PNW Kitchen Garden End of May: Strawberries, Curry Plant, Mason Bees, and the Herb Bed
- Jackie
- 1 day ago
- 20 min read
A walk through the PNW kitchen garden at the end of May: what is happening, what is finishing, and what is just getting started
End of May is my favorite time of the year in a PNW kitchen garden. The big tomato planting is done, the warm-season crops are in, the slugs have been handled, and the garden does something it only does for a short stretch each year. It runs by itself for a few days. The work shifts from setting things up to walking through and noticing what is actually happening. That is what this post is, a walk through the PNW kitchen garden at the end of May, from my own garden in Phinney Ridge this week. Six things have my attention right now, organized the way a working kitchen garden actually runs.
Veggies and Herbs: The Curry Plant Most People Misunderstand
There are two completely different plants commonly called curry plant, and one of the most useful conversations I have with new gardeners is about which is which.
The one in my garden is Helichrysum italicum (also called Italian strawflower or immortelle), a small Mediterranean sub-shrub with narrow silver-gray leaves that smell strongly of curry when you crush them. It is not the plant the spice mix comes from. It is not the curry leaf tree from Indian cooking, which is a completely different species and not hardy here. The curry plant in front of you in a PNW nursery is almost always Helichrysum, and a lot of confusion comes from the name. The leaves do not taste like the curry powder you would buy. The aroma is closer to sage or wormwood with a curry note, resinous and slightly bitter.
The good news is the plant is genuinely useful, more than I once gave it credit for. Here is what I actually do with it.
In the kitchen, it is used the way you would use a bay leaf or a sprig of rosemary. The young shoots and leaves go into slow-cooked Mediterranean dishes, meat stews, fish, mushroom dishes, soups, rice, and pasta sauces, and the sprig is pulled out before serving. The flavor it leaves behind is herbal, slightly bitter, and warm. In Tuscan country cooking it has a long tradition, especially in the Chianti region, where it is used the same way other people use fennel seed or sage. The taste is strong, so a little goes a long way. Start with one small sprig in a pot of stew and adjust from there.
In the herb world more broadly, the essential oil distilled from the flowering tops has a long history of traditional use for bruises, minor wounds, and inflamed skin, and the dried flowering tops have been used in traditional European herbal teas for cough and respiratory complaints. There is growing research interest in its antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties, particularly for the essential oil. I want to be clear that I do not distill my own essential oil and I am not a doctor, and I am not telling anyone to treat anything with this plant at home. The well-studied uses are with concentrated essential oil applied topically, which is a different thing than what is growing in your bed. Anyone curious about the traditional teas or topical uses should look into it through a qualified herbalist or aromatherapist, especially anyone pregnant, on medication, or with a health condition.
What I personally do is much simpler. I crush a leaf and smell it when I walk past. I cut a small sprig and put it in a slow-cooked stew now and then to see what it does. I dry a few sprigs in summer to keep on the shelf. And I leave the rest of it in the bed as a scent plant and a structural anchor in the herb garden. The silver foliage holds its color through the whole year and gives the herb bed something steady to look at when everything around it is changing fast.
The growing side is straightforward. The curry plant comes from dry, rocky Mediterranean ground, so it wants full sun, soil that drains well, and not much water. Once it is established it almost takes care of itself. In Seattle the one real risk is a wet winter sitting in heavy soil, so plant it on the high side of the bed or in a raised spot, and amend with some grit or coarse sand if your soil is on the clay side. Cut it back lightly in spring once you see where the new growth is coming from. Do not cut into old, woody stems, because it does not always come back from those.
Not every herb has to be a daily-use kitchen herb. Some plants earn their place because they smell wonderful, anchor a bed visually, and quietly do a few useful things on the side. The curry plant is one of those.
Fruit and Wild Fruit: Strawberries in the PNW Kitchen Garden at the End of May
Strawberry plants in my garden are full of green and just-blushing fruit right now, which means the first real handful is about two weeks away. End of May is a good moment to talk about strawberries, because most people in Seattle plant whatever the grocery store nursery section happens to have in stock that week, and that is not the same thing as planting a variety that does well in a PNW kitchen garden.
The Pacific Northwest has its own roster of strawberries, most of them bred at Washington State or Oregon State for our specific climate. A few worth knowing about.
Hood is the classic PNW June-bearer. It produces in early June, the fruit is small to medium, very sweet, deeply red all the way through, and best eaten fresh or used quickly for jam. The honest catch is that Hood is susceptible to viruses and tends to be short-lived, often only two productive years before plants need replacing. People accept that because the flavor is worth it.
