If you have two weeks before you will be transplanting, just leave plants in the shade for all but the last couple of days. If you don't acclimate them, they can sunburn, windburn, stop growing and even die. Transplanting into Southcentral gardens usually takes place the last weekend of May. You can usually move it up a week or so, but keep an eye on soil temperatures. If its been 40 degrees most of the time, the soil isn't going to warm up to 50 degrees, obviously.
Be prepared for the job of transplanting. Before you start, make sure you have some good compost or humus on hand to toss in the hole and to top dress the plants once they are in the garden. You will need labels for plants, which you might want to pre-make. And don't forget you will want to dust the roots of annuals and vegetables in an ENDO mycorrhizal fungi mixture. (These fungi put carbon in soil and help feed plants.)
Similarly, legume roots should be dusted with nitrogen-fixing bacteria that will colonize the roots and provide nitrogen. Both items can be purchased locally but don't wait until the last minute.
It is also a good idea not to wait until transplanting to get the soil wet. Water a day or two before so it is all ready and waiting to accept the transplants. I always harp about the good warm water does when it comes to helping your plants. This is especially so when transplanting. It is worth bringing warm, 50-to-70 degree water from inside the house to use outdoors when you transplant. Since the soil is already wet, you won't need much. Just enough for the water to tamp down your plants. You don't need to soak 'em.
Next, I get inundated by questions in August about yellowjackets and wasps. I hate to see readers kill them. The huge colonies develop when we have lots of aphids for them to eat, so they are a good thing. However, some nests, be they the kind in the ground or ones that hang in the air from trees or under eaves, can be located in areas where the human-insect contact zone is just too close for comfort. You don't want a nest just outside the front door, for example.
Each colony is started by a solitary queen. These appear in spring and can sometimes be trapped. If you have had past problems, it is sure worth a try using one of the inexpensive, commercial traps designed to lure in wasps. Or, make your own trap by suspending some lunch meat or fish over a half-filled bucket of soapy water. The queen goes for the protein, cuts off a piece, only to find it is too heavy after she hits the water. Again, since these are really beneficial insects, just trap in areas where you really want to avoid nests forming.
A third method to prevent queens from nesting in an inappropriate area does not involve trapping. Instead there are artificial, cloth nests that if hung will keep the territorial queen from building a real nest nearby.
By the same token, it is never too early to stop slugs from getting your crops. As you clean up around your yard be on the lookout for clumps of a few dozen eighth-inch whitish, little tapioca-like beads. These are slug eggs. In this wonderful world of computers, no one need wonder what they look like. Just use any search engine's image tool.
And, finally, there are delphinium defoliators and cotoneaster leaf rollers. These seem to appear earlier and earlier every year. This year you can be there waiting. Start checking your plants once a day. In not much time you will see the first sign of chewing on either plant. This is when you should spray with any product containing "Bt," aka bacillus thuringiensis, which will then be ingested and end your problems. It only impacts caterpillars and doesn't harm other insects that might be beneficial.
America's longest-running garden columnist, Jeff Lowenfels, returns to the airwaves with "The Garden Party" on AM-700 KBYR at 10 a.m. on Saturday.
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