While a lot of May gardening is dedicated to moving plants into the ground, there is still plenty of seeding to be done. Inside, I’m starting late-planted vegetables like cucumbers, and a second round of annual flowers, like stock and celosia. Outside, I’m beginning to direct seed vegetables like corn and beans, and annuals like sunflowers. It’s important to remember to stay on top of your succession planting during this busy time. And finally, there’s no better time to start, reseed, or overseed your eco lawn.

Lawns

A clover lawn before being cut
Credit: Amanda Blum

Take advantage of the last of the rains to help germinate your eco lawn or clover lawn. You don’t have to convert your whole yard, either, if you’re anxious about it. Carve out a smaller area to seed with clover to try it. Ideally, you’re not creating a monoculture of one kind of seed, so other low lying flowers can be added in like yarrow, English daisy, and multiple types of clover. I add traditional clover for winter coverage, and red and strawberry clover for the summer to get pops of color.

Annual flowers

In most parts of the U.S., you’ll start to get enough sunshine this month to direct seed outside, which just means you’ll plant the seeds in the soil, rather than try to grow seedlings inside to plant outside later. If you’re going to try to direct-seed annuals like wildflowers, they can start going in the ground as soon as you’ve reasonably passed the risk of frost. Pay attention to the packet for instructions as to the depth of seeds—many seeds cannot germinate by simply being sprinkled on top of the soil; they need cover of soil. Your sunflower seeds, for instance, need a depth of an inch or so. A good basic rule is that seeds need to be planted as deep as their size. So tiny seeds like celosia are ok to be sowed on the surface, but marigolds and zinnia must be planted about half an inch deep. If you want to scatter the seeds to get a more natural look rather than poke holes for the seeds, scratch up an area so there’s soil contact for the seeds, then scatter them and cover them by sprinkling soil on top and patting it down. Finish by watering. 

I plant a row of sunflowers on the edge of my garden every year.
Credit: Amanda Blum

Remember that summer is finite, so if you haven’t planted annual flower starts and you want to direct seed, you’ll want to do so before the end of May—although you may succession-seed another round of flowers later this summer, like zinnias or sunflowers. Consider ideas like a flower wall, or a row of sunflowers at the edge of the property or garden to define the area.

Direct sown vegetables

While some people direct sow vegetables like tomatoes and peppers outside, for most of the U.S., the summer is simply too short to do so and get a reasonable yield of fruit. This is why people buy vegetable starts at the nursery. Some vegetables, though, are fast-growing and prefer not to have their roots disturbed, so seeding them in the garden is a fine idea, and now is the time to do so.

There’s almost no reason to start beans inside; they grow quickly and have shallow roots, so they are best seeded outside. Remember that beans are either bush type or vine type, and both need support, but vining beans can grow ten to twelve feet tall: Strong support will be needed, as beans can easily pull a trellis down.

Cucumbers on a frame trellis
Credit: Amanda Blum

Cucumbers are ideal to start outside, particularly cucamelons (Mexican sour gherkins, which have become quite popular the last few years). They germinate within a few weeks and prefer not to have their roots disturbed. You can succession plant your cucumbers, so put another round of seeds in the ground in a few weeks. Cucumbers can crawl on the dirt, but you’ll get better use of space and cleaner cucumbers if you use a trellis designed for them.

when pumpkins are grown on trellises, you make slings for them to add support
Credit: Amanda Blum

Pumpkins and squash are fine to seed in the dirt. Pumpkins benefit from a hilling process. A popular way to do this is to dump a bucket or two of compost into a pile, creating a hill, and then place two or three pumpkin seeds in each hill. If these are giant pumpkins, you’ll thin the seedlings to one, but for regular size pumpkins, you can have two seedlings. I’ve also had tremendous success growing pie pumpkins or mini pumpkins on an arch, so the pumpkins hang down. I’ll be doing that again this summer with black and white pumpkins.

Most squash will germinate quickly, and while you can pick up summer squash and zucchini starts, you have plenty of time to grow from seed in most climates. Give it a try this summer.

Corn should be grown in blocks for better pollination.
Credit: Amanda Blum

Corn should always be direct seeded. It is easy to germinate, and it grows fast. Make sure you’re planting corn in blocks of four by four feet, so there’s enough corn to pollinate itself. Corn grows tassels, which are pollinated by the wind, so unless you have a big enough block of corn stalks, you won’t get corn. Don’t try to grow a short row or a few plants; you need a substantial block of plants.

Melons are similar to squash and cucumbers and can be direct sown outside—but remember that melons and those cucurbits can cross pollinate, so don’t plant them close together or you’ll end up with Franken-squash, a common garden occurrence.