Shuksan was developed at WSU specifically for our wet, cold winters. The plants are tough, the berries are larger than Hood, and they freeze better than almost any other variety. If you want one strawberry bed that gives you both fresh eating and a freezer full of berries for winter smoothies, Shuksan is the one to plant.
Tristar is a day-neutral, so instead of one heavy crop in June, it produces smaller flushes of fruit from early summer all the way into fall. The berries are smaller and firmer, the flavor is good rather than incredible, and the real reason to grow them is that you get strawberries on and off for months instead of for two weeks.
A common mistake is planting only one type and then being surprised when the strawberry season is over by the end of June. A small mixed bed with Hood for early sweetness, Shuksan for the freezer, and a few Tristar plants for the long tail is a much better setup than a single variety.
A few practical notes for any of them. Strawberries need full sun and well-drained soil. They are not happy in wet feet, so a raised bed or mounded row works better than flat ground in our climate. Replace the plants every three to four years, because virus and root rot pressure builds up over time and yields drop. And do not take runners from an old, struggling patch to start a new one. Buy clean, certified plants instead.
A strong slug program is essential. Last year I lost more strawberries to slugs than to anything else, and the boards-on-the-soil method I wrote about earlier this month makes a real difference.
Flowers and Trees: My Tenant's Pots Are Pulling in the Pollinators
This one is a small story that has turned into a real benefit.
My tenant keep flower pots on their patio that are not strictly part of the kitchen garden. May flowers, mostly: pansies, geraniums, snapdragons, some smaller spring annuals in cheerful colors. They are not there for me. They are there because my tenants like flowers. But the pollinators do not know that, and the bees and the hoverflies have been working those pots constantly. The traffic spills over into my vegetable beds, which are only a few steps away, and the squash flowers and strawberry blossoms get visited more because the pots are nearby.
I share this because it points to something I think gets missed in a lot of kitchen garden writing. A kitchen garden does not have to be a closed system. The fence-line plants, the neighbor's lavender, the tenant's patio pots, all of that is part of the pollinator ecosystem your vegetables depend on. If you live in an apartment and your only growing space is a few pots, you are not separate from a kitchen garden somewhere. You are quietly feeding it.
So if you live in an apartment and have been hesitating to put a few pots of flowers out because you do not have a vegetable garden of your own, please go ahead. Someone three doors down is growing tomatoes, and you are helping them whether either of you knows it.
Animals, Critters, and Nature: What the Bee Hotel Is Doing Now That the Mason Bees Are Gone
This is the part of the season most people do not understand about insect hotels, so it is worth slowing down on. Most of what gets sold as a bee hotel is really one specific thing, a wooden box with drilled holes and bamboo tubes, designed for cavity-nesting solitary bees like mason bees. That is one piece of the puzzle. A real garden, the kind that supports a wide range of beneficial insects, usually has more than one kind of shelter, and the three structures in my own garden are a good example.
The first is the classic tube-style bee hotel mounted on the wall. Drilled wood blocks, bamboo tubes of different sizes, and a wire-front compartment underneath packed with pine cones. The tubes are the part most people focus on, and they are exactly what mason bees use in March and April. By the end of May the mason bees here have finished their season. They emerge in March and early April once we get a few sustained days of fifty-five degrees, they spend about four to six weeks mating, collecting pollen, and laying eggs in tube nests, and then by late May the adults are gone. What is in the sealed tubes right now is the next generation, a row of cells each holding a developing larva eating the pollen ball its mother left behind. They will pupate over the summer, become adults inside their cocoons in fall, overwinter, and emerge next March to start the cycle again. Your bee hotel in June, July, and August is not empty. It is doing the most important work of the year, quietly. Leaf-cutter bees move into the open tubes later in summer, neatly cutting small round discs out of leaves to seal their own cells, and the pine cones at the bottom of the structure offer shelter for ladybugs, lacewings, and small spiders that hunt aphids in the beds.
The second is a ground-level shelter I built from a broken terracotta pot. Half of an old clay pot tipped on its side, packed with sticks of different sizes, dried plant stems, a couple of round rocks, and a few large pine cones. This is the kind of structure German garden books call an Insektenhotel in the broader sense, and it shelters a completely different set of insects than the wall-mounted hotel does. Ground beetles, woodlice, lacewings, ladybugs in winter, spiders, and solitary ground bees use these kinds of small, dark, dry cavities for shelter and overwintering. The materials in the pot do not need to be tidy or new. The whole point is that it looks like a small messy pile, because that is what the insects evolved to use.
