What to Plant in May in Zone 7

The Table Narrows as It Warms

The crop count drops from April's peak as the short-season spring crops finish their run, but what replaces them needs real heat to get going. Winter squash, pumpkin, sweet potato slips, ginger, and turmeric all open this month, none of them workable a few weeks earlier.

Sweet potato slips in particular want soil that holds 65 degrees at a 4-inch depth for several consecutive days; set below that and the slips simply sit and rot instead of rooting.

Winter squash and pumpkin both need roughly 90 to 100 days of frost-free growing to size a full fruit, so a start any later than the first half of this month starts eating into the margin left before your late-October frost.

Ginger and Turmeric Are a Long Bet Here

Both rhizomes typically need 8 to 10 months of warm growing weather to size up well, well beyond the roughly 200 frost-free days this zone actually delivers. Treat them as a container crop you can move under cover come October rather than counting on a full harvest straight from open ground; dig what you have before the first hard freeze, even if the rhizomes look small.

Turmeric shares ginger's timeline and the same workaround. Pot it up rather than planting it straight into a bed, and plan on a modest harvest rather than the full-size rhizomes a true tropical season would produce.

Mulch both rhizome crops with 2 to 3 inches of straw as soon as they're in. The roots sit shallow and dry out fast once a bed is getting 12 hours of direct sun a day by late May.

By month's end, dill, thyme, chives, blueberries, elderberries, and several of the beans planted earlier are on their last call. Anything you still want from that list needs to be in the ground in the first two weeks of May.