Birds and Wildlife
- The purple martins are already finishing up breeding for the year. They will hang around for a month or two more but do not breed in mid-summer. Once they move on, lower the martin house to prevent several more generations of English sparrows and starlings.
- Change your hummingbird feeder sugar water every week when the warm weather amves.
Color
- Get the begonias and impatiens in quickly if you expect them to fare well when the heat arrives. Wait to mid-month to plant periwinkles. Do not water overhead.
- Mandevilla, bougainvillea and Chinese hibiscus are great patio plants.
- Deadhead (pinch/cut off) spent flowers from perennial blooming plants to encourage more blooms.
- Hot weather plants include firebush, lantana, poinciana, Esperanza, firespike, caladium, coleus, begonia, moss rose, hibiscus, bougainvillea, purslane, cannas and blue princess verbena.
- As the weather gets warmer, regular fertilizing of your pot plants with a water soluble product will bring rich color to your environment.
- Roses should be blooming with color. Continue to fertilize them for continued blooming.
- Let your wildflowers go to seed before mowing.
- Flower seeds that may be sown directly in the wann soil include amaranthus, celosia, morning glory, sunflowers and zinnias. Plant hibiscus, bougainvillea or mandevilla vines in containers for tropical landscape color.
- Fertilize container plants and hanging basket plants on a regular basis with a water-soluble fertilizer product and be sure that a slow-release fertilizer such as Osmocote has been mixed into the potting medium at the label-recommended amount.
Fruits and Nuts
- Peaches are ready to harvest when the base color changes from green to yellow.
- This is the month for pecan case bearer. On or about May 15, apply Lorsban or Malathion to reduce case bearer damage to your pecans.
- Pick peaches, apples and plums as soon as they ripen (turn from green to yellow).
- Keep suckers pruned off your fruit trees— they come from the root stock and will take over if unattended.
- Keep fruit trees well watered as long as there is fruit on the tree.
Ornamentals
- Control army worms and web worms with Bt, Spinosad, or Malathion. They must be applied to areas where worms are feeding.
- If you collected bluebonnet seeds, hold them in paper bags until September.
- Firebush for full sun and firespike for full shade are two of the best hummingbird plants. Hibiscus, cigar plant, dwarf Chinese trumpet creeper, lantana, and firebush on the patio will bring hummingbirds in close for observation.
- Caladium corms are to be planted now. Wait until the soil warns and night temperatures are above 70 F. Caladiums prefer a loose, well-drained soil with plenty of organic matter. They thrive in shade with dappled light, and their colors of green-white, green-pink or green-red fit into almost any landscape.
Shade Trees and Shrubs
- This is NOT a good month to prune oak trees. The oak wilt fungal spores and beetle sap camers are active. If you must prune, be sure to paint with a latex-based paint immediately after cutting.
- If you have red-tipped photinias and the leaves are getting black spots, remove the leaves with the black spots and throw them in the trash. Don’t burn them or put them in the compost pile.
- Be careful with the weed-eater around young trees. One trip around the bark at the base could kill it.
- Summer weight oil does a good job of temporarily controlling scale on euonymous and other shrubs. Follow the instructions carefully.
- If your red-tip photinias require constant pruning, consider replacing them with holly, nandina, xylosma, eleagnus, or pyracantha.
- Leaf miners make translucent trails in the leaves of Texas red oak and other plants. They can be controlled early with Bt or Spinosad, but usually are not a major problem.
Turf Grass
- May is the best month for starting a new lawn in the San Antonio area. Our recommended grass varieties respond well to the warm weather and there is time for it to get established before the summer drought.
- Don’t bag those lawn clippings. Let them fall to the soil to compost and return nutrients to the roots of the grass. May is the only month to fertilize buffalo grass.
- If you’re starting a new Bermuda grass lawn, use 2-3 lbs. of seed per 1,000 sq. ft. on well-prepared soil and water twice a day. It will be up in 3-4 days and need mowing in about 3 weeks.
- Your St. Augustine grass will fill in drought-killed areas quickly if you can water regularly. Water when the grass doesn’t spring back in your footprints after you walk across it.
- Place several tuna or cat food cans around the lawn and measure how long it takes the sprinklers to put % inch in the cans. That’s how long you set the timer on the sprinkler system. Usually, a properly maintained system will put out % inch in about 10-15 minutes. Running your system for this period of time is all that is necessary to maintain a nice, green lawn. Train your lawn to be drought resistant by only watering when the grass needs it and then water deeply. The equivalent of % inch of rain per week is all that is necessary to keep St. Augustine grass healthy.
- If you didn’t get the lawn fertilized in April, there’s still time if you do it early.
Vegetables
- Fruit set of many vegetables are sensitive to high temperatures, so plant okra, Southern peas, peanuts, sweet com, watemelons, cantaloupes and cucumbers, squash, eggplant during the first part of May for best results. High temperatures, both day and night, interfere with pollination and fruit set in many vegetables. Snap beans tend to drop their flowers readily under these conditions. Squash has a tendency to produce a large number of male flowers (the ones without the small fruit attached at the base of the bloom) and, consequently, few fruit. Okra, Southern peas and eggplants will continue to set fruit in the summer.
- Tomatoes are ready to pick when they change from green to green-white color. For maximum production, pick them at this stage and let them ripen to a red color on the kitchen counter.
- Keep the tomatoes well watered and mulched to avoid blossom-end rot. Avoid watering the leaves by watering only the soil underneath.
- Side dress vegetables with 1 cup slow release lawn fertilizer (2 cups of organic fertilizer) per 10 feet of row every 6 weeks.
- Harvest, harvest, harvest. If you don’t, production will slow or stop.
- Yellowing grass leaves with darker green veins signals symptoms of iron deficiency that is common in alkaline soils. Apply iron sulfate (Copperas) onto mulches or decomposing organic material (compost) to make a slow-release, chelated product. Use 6 tablespoons per gallon and apply with a pump-up sprayer. Green sand is a long- term solution.
- Onions are ready to harvest when the green tops fall over. Pull them up and let them dry on the garden surface for two days before collecting them.