Succession seeding

Be sure to take advantage of the last spring rain to germinate additional rounds of carrots. Since they need constant moisture during germination, the rain can carry the load here. This time of year, I leave the radish, lettuce, green onion, beet, and kohlrabi seeds outside in a protected spot so I’ll remember to seed them once a week. You don’t need to put out a packet’s worth each week, just the number that you’ll eat. It helps to mark rows as you go so you don’t plant in a spot you’ve already seeded. 

lettuce grown in troughs
Credit: Amanda Blum

My favorite tip for having a summers’ worth of lettuce is to direct seed a long, low trough planter of lettuce, but you can just pick a corner of a planting bed. Dump the whole packet of seeds in and be sure to mix it with the top layer of soil so it’s distributed evenly. Water the area and as the seeds germinate, you’ll have a planter packed with lettuce. But if it’s too packed, it won’t grow much, so each week, I grab a scoop from the end of the planter, separate those seedlings, and plant them out in the garden beds. The planter acts as a holding space for lettuce most of the summer, and each week I pluck out a few to plant. 

Seeding inside

There are still seedlings I grow inside this time of year, despite the abundant sunshine because growing inside means less exposure to predators like squirrels, birds, and rabbits, and I can control the atmosphere. If it’s a particularly bad year for slugs, for instance, I may choose to grow cucumbers inside as starts. Sometimes I grow them in both locations so I can sub a start in if a cucumber plant gets eaten.

I also grow a second round of flowers inside, like stock and celosia. These are delicate seeds that benefit from a lot of attention, so I find growing them inside in a controlled environment is easier. Then I can place the grown starts precisely where I want them.

The alphabet soup of TV terminology is overwhelming enough, but you might have seen a particularly confusing term pop up lately: mini-LED. LEDs are already tiny, so what exactly could the “mini” here even mean? It turns out, quite a lot, and that distinction can mean the difference between washed out colors and a more vivid display.

The thing is, almost every TV you see is technically some kind of LED display. Most use bright white LEDs as a backlight, which shines through an LCD matrix and color filter to produce a coherent image. (The exception is OLED, which lights up each pixel individually and thus doesn’t require a backlight.)

Mini-LEDs are an improvement over the backlight part of that process. Traditionally, the backlight on most LCD TVs have been either uniform or only divided into a few sub-zones. Mini-LEDs are much smaller back lights that can be individually controlled, allowing your TV to be bright in spots where it needs to be bright, and dark where it needs to be dark.

How do LED displays work?

Before we get to mini-LEDs, let’s break down how most LCD displays work a little further. When manufacturers advertise a display as an “LED TV,” this is usually referring to the backlight and, well, LED is kind of a given there. However, there are a couple different types of backlights:

• Edge-lit backlighting: In this arrangement, LEDs are placed in an array along the outside edge of the screen, which then shine through light guides that more evenly distribute the light across the display. This can be more cost-effective, but it can sometimes lead to light bleed around the edges, or duller areas in the middle of the screen.

• Full array backlighting: Alternatively, some manufacturers will create a grid of LEDs that fill the area of the display. This leads to more even lighting across the picture. More importantly, those LEDs can usually be controlled individually, allowing for local dimming (more on that below).

These backlights shine white light (or blue, in the case of quantum dot displays) that is then dimmed or blocked by an LCD matrix. This layer uses tiny liquid crystals to block or allow light to pass through, which then passes through either a red, green, or blue filter. By controlling how much light goes through each of these filters (or “subpixels”), the TV can control what color each pixel will be.

There’s just one tiny problem with this: LCDs can’t perfectly block all of the light that the backlight emits. This is why, even when your LCD screen is displaying all black, it still looks “on.” Some light is always making its way through. In order to achieve darker blacks, you need another technique.

How does local dimming work?

“Local dimming” refers to a range of techniques for LED-backed displays that essentially boils down to the same thing: dimming or disabling backlights where you don’t need them. This means less light bleeding through, resulting in darker black levels, and more contrast with the brighter parts of the screen.

The only hitch is, there are quite literally millions more pixels in an LCD display than there are individual backlights. Fewer backlights means less resolution to distinguish between bright and dark zones. It also means you can get what’s called a “bloom effect” when a bright object seems to glow more than it should. This is caused when the backlight bleeds through in the dark pixels around a bright object.

Every backlight creates a dimming “zone” and the more zones you have the better. For most LED-lit TVs, this can range from a couple dozen to a few hundred. However, mini-LED tech allows TVs to crank that number up to the thousands.

What makes mini-LED displays different?

