In this instructional video, Nicole Johnsey Burke emphasizes that May is the optimal month for planting a summer garden and warns that waiting until June will result in missed harvests. She introduces a three‑group system based on a gardener’s last frost date: Group 1 (last frost in Jan‑Feb or unknown), Group 2 (last frost in Mar‑Apr), and Group 3 (last frost in May‑Jun). For each group she lists specific vegetables, fruits, greens, and flowers that should be planted in May, noting whether they should be started from seed or transplanted as seedlings, and offering brief cultivation tips (e.g., watering, placement, heat tolerance). The video also promotes ancillary resources: a frost‑date calculator on Gardenary.com, a free seed collection, a garden‑planning workshop, and links to related how‑to videos. Throughout, she encourages viewers to comment their frost‑date group, celebrates reaching 300,000 subscribers, and maintains an enthusiastic, supportive tone aimed at home gardeners across climate zones.
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If you're dreaming of a beautiful summer garden but you're waiting to plant till June, I've got bad news: you're going to be too late. I've grown in cold climates, hot climates, and mild climates, and every single place, May is my biggest planting month. So in this video, I'm going to give you a list of 5 plants you must plant in May if you want a beautiful, productive summer garden. So don't be like your neighbors and wait until June. Watch this video right now. Now before I give you your list, you got to find out if you're a 1, a 2, or a 3. You're a 1 if your last frost date happened in January or February, or you don't even have a last frost date. You're a 2 if your last frost date happened in March or April, and you're a 3 if your last frost date happened in May or June. Now if you don't know your last frost date, don't worry, we got you covered. At gardenary.com, we have a frost date calculator. I'll put a link to it right below this video. Now before we go on, you got to go to the comments and tell us whether you're a 1, 2, or 3, cuz I want to know who we're gardening with this season. And by the way, thank you guys so much for being part of the Gardenary channel. Every single week you're showing up, watching and growing with us, and it means so much. We just hit 300,000 subscribers on this channel, and I cannot tell you how happy it makes me feel to know that we're all growing in the garden together. So thank you. Now tell me, are you a 1, 2, or 3? Because we gotta start digging in. We're going to start with our number 1s because you are now in hard mode. We've got to get you ready for the summer because if your garden space is anything like mine was when I was gardening in Houston, Texas, the summer Winters were brutal, and May is the month to get your garden primed and ready so that it can survive those really hot temps when you're likely to not get much rain. So these are the things I would be planting if I lived in a climate that's going to get really hot in the next few months. First up is eggplant. This is a major fruit producer even in the hottest of climates. This is a plant you want to get into the ground right now as a plant, not a seed. Get it well watered in, get the roots established. You're going to have tons of eggplant. Starting by July, and these things will fruit for you all the way until you have a frost. Literally the most productive plant. Next up is okra. This also is a super producer when the weather gets really hot. This also should go in by plant, and you want to put it right down the middle of your bed. You could even plant it to the side of your raised beds. This plant is super hardy. It can survive through the hottest of temperatures, and it will give you a ton of okra starting around end of July all the way into September. Next up is cantaloupe. This is a fruit that does so in really hot climates. When I was gardening in Houston, Texas, we would plant these seeds right alongside the edge of the bed and let the fruit just flow out and vine and grow in the pathways between our gardens. You'll get so many delicious fruits if you get the seeds started this month. Water them in well, establish the roots, and you'll have fruit by the end of July. If you want to grow some leafy greens, it gets a little tough in hotter climates, but mizuna is one of those greens that can survive the hotter temps. It does have a really peppery taste, so it is a little bit of an acquired taste, but I love growing it right underneath tall eggplants or okra. It's going to give you a great leafy green you can cut from the garden even in the hot months. Another alternative is growing basil. Basil absolutely loves the hot weather. It can survive when the temps hit 90, 95, even 100°F, and what I love to do in the summer is swap out my normal romaine or buttercrunch salads for basil salads instead. If you've never tried growing cosmos flowers right along the edge of your raised beds, you're missing out. This is this beautiful wispy flower. The bees, the butterflies, the hummingbirds all love it, and it is a great survivor for really hot, humid temps. And a bonus: you might want to head to the grocery store and buy yourself some organic sweet potatoes. When I was running my business in Houston, we had lots of clients that traveled all summer long and really couldn't use their garden, so we would plant up their garden with sweet potato slips at the start of May, let their garden get completely covered over with sweet potato greens, so then when it was time to go back to school in August or September, we'd come back, cut back all the sweet potato greens, pull up all the sweet potatoes. The garden had been protected, the soil had been enriched, and we got tons of production. Then we were ready to plant for the fall garden when the temps cooled down a little bit. Before we get into group number 2, I know some of you are watching this dreaming of having a garden, but you don't actually have one yet, or you have one but you don't really love it, and that's why I'm teaching my garden planning workshop. It's all about how to get to set up the timing and the planting right so that when you finally get your garden set up, you start it right the first time. The class is right below this video, so I'll put a link so you can watch it right after. All right, group number 2, you should be officially out of the threat of frost. Hooray! And