By Katie Markheim
Nebraska Extension Master Gardener
May 6 – It’s that time of year. Spring cleaning both inside and out. Using a landscape maintenance company offers a viable option to maintaining your landscape on your own. Care should be taken to ensure a reputable company is selected. If you’re a property or homeowner looking for help when caring for the lawn and landscape, you have the option to hire a professional to do the work for you. Consider the following. What are the benefits of hiring a professional company? What is a reasonable price to pay for lawn care? What do service packages offer? What’s required of you? When selecting a reputable company consider schedule flexibility, communication strategies, response times, expertise, comprehensive maintenance plans, and environmental stewardship. If your choice meets all the above, you’re well on your way to a great-looking place.
May 7 – Seed and Soil Quality – Winter can sometimes be long, especially for a gardener like me. It’s hard for us to stay indoors during cold weather when we want to be outside working in our garden year-round. However, the growing season can begin early by starting seeds indoors.
When starting transplants, use good quality seed and a sterile soil or soil-less mixture. For growing media, use potting soil, or a soil-less mixture that contains vermiculite, perlite, and/or peat moss. Choose growing media that is lightweight and well-drained and has been moistened prior to adding to planting containers. Start the seeds in seed trays or other types of peat containers. You can reuse pots or seed trays from previous years; just make sure they’re cleaned from year to year. You can recycle old food containers or make your own from newspapers or toilet paper tubes. Be sure that all recycled containers are thoroughly cleaned prior to use and have good drainage or drainage holes punctured into them.
May 8 – Temperature and Light – Did you know plants from seed should be grown in temperatures between 70 and 75 degrees? Too cold or too warm can reduce the rate of germination or the plants may grow leggy or improperly.
Seedlings need 12-16 hours of light per day. This light should be kept about 1 inch above the plants, as they grow, this light should be moved up with the seedlings. The light source can be as simple as a utility or shop light with one cool and one warm fluorescent bulb.
Many lights for growing plants have a built-in timer to keep the lights on for up to 12 hours, but you can always purchase an inexpensive outlet timer to keep it on for 12-16 hours and off for the rest of the evening. The light should not be on continuously for 24 hours.
May 9 – When to Start Plants – While cool-season crops can go in the ground in late April, it is best to wait until after our last frost to plant transplants of warm-season crops into the garden. It takes about 6-8 weeks to grow tomatoes and peppers from seed, so count backward from Mother’s Day to determine when to start the plants indoors. Since Mother’s Day this year is on May 12, you could have kicked off the indoor growing season for tomatoes and peppers in early March. Peppers can be planted 7-8 weeks prior to outdoor planting with tomatoes 6 weeks prior to planting as they will grow faster.
Don’t fret, if you missed the indoor planting date or have found it difficult to keep those seedlings alive, plants for purchase from a retailer or local grower may be your solution.
May 10 – Hardening Off – Prior to transplanting outdoors, plants should be hardened off to acclimate them to the outdoor conditions. One to two weeks ahead of planting outdoors begin moving your plants outside gradually into more wind exposure and more sunlight for longer periods of time as the hardening-off period goes on. Plants started indoors have not developed a thicker cuticle to sustain Nebraska winds, so they need to be put into the wind gradually to push them to grow stronger. They also are not used to the intensity of sunlight outdoors. Moving them abruptly from inside your home to outside conditions could cause the plant to snap off in high winds or develop sunscald on the leaves.