Vegetable Gardening Ideas for May

May 13, 2025 by Karen 23 Comments

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Right off the bat, the number one idea is planting. You'll never succeed at gardening if you buy plants and then let them shrivel up in their pots.

I've done it, you've done it, we've all done it. You buy or even GROW the plants, set them outside, make a mental note to water them in a day or two and immediately never look at them again until all that's left is the pot and a crispy stem sticking out of it.

So remember. My number one advice is always PLANT YOUR PLANTS.

Plus today I have for you a list of stuff you should do in the garden this month, the tools you need and what pests to watch out for.

This is all the stuff you should have done last month.

It is gardening season!

A season of hope and green, and dirt, and bugs. There’s probably also dog poop out there, but that’s the kind of thing I like to gloss over when describing the joys of May.

Warm up with some jumping jacks, THIS is the month that gardeners really get to start gardening. If you're in Zone 6. You might be earlier or later depending on your zone.

Table of Contents

May

May is when you’ll be planting most of your vegetables and flowers out in the garden. You probably won’t be picking anything yet (unless you plant some quick growing radishes or lettuce which can be ready to harvest in 30 days) but you’ll be laying the foundation for the next 5 or so months.

The more time you put into May the more vegetables you’ll get in July, August & September.

By mid May, your garden beds should be prepped and ready to go.

Bed Prepping

Thoroughly weed
Shape beds if needed
Add 2-3" of compost on top of soil or add a granular slow release fertilizer

May gardening tasks

It’s Planting out time!

Decide what goes where.

If you haven’t already, decide what goes where before you start putting anything in the ground. Plan out and think about how many tomato plants or carrots you really need and then map your garden bed (or pots) out accordingly.

Buy some plants!

If you haven’t started any plants on your own DON’T WORRY. This month everything you could possibly want will be available to buy. I get some of my seedlings from a local seed store that grows their own seedlings, plus I pick up the odd one from nurseries, garden centres and even the grocery store.

Staking, stringing and netting.

In May, smart people build or buy some type of structures for their bigger sprawling plants (tomatoes, beans, melons, cucumbers). Not so smart people ignore this step.

You can recognize the not so smart people by the inconsolable crying they do some time around mid-July.

Look up different methods for staking tomatoes, cucumbers and pole beans. My preferred method is string training them. You can read about how to do it and why it’s great here. Smaller gardens might just need stakes or cages for tomatoes.

Vegetables that need support structures.

Pole beans (as opposed to bush beans) – Use netting strung between two posts, the string method, or a bean tee pee.

Cucumbers – Use heavy netting, a wire fence or the string method to keep cucumbers up off the ground and disease free. If you plant them in a Vegtrug, cucumbers can trail over the side instead of staking them.

Tomatoes – Cages, stakes, the Florida weave and the string method will all keep your tomatoes off the ground and help reduce disease and pest damage.

Melons – Melons take an enormous amount of garden, but if you grow them vertically you can save a lot of space for other things. Make sure your structure of netting in between two posts is very sturdy and strong. Melons get heavy! If you have a real problem with raccoons it might be better to grow melons on the ground. That way when it ripens you can cover the melon with a milk crate or other box with a rock on top to keep raccoons from getting at it. It’s much harder to protect a melon hanging on a trellis from raccoons.

Cucumbers and beans growing up string in hoop house. — Row cover helps keep cucumber beetles off of cucumber plants.

Growing these pickling cucumbers and beans up strings and under row cover protects from pests and disease.

Now that you have everything mapped out, your structures bought or built, you can plant your plants. If you grew them indoors, make sure they’re hardened off. Hardened off means acclimatizing them to their new growing conditions outside where there’s much stronger sun and wind. This is how you harden off plants.

If you’re planting warm weather plants like tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers, remember to wait until your last frost date has passed. And even then, keep an eye on the overnight forecast and if frost is predicted, cover up your plants!

An easy way to cover them for the night is putting an overturned bucket over the seedlings. Fleece row cover is a great option if you have a larger area with more plants. Just make sure you do something to keep the frost off of them or you could wake up to blackened, dead seedlings.

May Pests: A Parade of Jerks

Everything is growing in May — especially things you don’t want to.