if you followed the videos for what to plant in April, you should already have things like tomatoes and peppers, things like that in your garden. So we're going to talk about some things you can start from seed. One is cucumber. This is my favorite plant to just keep planting throughout the summer in a milder climate. I put this right underneath my arch trellises, get tons of cucumbers all summer long, literally from seed to harvest, 55 days. By the way, these are in our free seed collection, so I'll put a link to that right below this video if you don't have cucumber seeds yet. Also in that collection are zucchini. Zucchini will get so big and give you so many harvests, and you plant them from seed directly in the soil. I like to plant these like right on the edge of the bed and just let the zucchini plant just boop, right over the edge. I also like to trellis them up an obelisk trellis like this. We did a whole video about how to grow zucchini, so we'll link that up below if you need to know how to grow zucchini. But this is a great thing to plant if you're in Group 2. Next up is bush beans. This again is something you want to grow and plant again and again, maybe every 2 weeks. You will never have to buy bush beans starting about 5 weeks from planting this seed. I like to plant this right along the edge of the garden, and this also is in the free seed pack. Next up, so much fun, is watermelon. In our climate where we have this kind of little shorter window of frost-free, you got to get your watermelon seeds in the ground and growing right now. So if you wait till June, not gonna happen. You won't get a melon before the light starts to dim and the temperatures start to cool off. So watermelons, you could either start by seed or plant, but put it in the ground right away. And if you want a leafy green to keep you through the summer, this is a pink mizuna, another color of mizuna. This also is in that arugula family, so going to have peppery flavor. I love the color on this, and it's so beautiful planted right underneath like a purple eggplant or pepper plants. And then finally is zinnia. This is a great cut flower. If you've never grown cut flowers, this is the one you want to start with. So easy from seed. This is also in our free seed pack, and you can plant this along the side of your garden, or you can actually plant these in the corners of your garden. You'll have these really tall, beautiful zinnias, great for pest protection, great to feed the bees and the butterflies, and also just really pretty. So Who wouldn't? Now finally, for Group 3, you should be getting very close to not having any more frost. All the plants I'm going to talk about for planting in May, they are assuming that you are frost-free at this point. You could start these indoors if you haven't gone frost-free, but as soon as you hit that last frost date, these are the plants that can go out into the garden. So first up are peppers. Peppers take a very long time to grow from seed, so if you've got a frost date coming in June, You could start these indoors now, but as soon as you hit your last frost date, get these started as plants into your garden space so that you get fruit before the end of the summer. These take a really long time to get started, but once they start fruiting, they just don't quit. August, September, you're going to get tons of fruit from each and every pepper plant that you have in the garden. That will make it well worth the wait. Next up is tomatoes. These need to go in the garden by plant. Again, do not put them out if your last frost date hasn't passed. If it's not coming till June, you can start your tomatoes indoors right now, but tomatoes need to go out into the garden as soon as your last frost date. Plant it underneath a trellis so that it can vine up and grow over the trellis throughout the summer. Tomatoes will fruit for you starting around July, and they're going to give you fruit all the way until your first frost in the fall. Speaking of fruit, there is nothing more fun than growing pumpkins or big gourds that come to be harvested in the fall season, especially in colder climates. The best growth I saw on pumpkins was when I was living in the Chicago area, so if you haven't passed your last frost date yet, you can start these from seed indoors, but you want to have plants ready to put out into the garden as soon as frost has passed. These are going to get huge. They're going to vine and sprawl, so it's a great thing to plant them on the edge of your raised bed or even in the flower beds around your garden space, and you'll have pumpkins that you can harvest right around the end of October. If you haven't started greens yet in your garden, it is not too late to start something like kale. Kale is a biennial green, which means it actually wants to stay in your garden for 2 years, and this is going to work in your favor as you're growing in a place that has a little bit of a shortened growing season. So you can start kale from seed or from plant, but it's a great way to be sure you've got greens to cut and enjoy all the way until things get really, really cold in November or December. Arugula is another green you can grow. It's going to grow a lot faster directly from seed, and right now is a perfect time to get it in the ground. This is the one seed out of all the ones we've listed that you could actually plant before your last frost. So wherever you are, May or June with your last frost, put some arugula seeds in right now, and you'll get your first harvest even before the soil starts to warm up. My favorite flower to grow at the start of the warm season are marigolds. They're great for pest protection, they're so beautiful, and you can start these from seed right inside your garden bed. As soon as you get your first blooms, you'll realize every single petal gives you one more seed for next year. So plant this whole packet of marigold seed, and a year from now, you'll have about 15 or 20 packets worth of seed that you can give to your friends. The last thing you want to be planting in this season are potatoes. Potatoes love to be started right at the beginning of the warm season. For each potato tuber that you plant, you're going to get 5 to 10 more tubers, and May is the perfect time to get these in the ground. If you're wondering how to grow potatoes, I'm an entire video that gives you the step-by-step to do just that, and you can watch that right here.