The third is the one that gets the least credit, which is the old tree stump along the side of the house. I did not build this. The tree was cut years ago and the stump was left, and it is now slowly decaying in place. Decaying wood is genuinely valuable habitat in a garden. The soft cracks and rotting heartwood house native solitary bees that nest in dead wood, beetle larvae, native pollinator beetles, fungi, and the small invertebrates that the birds in the May 19 post are out there hunting. A weathered stump is doing more for the garden than a perfectly tidy yard does, and the simplest thing most people can do for native insects is not the construction of a hotel at all. It is the decision to leave dead wood where it falls, somewhere out of the way, instead of carting it off to yard waste.
A few things to do, and a few not to do, across all three.
Leave the sealed tubes on the wall hotel alone for the rest of the year. Do not pull them out, do not clean them, do not move the hotel into the garage to tidy it up. Anything inside is now part of next year's crop pollinators.
Leave the broken-pot shelter alone too. It looks rough by design, and that is the point. Resist the urge to clean it out.
Leave the stump where it is. If yours has not gone fully soft yet, that is fine, give it years. Decaying wood does its best work when it is not disturbed.
Protect the wall-mounted hotel from full afternoon sun and driving rain if you can. Morning sun on a south or southeast face is ideal, and a small roof over the structure keeps the rain out of the tubes. Mine has both.
And in the fall, do the maintenance the bees on the wall-mounted hotel cannot do for themselves. I will write more about that closer to October, but the short version is that tube hotels need a real cleaning at the end of the season to keep pollen mites and houdini flies, which are a growing problem in the PNW, from building up year over year. The ground-level pot shelter and the stump need none of that. They are self-maintaining.
The broader point is that a real insect hotel in a garden is not one piece of equipment you bought at the garden store. It is a few different kinds of shelter, at different heights, in different places, made of different materials. A wooden box on the wall, a messy pile in a corner, and a stump that is allowed to rot in peace. Most of the value is invisible most of the year.
Knowledge Base: Herbal Remedies for the Garden
This is the section my German gardening books treat as essential, and most American kitchen garden writing skips over. Most people think of herbal remedies as something for the human medicine cabinet. There is another whole side to it, the herbs that act as remedies for the garden itself. Pest deterrents, fungal sprays, compost activators, soil improvers, trap crops. The same plants that have a long European tradition as medicinals also have a long European tradition as garden helpers, and a working herb bed earns its space in both ways at once.
None of this replaces good basic practice. Healthy soil, sun, water, and spacing do the heaviest lifting in any garden. But on top of that foundation, the plants below are quietly doing real work. Here is what each one does for the bed it grows in, and what you can actually make from it.
Calendula. Bright orange and yellow daisy-like flowers, blooming from late spring all the way to frost if you deadhead. In the garden, calendula is a workhorse companion plant. The flowers pull in bees, hoverflies, and ladybugs, all of which are useful, and the plant is often used as a trap crop for aphids, drawing them off tomatoes and other prized vegetables. The roots are also said to repel certain soil pests, including some nematodes. I let calendula self-seed wherever it wants, especially along the edges of vegetable beds.
Horsetail. This is the one that surprised me most when I started reading about it. Horsetail (Equisetum arvense) is one of the oldest and best-documented organic fungicides in European gardening. The leaves are extremely high in silica, between fifteen and forty percent, and a tea made from horsetail is used as a foliar spray against powdery mildew, downy mildew, black spot, peach leaf curl, and damping off in seedlings. The silica also strengthens cell walls in the plants you spray it on. A peer-reviewed Italian study found horsetail macerate to be as effective as copper-based sprays against late blight on tomatoes. The basic recipe is to simmer a quarter cup of dried horsetail in a gallon of water for twenty minutes, let it stand overnight, strain through a coffee filter, and use as a foliar spray. Biodynamic gardeners have used this for a century. It is also a deep-rooted plant that brings minerals up to the surface, so the spent material composts well. The catch is that horsetail spreads aggressively if you give it good conditions, so grow it in a contained spot or harvest it from a corner where it has settled in on its own.
Garlic. A staple in the kitchen, and an equally useful pest deterrent in the garden. Garlic interplanted with roses, tomatoes, and brassicas helps deter aphids, spider mites, and some beetles, and the sulphur compounds in the plant carry into the soil around it. A simple garlic spray made by blending a few cloves into a quart of water with a teaspoon of mild soap, straining, and applying as a foliar spray, works as a contact deterrent for aphids and as a mild antifungal. A cautious note. Garlic spray does not discriminate. It will affect beneficial insects too, so use it only where pests are clearly active, and spray in the early morning or evening when bees and pollinators are less likely to be on the plants.