Here’s who to watch for, and how to deal with them:

Slugs

Will crawl over glass to get to your lettuce let alone diatomaceous earth.
Skip right to slug bait or beer traps
Keep leaves, straw and other hiding spots cleaned up.

Rabbits

Will snack, settle in, reproduce, and teach their young to snack
Use fencing that’s 12" deep and 2' high to keep them out of your garden

Raccoons

Worse than rabbits
Use loose, wobbly fencing that makes climbing it difficult
Cover ripening melons with a crate + rock
They'll obliterate tomatos and corn - for this you need a portable, battery operated electric fence

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Mice & Voles

Will decimate seedlings overnight
Use collars from cut pop bottles or bottomless pots to put around plants so voles and mice can't get to tender seedlings.

Cucumber Beetles

Eat plants and carry bacterial wilt so if eating all the leaves didn't kill the plant, the bacterial infection the beetles give it will.
Use row cover or plant wilt-resistant varieties

Cabbage Moths

White fluttery things that poop on your kale
Use row cover for 100% protection
Monthly BTK spray helps without harming pollinators

If you’ve got a big garden, build a hinged hoop house. Smaller garden? Row cover and hand-picking works just fine.

Karen Bertelsen in Blue Jays tee shirt sets up hoop house.

Karen Bertelsen drapes insect cover over DIY hoop house.

A hinged hoop house like the one I made a few years ago is really effective it is for keeping pests like thrips, cabbage moths and birds away from your vegetables. It’s a big project for a big garden. If you have a smaller garden you can get the same protection by hand picking bugs and caterpillars or by draping row cover over the plants like I did below.

Floating row cover over young garlic and leeks to keep out leek moth.

TOOLS

Because you’re actually gardening outside this month you’ll be using a lot more tools. This is my list of essential tools for your upcoming gardening season. You’ll find you may need a few more things but these will get you started.

Dutch hoe leans on bucket in vegetable garden.

A TIP about weeding! If you have limited time to weed always pick the weeds with flowers on them first! These are the closest to setting seed and starting the infuriating cycle all over again.

Tools You’ll Actually Use

It’s May. You’ll need tools. A lot of them.

Here are the ones that earn their keep:

Scuffle hoe (loop hoe) – #1 for slicing off weeds at soil level for less soil disturbance)
Secateurs (Felco pruners) – Reliable, strong, long-lasting
Small trowel – For planting seedlings
Large pointed shovel – For real digging
A whack of gardening gloves – Leather palms > blistered palms
String – For laying out rows or marking beds
Row cover, cages, netting – Just trust me
Compost setup – I use a big, ugly pile, not a bin — faster and easier

WHAT CAN BE PLANTED IN MAY

This is the month you can get it all outside. All the warmest weather crops can be planted outside now. Some should be left until a bit later in the month if they’re especially heat loving like sweet potatoes.

There’s also still time for you to direct seed a lot of things in your garden. It’s too late to start tomatoes or peppers from seed in my zone 6 climate but it’s the perfect time for planting tomato and pepper seedlings.

And there’s a TON of stuff that you can direct seed into the garden in May.

DIRECT SEED

Beans
Beets
Carrots
Corn
Cucumbers
Lettuce
Potatoes
Radishes
Squash
Zucchini

Freshly dug and washed mixed bunch of radishes. — Ping pong, Raxe, & Amethyst radish

PLANT OUT

By the end of May you can plant out heat loving seedlings or starts like:

Tomatoes
Peppers
Eggplant
Swiss Chard
and pretty much everything else that isn't weird about temperate

The two exceptions for me are Luffa seedlings and sweet potato slips.

I plant my home grown luffa seedlings on June 1st.

I plant my started sweet potato plants on June 1st as well.

Growing Guides

Need help with something specific? These posts dig deeper:

Gardening is a lifetime of learning.

Gardening is a lifetime of learning. If you want advice that actually works, read gardeners like myself, Savvy Gardening, or Homestead & Chill who are out there making mistakes, growing things and killing things - not just reposting stock photos and Google blurbs.

Next month we’ll get into keeping your plants alive, managing pests before they manage you, and celebrating the fact that yes — you finally got your stuff planted.

But until then?

Plant. The. Plants.

Vegetable Gardening Ideas for May

May

May gardening tasks