Top Tips for the Garden in May

There are lots of summer bedding plants for sale this month. Plan your colour schemes and choose from the wide variety available. Remember to protect the plants from late frost, with horticultural fleece or by moving them under cover when frost threatens.

• Take softwood cuttings of perennials such as lupins, delphiniums and phlox  to increase your stocks and replace old plants as they reach the end of their lives.


• Remember to use a hormone rooting powder.


• Walk around the garden and check for signs of winter damage. Prune out obvious dead areas in evergreen shrubs, checking for new growth from the base of the plant. Give plants that have been damaged a top dressing of general fertilizer and mulch around the base to help improve the soil.


• It is not too late to plant onion sets and shallots on a firm seedbed, which has been top dressed with fish, blood and bone, at the beginning of the month. Plant with the tip of each bulb just showing and revisit the rows in a couple of days to replant those that the birds have pulled up.


• Visit our plant centre and purchase your vegetable seeds  for succession sowings of fast maturing crops through the summer.


• Continue to remove the seed heads of daffodils and tulips as they finish flowering and reward the clumps with a top-dressing of bone meal to help build up the bulbs for next year.


• Soak sweet pea seeds in water overnight and then sow in deep pots to encourage good root systems. Once these are 15cm high, they can be pinched out and planted where they are to flower, providing their exquisitely scented flowers for the house through summer.


• Plant tomatoes into grow bags in the greenhouse and provide heat at night until risk of frost is past. Keep well-watered and begin to feed with a liquid feed once the first truss of fruit has started to set.


• Sow seeds of hardy annuals such as candytuft , love-in-a –mist and larkspur in drifts where they are to flower, after rain. Just cover the seed in shallow drills and mark well.

Choose from the wide range of shrubs and perennial plants, which are available in our plant centre, for years of colour in your own garden.