Onions. Same family as garlic, and the same general role in the garden. Onions and chives planted near carrots help deter the carrot rust fly. Around roses, onions and their relatives can reduce aphid pressure. Chive flowers also pull in pollinators, so they earn their place at the edge of a bed twice over. A spent onion bed is a good place to follow with a heavy feeder like a brassica, because the soil tends to be in good shape after a season of alliums.
Wormwood. Silver-leafed, bitter, and one of the strongest natural pest deterrents in the herb bed. The historical use is well documented. A small clump of wormwood near the brassica bed seems to confuse cabbage moths, and a spray made from the leaves is traditionally used against thrips, snails, slugs, spider mites, and mealybugs. The honest caveat is that wormwood is strong enough that it can also suppress the growth of plants right next to it. Plant it as a border or as a sentry in a corner of the bed, not in the middle. Grow a small patch and use the cuttings to make a leaf tea spray when there is a pest problem worth treating.
Nasturtium. Probably the most useful flowering trap crop in a kitchen garden. The leaves and flowers are edible, peppery, and beautiful in a salad, but the real garden value is what nasturtium does for the plants around it. Aphids prefer nasturtium to almost anything else, so a row of nasturtiums planted near the squash, beans, or roses pulls the aphids off the things you actually want to harvest. The infested nasturtium can then be pulled and composted, or sprayed and replanted. Nasturtium also attracts hoverflies and parasitic wasps, both of which eat aphids and other small pests. Yellow flowers are especially attractive to aphids, so if trap-cropping is the goal, plant the yellow varieties.
Basil. A classic kitchen herb and a classic tomato companion. The traditional pairing of basil with tomato is more than just kitchen logic. The scent of basil seems to deter thrips and some flies, and a few basil plants tucked in between the tomato plants is a small piece of integrated pest management. Basil also flowers prolifically late in the season, and the flowers are good for bees. The honest caveat is that the benefit of basil as a companion plant is well-attested by experienced gardeners but not strongly proven by formal research. Treat it as a tradition that pays off in a working garden, not as a guaranteed pest control method.
Yarrow. Yarrow does more work in a garden than almost any other herb on this list. The small flat flower clusters pull in beneficial insects, ladybugs, lacewings, hoverflies, and parasitic wasps, all of which are quiet pest predators. The deep taproot brings up minerals from soil layers most vegetables cannot reach, and the cut leaves are a known compost activator that speeds up decomposition in a slow pile. Biodynamic gardeners use yarrow specifically for this. I cut yarrow leaves and stems back through the season and drop the cuttings either directly on the beds as mulch or into the compost. Worth knowing about. Yarrow is susceptible to powdery mildew, so avoid planting it directly next to cucumbers, squash, or zucchini, which can have the same problem.
Chamomile. German chamomile is a classic anti-fungal in the herb gardener's toolkit, especially against damping off in seedlings. A weak chamomile tea, made by steeping a few dried flowers or a couple of tea bags in a quart of cooled water, sprayed gently on the soil surface of seed trays or used to mist young seedlings, helps suppress the soil fungi that cause young plants to collapse at the soil line. The same tea also seems to help against powdery mildew on older plants. As a companion plant, chamomile is sometimes called the plant doctor in older European writing, because plants growing near it often look healthier. The mechanism is not fully understood, but the tradition is long.
Dandelion. This is the one most American gardeners spend the most time killing. In European gardening traditions, dandelion is treated as one of the most useful plants in a working garden. The deep taproot breaks up compacted soil and brings up calcium, potassium, and iron from below the reach of most vegetable roots, so the leaves are mineral-rich. Chop the leaves and add them to the compost pile, or drop them as a mulch around heavier feeders. The flowers are one of the first sources of nectar in spring, so emerging bees and pollinators feed on them before much else is in bloom. Dandelion also releases a small amount of ethylene gas from its roots, which can encourage fruit ripening in nearby plants. I leave dandelions in the herb bed and along the edges of vegetable beds on purpose.
Tansy. Bright yellow button flowers, fern-like leaves, and a strong, sharp scent. In the garden, tansy is one of the oldest documented pest-deterrent plants in European folk gardening, used against ants, flying insects, and several kinds of beetles. A patch near potatoes, squash, or beans is the traditional placement. The fresh leaves can be tucked into a pet bedding or rubbed on garden tools as a mild insect deterrent. A leaf tea spray is sometimes used against ants and aphids, but tansy is strong and toxic in larger doses, so I do not take it internally and do not recommend handling large quantities without gloves. As a structural, scented presence in the bed and a deterrent for pests, it is excellent. As a casual herb to experiment with internally, it is not.
