Your May Homestead Checklist For An Off-Grid Home

After a winter of grey days, a battery deserves a really full charge. Late spring finally has the sun for it, day after day.

For lithium batteries that's simple: let them fill and let their own electronics handle the rest. Old-style flooded lead-acid batteries may need one extra step.

A lead-acid battery is made of cells, little boxes linked together like train carriages. Over time some carriages end up a bit fuller than others.

Equalizing is a careful, extra-strong charge that evens them out again. Trojan, a big battery maker, says to do it only when a hydrometer shows the cells need it. A hydrometer is a small tool, a bit like a turkey baster with a float inside, that measures how strong the liquid in each cell is.

Equalizing makes the battery bubble and give off hydrogen, an explosive gas, so air the room well, keep flames away and wear eye protection.

Two rules matter. It's only for flooded batteries, the kind with caps you open to add water. Trojan says never to equalize sealed AGM or gel batteries, and any other battery type should follow its own manual.

Our guide to lead-acid batteries explains the different kinds and how to keep one healthy.

So what do you plant in May? This is the big planting month, when the vegetable garden finally fills up. But warm-weather crops care more about soil temperature than the date.

Oregon State University gives the minimums for seeds to sprout. Beans and squash want soil of about 16 °C. Sweet corn can start at about 10 °C.

Plant them colder, and few or none of the seeds sprout. A soil thermometer pushed in a few centimetres settles the question.

Then come the tender seedlings you started indoors in early spring. Tomatoes and peppers can't take any frost, so they go outside only once the last frost has passed, after the hardening off you began in April. If your last frost comes late, watch the weather forecast until it has passed.

Tomatoes need a little help once they're in. The tall "cordon" varieties grow up a single stem, and the RHS, Britain's big gardening charity, says they need supports, usually a tall sturdy cane. They don't wrap around it by themselves, so tie the stem to the cane as it grows.

Small side shoots pop out where the leaves meet the main stem. The RHS says to remove them, by pinching them out or snapping them off, so all the growth goes up the one stem.

No garden bed? Tomatoes grow fine in containers too: the RHS gives one plant per 30 to 45 cm pot, or two per grow bag, in full sun.

The flowers go outside now too. The RHS says summer hanging baskets can be planted from late April, but the tender summer bedding plants in them need protection from frost until late May or early June. Without a greenhouse, plant them once the frost risk has passed.

Baskets dry out fast, so the RHS says to check them daily once the hot weather comes. Remove the dead blooms often too. That encourages the plant to keep making fresh flowers, and the colour lasts a longer season.

Strawberries begin to fruit as well. The RHS says to tuck straw or mats under the plants as the fruits form, to keep the berries off damp soil. Net them before they ripen, or the birds harvest them first.

Lettuce and radishes all sown on one day are all ready on one day too. Then the garden gives you far more than you can eat, followed by nothing.

The fix is called succession sowing. NC State University suggests sowing radishes every two weeks, a short row at a time, so there's always some coming. Our guide to the off-grid garden helps you plan how much space each crop needs.

May often still brings rain. Summer often doesn't.

So top up all the tanks and barrels now. Well water follows the seasons too: Penn State says groundwater usually sinks to its lowest point in late September or October.

A full tank going into summer is like a full water bottle at the start of a long hike. You'll be glad of it in August, when the garden is thirsty.

The house is easier to keep cool if the heat never gets in, so plan it before the first hot week.

The US Department of Energy suggests awnings on south- and west-facing windows. For trees, it suggests tall leafy ones on the south side and lower ones on the west, where the evening sun comes in low and sideways.

A shade tree planted in April does the same job in later summers, and leafy trees drop their leaves in autumn, so the winter sun still gets through. Our guide to off-grid cooling explains why shade beats almost any machine.

A septic tank works quietly underground, so it's easy to forget. That's exactly how it fails.

The EPA says to have it inspected at least once in three years, or yearly if it has pumps or other moving parts. Most tanks need pumping every three to five years.

Saving water helps it too. The EPA says one leaky or running toilet can send as much as 750 litres a day into the system. Our guide to septic systems explains how it all works.

The lawn grows fast in May, and the clippings are free plant food. University of Missouri Extension says leaving them on the lawn is highly recommended, and it doesn't cause a build-up of dead grass.

If you'd rather compost them, add thin layers of no more than 5 to 7.5 cm at a time. A thick, wet pile of clippings turns into a slimy, smelly mat, so mix them with dry browns like leaves. Our guide to home composting shows how to balance the heap.

Or don't mow a corner of it at all. Plantlife, a British wildflower charity, runs a campaign called No Mow May that asks people to stop mowing their lawn, or even just a small part of it, from May onwards.

Daisies, dandelions and clover get a chance to flower, and Plantlife says even the tiniest wild patch can provide food for bees and butterflies, the same pollinators your squash and strawberries need.