level. Usually, bigger kits like Rise will have leveling feet to help with this, but a system like LettuceGrow doesn’t, so you’ll need shims. You still need to ensure your countertop garden is level. When they’re not, the water will list to one side of the garden, and some roots might not get hydrated. If only one side of your garden is germinating, this might be the cause. 

Grow the right crops

Hydro gardens grow crops in a tight space, with a finite amount of “sunlight” and no soil for roots to steady themselves in. While almost anything will still grow, crops that are going to require a lot of support like squash can’t flourish. Crops with a really long grow period, like pumpkins, also are not ideal for the system, since you’ll need to turn the garden system over before the pumpkin is done and it will grow out of the “sunlight.” Moreover, while smaller and smaller vegetable plants are always being bred (I recently grew actual tomatoes on eight-inch tall plants from Aerogarden), it doesn’t mean they’ll taste good. I’ve been really disappointed by fruit and vegetables grown in hydroponic environments; while they still receive nutrition, sunlight and water, they usually just don’t taste great. So while you can grow almost anything, I’ve found that simply growing herbs or simpler, short crops like peas is the best way to go. 

Learn how to self-pollinate

Since your hydroponic garden won’t be visited by bees to do the work of carrying pollen from plant to plant, you’ll need to do that if you grow any type of fruit or vegetable. I’ve seen many of these gardens advise casually shaking the plants from time to time, but this is disingenuous. To achieve good pollination rates, you need to really vibrate the plants and do it often while there are flowers. The best way I’ve found to do this is with a real vibrator or massage wand and to use a smart automation to have it run for a minute every few hours. I specifically looked for one that plugged in and used a manual switch, rather than a button to be powered on each time. This way, I could leave the want plugged in and on, and just set an automation for the outlet it was plugged into. I just left it set on top of the garden, but you could also tape it to the back. As long as it’s attached in some way to the garden, it will vibrate it enough that the pollen will be freed and form a cloud of yellow dust that will settle onto the blossoms and pollinate them. 

Grow any seed you’d like

Most companies that make hydroponic gardens sell seed packs or starts for those gardens, and they’re quite expensive. But the gardens provide everything a plant needs to grow: sunlight, nutrition, and water. You can always purchase aftermarket pods and growing medium and plant your own seeds. There’s nothing particularly special about the lettuce or herb seeds they’re using, and you likely have seeds or can purchase a packet of them, cheaply. While small “patio” vegetables are bred specifically for these purposes, you can usually purchase similar varieties online (although, again, growing them is mostly for sport as they don’t taste great). 

Be vigilant about pest prevention

Plants will attract pests like aphids and gnats on their own with little work. Hydro gardens seem to worsen the problem, so you have to be proactive. Always ensure there is no standing water around, from a leaking unit or when you add water to the unit. Using traps nearby is a good idea—I like the Zevo flying insect traps that use UV light to attract the insects. You can consider adding nasturtium flowers to your garden—not in abundance, but in one of the growing pods since they work to “trap” aphids. The aphids are attracted to the nasturtium, and just hang out on it, avoiding your other plants; you just leave the nasturtium to do it’s work. 

The secret sauce, for me, has been using smaller gardens for growing herbs, which I use consistently, making sure I am hacking the plants back on a regular basis to keep them from bolting. For larger gardens, I grow greens like lettuce, celery, celery, chard, and spinach. Using small, compact plants like these means that nothing is crowded out, there’s no fruit to be disappointed by or that will take too much time, and you ultimately end up pretty satisfied with the experience. 

People think of mulch as something that provides a unifying look to their garden beds, but that’s not the reason you need it. Mulch, when done right, provides an insulating layer that protects your plants from extreme weather, keeps the soil from drying out, and provides nutrition back to your beds as it decomposes. It’s a lot of work to get mulch into place, so it can be frustrating to view it as temporary. But mulch breaks down—it's supposed to. A lot of people complain about their mulch blowing away, but fortunately this is a solvable problem. 

The right way to mulch

The surface of your soil is vulnerable. It is exposed to the sun and can easily dry out. It’s exposed to the wind, which can blow it away if you don’t have plant roots anchoring it. We are now experiencing extreme weather conditions all the time, including heat domes in summer and extreme ice in the winter, all of which wreak havoc on your plants. A healthy layer of three to six inches of mulch can really make a difference.

You want to ensure that this organic material you choose is pulled away from the stems of your plants. (Mulch shouldn’t be up against tree trunks, either.) You want your plants to be planted into the soil, not the mulch, and each plant has a natural place it should be buried up to in the soil, as it comes from the nursery or grows naturally, and the mulch would smother the plants. Pulling the mulch away creates a well around the base of plants, which is perfect for watering. 