Stinging Nettle. This one belongs at the top of any honest list of garden remedies, and it is the one I treat as essential. Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) makes the single most useful homemade plant feed I know of, called Brennnesseljauche in German, fermented nettle brew in English. Here is what you do. Cut a generous handful of nettles, wear gloves, chop them roughly into a five-gallon bucket, cover with rainwater if you can or with dechlorinated tap water, set the lid loosely on top (do not seal it, the fermentation builds up gas), and stir every day or two. After about a week to two weeks the bubbling stops and the liquid is a dark tea color. That is the finished brew. The smell is famously strong, which is why I keep the bucket against the side of the shed, well away from any window. Strain the liquid through a fine mesh and use it two ways. Diluted one part brew to ten parts water as a soil drench, it is a high-nitrogen liquid fertilizer that leafy crops, brassicas, and heavy feeders respond to almost overnight. Diluted one part to twenty parts water and sprayed on the leaves, it deters aphids, mites, and thrips, and helps suppress mildew and other early fungal pressure. The spent nettle pulp goes onto the compost pile, where it also works as an activator and speeds the whole pile up. Stop using it on flowering plants once flowers set, because too much nitrogen at that stage gives you leaves instead of fruit. I grow my stinging nettle in a large container so it does not spread, and I cut from it through the season. It is the closest thing a kitchen gardener has to a free liquid fertilizer, and it costs nothing but the bucket.
That is the herb bed thinking about its second job. Twelve plants, each one quietly doing a piece of work in the garden, none of them a replacement for the basics, all of them earning their space. The honest summary is that an herb bed is not just a garden for herbs. It is a small toolkit, and most of the tools are right there in the soil, waiting for the gardener who knows what they are looking at.
Service: An Honest Review of FoxFarm Happy Frog Potting Soil
This is the potting soil I keep coming back to, and it is worth being specific about why, because the bag of generic potting mix from a big box store is one of the most common reasons people's container plantings struggle.
The product is FoxFarm Happy Frog Potting Soil, sold in two cubic foot bags. The bag lists mycorrhizae and humic acids in the mix, and the reason that matters in practice is that those two ingredients support root development from the start, instead of relying on a plant to build a relationship with whatever soil microbes happen to be present in a cheap bag of mostly peat and bark.
What I notice using it.
It drains well but holds enough moisture that I am not watering containers twice a day in July. The structure stays open over a full season, where some cheaper mixes compact down into a brick by August. The plants put on solid growth without needing me to start feeding from day one, which gives me a buffer of two or three weeks where I can focus on other things in the garden.
Where I use it. Containers and pots, especially anything where I am starting young plants or growing herbs and small vegetables. I do not use it to fill raised beds because a two cubic foot bag is expensive at raised-bed volume, so my raised beds get a different mix built on bulk compost and screened topsoil. But for a planter, a pot, a grow bag for tomatoes, or a window box of herbs, Happy Frog is what I reach for.
Where to look for it. Most independent nurseries in the Seattle area carry it, and so do some of the better-stocked hardware stores.
Honest caveats. It is not cheap. What you are paying for is structure and microbial life, and over a full growing season those things show up in the plants. For one summer of containers on a patio, the difference is worth it. For filling a four-by-eight raised bed, look at bulk options instead.
Closing
End of May in a PNW kitchen garden is the quiet productive week between the tomato push and high summer. The strawberries are about to come in, the herb bed is full and working, the bee hotel is doing the most important work of the year invisibly, and the garden largely runs by itself for a few days while you walk through and notice things. That is what a kitchen garden is supposed to feel like in late spring, and if your own garden does not feel that way right now, that is usually a planning problem rather than a motivation problem, and it is fixable.
If herbs are the part of your kitchen garden that has been hardest to get started, the next Year-Round Herb Garden Workshop on Saturday, June 13 is the easiest way to skip past the part where people mean to start and never quite do. It is a small, hands-on session, and you leave with a planted herb garden in your hands, not a worksheet and a page of notes.
And if you would rather talk through your specific garden one to one, Palatino Garden Adventures offers consultations for Seattle-area kitchen gardeners. We do this one step at a time, one plan at a time.
Happy end-of-spring gardening. Let me know if you need help.
Jackie, Palatino Garden Adventures
June bookings are now open for both the Executive Blueprint and one-on-one consultation sessions.
→ The Blueprint is the full design phase - soil assessment, crop selection, succession plan, and layout - everything covered in this post, done for your specific space. Book here.
→ Consultation sessions are a good fit if you want to work through one piece of it yourself with guidance. Either way, the spring planting window sets the deadline, and spots fill before it arrives. Book here.
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