What’s Growing on in the Garden: May 2025

I can’t hardly believe that Spring is coming to a close in a few short weeks, and summer will be ushered in. How time flies when you’re busy in the garden! May is perhaps the busiest month of the year on the farm as we continue to harvest the first flowers of the season and plant all the summer blooms. In the early weeks of May, I took care of seedlings both inside and outside while waiting for planting day. I felt like a juggler on most days, just trying to keep all my batons in the air. In today’s post, I thought I would share all the craziness and delight that was May on the farm in this month’s edition of What’s Growing on in the Garden.

Tulips and daffodils still reigned supreme in the beginning weeks of May. I brought bucket upon bucket of beautiful blooms out of the field for our community. These gorgeous flowers filled our Spring CSA bouquets and delighted everyone who brought them home. I also filled wholesale orders with hundreds of stems, spreading the joy of our tulips beyond our community. They were also the highlight of our Mother’s Day Pop-Up, along with our Iceland poppies and other spring goodies.

Mother’s Day is always a busy time for farmers and florists. We spend weeks preparing for the holiday so that we can help our communities celebrate the occasion. As mentioned previously, it also falls at the busiest time of year for us, so it can be exhausting both physically and mentally. But, it is always worth it when I see how much joy the flowers bring to our community. Being a mom myself, I love helping others celebrate all the moms and mother figures in their lives.

Getting through Mother’s Day weekend feels like a victory every year! A few years ago, I started a tradition of saving some special flowers to create an arrangement for myself once the weekend is over. I permit myself to use the “good flowers,” not just the “unsellables” that usually wind up in vases in my home. I take a couple of deep breaths, listen to my favorite music, and create. As I place each stem, I let all the stress go. I get lost in the process and forget about everything else going on around me. When the arrangement is complete, I feel a sense of peace and centering. It is the best gift I can give myself! I find the act of arranging so meditative and healing that I splurged and gifted myself enrollment in a flower arranging class. Over the growing season, I will learn about arranging and elevating my creations. I’m so excited to get started next month! Self-care is essential, and I’m glad I can treat myself to this learning experience. I hope all of you find ways to care for yourselves, too.

Sadly, by the end of the month, the tulips and daffodils had finished blooming and were a distant memory until next season. These are some of my favorite cut flowers that I grow, and I always hate to say goodbye. Luckily, the tulip and daffodil season is followed closely by another one of my favorite cut flowers, peonies! By the end of May, I was harvesting more buckets of blooms, this time with fluffy, multi-petaled peonies. In shades of pink, white, yellow, and candy-striped, these gorgeous blooms always put a smile on my face.

Between harvesting the flowers, I attended to other farm tasks, such as the mundane but essential tasks of cleaning all the buckets, weeding, and installing supports. I was also in planting mode throughout May. New perennials were added, and seedlings were finally gently placed in the soil after weeks of care indoors. Additionally, all of our dahlia tubers that were retrieved from storage were planted, which is always a labor-intensive yet rewarding task. It was such a relief to get everything in the ground after months of care indoors.

Despite so much beauty coming out of the field, it wouldn’t be farming if we didn’t run into some issues with Mother Nature. It has been a very cool and wet spring here in the Northeast, and that is having an impact on our growing season. Many flowers are behind schedule, and others struggle in the cool, wet environments. In late May, we were hit by a nor’easter that brought strong winds and four inches of rain within 24 hours. Frost warnings and low nightly temperatures followed this. The extreme weather led to a delay in transplanting our seedlings and has seemed to have increased pest populations. Fifty-degree temperature swings were not uncommon, and I worried often about the stress these swings were having on our plants. Wildfire smoke and pests such as aphids, spittlebugs, spongy moths (they’re back!), a ravenous groundhog family, and my first sighting of a spotted lantern fly nymph have kept me on high alert. The results of these pests are often devastating and discouraging, and they always keep me on my toes.

But, I try to always look on the bright side, and anytime I’m able to bring beautiful flowers out of the field to share, it’s a bright side. In May, we had the joy of sharing tulips, daffodils, baptisia, iris, peony, poppies, sweet peas, ranunculus, and more. Throughout all the challenges we’ve faced over the last few weeks, these flowers made our days bright indeed.

That’s what’s been growing on in our gardens, what’s been growing on in yours?