Heftier mulch won’t blow away

Big box stores tend to sell bagged, dyed mulch. This mulch has three issues that make it a poor choice: the dye itself, which fades and adds a chemical to your beds; the lack of nutrition in it; and finally, people don't put enough of it down, and a light layer isn’t going to do much. This dyed mulch can look great at first, but again, that’s not the purpose of mulch, and the dye quickly gets bleached out anyway.Sometimes, people put down plastic before the mulch or landscape fabric, and this, too, is unadvised. The plastic will break down; it does not usually suppress weeds as well as you’d think; and it introduces microplastics to your beds. Getting rid of that plastic by taking it back up is a miserable process, too. 

Instead, you want natural material to sit on top of your soil, and you want a hefty amount of it—ideally, three to six inches deep. I like to use wood chips because they have weight to them, create a uniform look, decompose slowly and are spectacular for the soil as they compost. They’re also free—I use ChipDrop to get them yearly and have been using them for 10 years without much issue. You can also use straw (not hay—there’s an important distinction), or leaves. In the fall, rake or blow your leaves into your beds instead of bagging them. Leaf mulch becomes amazing compost while supporting local beneficial insects as a place to nest over winter. Using a heftier amount of mulch, and heftier mulch, means it is less likely to blow away. Even if some of it does, you still have a substantial amount of it. 

You may only think your mulch is blowing away

Mulch, when done right, decomposes in place, enriching the soil. It may be simply that what looks like disappearing mulch is really this process taking place. It can also be that it’s your dyed mulch losing color. You could also be washing the mulch away, if you water overhead instead of watering your plants at the soil line via drip irrigation.

Even if your mulch migrates, while your plant beds are now more exposed, it’s not really a problem for the places the mulch migrates to. It should just break down there, as well. The bigger issue is that your beds are left exposed to the elements and you lose the benefit. 

How to keep your beds tidier

Curbing or edging your beds can help mulch stay in place and keep your beds looking uniform, whether you use plastic or metal or bricks.  If you have a well-planted garden, the wind should be screened by your landscaping, as you want a healthy mix of understory, shrubs and then a canopy layer of trees. If you experience enough wind to be a problem for your mulch, you might consider that your landscaping has left your plants too exposed and introduce more of these layers. You can also consider ground cover, which is, hands down, the best way to reduce erosion, since it introduces roots to anchor the soil. I am reluctant to mention mulch glue, because I think it’s unnecessary, but there usually isn’t anything problematic in the glue itself. It’s a mix of bark dust and other wood products that are heated into a sticky adhesive you can spray onto your mulch to keep it in place. However, I fear it prevents the mulch from doing the thing we ask of it, which is to break down into compost. 

Mulch isn't permanent

Mulch is a to-do item you should address yearly. Choose the right kind of mulch, and make sure you are applying enough of it in the right places, and replace it when you see it disappearing. Occasionally, take a peek at the soil below your composting mulch. It’s likely to be a healthy layer of humus full of happy worms and mycorrhizae.

Sumatran orangutan becomes first wild animal seen using medicinal plant to treat wound.

A Sumatran orangutan has become the first wild animal seen self-medicating with a plant to heal a wound. The male orangutan, named Rakus, had sustained a wound on his cheek pad, most likely from fighting other males, researchers said in a study published in the journal Scientific Reports. Rakus was seen chewing liana leaves without swallowing them, then using his fingers to apply the resulting juice onto the wound, the researchers said. Finally, he covered the wound up completely with a paste he had made by chewing the leaves and continued feeding on the plant. Five days after he was seen applying the leaf paste onto the wound it was closed, and a month later barely visible. It is the first documented case of active wound treatment by a wild animal with a plant known to have medicinal qualities. The leaves were from a liana known as akar kuning (Fibraurea tinctoria in Latin), which is used in traditional medicine to relieve pain, reduce fever and treat various diseases, such as diabetes and malaria. It also has antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, antifungal and antioxidant properties.

For the first time, scientists observed a primate in the wild treating a wound with a plant that has medicinal properties.

NYU Langone Health surgeons performed the transplant after implanting a mechanical heart pump in the severely ill patient.

© Shelby Lum/Associated Press

A Houston hospital is investigating whether a doctor altered a transplant list to make his patients ineligible for care. A disproportionate number of them have died while waiting for new organs.

© Matt Patterson, via Associated Press

We want to hear from patients as well as doctors, nurses, technicians, medical residents and any others with experience in the system.

© Molly Riley/Associated Press