Put simply, in a mini-LED display, the LEDs are, well, mini. That’s it. To be more specific, the term is defined as any display where the backlight LED diodes are no larger than 0.2 mm. They can be smaller than that, but any larger and they can’t (or at least shouldn’t) be called “mini-LED” anymore.

When they’re packed that small, you can fit a lot more LEDs into the same space. This Sony 65-inch Bravia Mini-LED TV, for example, has over 1,500 local dimming zones. That means that each LED backlight only has to light up a little over one square inch. This provides a lot more flexibility to create contrast between the light and dark parts of the image.

Why would you want mini-LED over OLED?

It does seem a little weird, right? OLED displays light up every single pixel individually, so you’re only using the pixels you need. Why this rigmarole with a local dimming array? In part, it’s because OLED displays have a higher susceptibility to burn in. 

The organic LED elements can degrade in ways that leave ghosting of images that are frequently on screen, such as menus, taskbars, or lower-thirds. This isn’t an issue for typical LED-lit displays, where the LCD layer is made of sturdier, inorganic materials.

LED and mini-LED panels can also get a lot brighter than OLED displays. This makes them better suited for TVs that might sit in your living room, near a lot of sunny windows. While OLED TVs exist and they’re great, they can struggle to compete with the light in bright rooms, making them better suited to night-time viewing or dimly lit rooms.

At its Config 2025 event on Wednesday, Figma unveiled four new AI-powered tools — Sites, Make, Buzz, and Draw, positioning itself as a full-stack design platform to rival Adobe, WordPress, and Canva. These tools enable users to build websites, generate code, create marketing content, and design vector graphics without leaving the Figma ecosystem. The Verge reports: Figma’s first solution is Figma Sites, a website builder that integrates with Figma Design and allows creators to turn their projects into live, functional sites. Figma Sites provides presets for layouts, blocks, templates, and interactions that aim to make building websites less complex and time-consuming. Additional components like custom animations can also be added either using existing code or by prompting Site’s AI tool to generate new interaction codes via text descriptions, such as “animate the text to fall into place like a feather.” Figma Sites is rolling out in beta for users with full seat access to Figma products. Figma says that AI code generation will be available “in the coming weeks,” and that a CMS that allows designers to manage site content will be launched “later this year.”

Figma Make is Figma’s take on AI coding tools like Google’s Gemini Code Assist and Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot. The prompt-to-code Figma Make tool is powered by Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 model and can build working prototypes and apps based on descriptions or existing designs, such as creating a functional music player that displays a disc that spins when new tracks are played. Specific elements of working design, like text formatting and font style, can be manually edited or adjusted using additional AI prompts. Make is rolling out in beta for full seat Figma users. Figma says it’s “exploring integrations with third parties and design systems” for Figma Make and may apply the tool to other apps within its design platform.

Figma Buzz is a marketing-focused design app that’s rolling out in beta to all users, and makes it easier for teams to publish brand content, similar to Canva’s product design platform. The tool allows Figma designers to create brand-approved templates, styles, and assets that can be used by marketers to quickly assemble emails, social media posts, advertising, and more. Figma Buzz includes generative AI tools for making and editing images using text prompts, and can source information from spreadsheets to bulk create thousands of image assets at once.

Lastly, the Figma Draw vector design app is like a simplified version of Adobe Illustrator that creatives can use to make custom visuals without leaving the Figma platform. It includes a variety of brushes, texture effects, and vector editing tools to create or adjust scalable images and logos for product design projects. Figma Draw is generally available now for full seat users as a toggle in Figma Design, with some features accessible in Sites, Slides, and Buzz. It’s not quite as expansive as Adobe’s wider Creative Cloud ecosystem, but Figma Draw places the two companies in direct competition for the first time since Adobe killed its own XD product design platform. It also brings some new options to the creative software industry after Adobe failed to acquire Figma for $20 billion due to pressure from competition regulators.

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sciencehabit shares a repot from Science.org: Scientists have captured fungal spores cruising in the inhospitable environment of the stratosphere, much higher than commercial aircraft fly. When brought back to the lab, the researchers found that some of the spores — including pathogens of plants and people — had survived intercontinental trips and could be cultured in the lab. Although spores and microbes have been detected in the stratosphere before, the new results come from a cheap, homespun sampling device dangled from weather balloons, the project could help researchers figure out what traits and conditions allow spores to survive a swing through the stratosphere and how they get up there in the first place. The work could also be a first step towards an atmospheric monitoring system that could nip emerging fungal pathogens in the bud, the study’s authors reported at a conference of the European Geophysical Union.

After five preliminary flights, the team has already learned a lot. Based on DNA sequencing analysis, they identified spores from 235 genera, including fungi that infect blackberries and carrots in the United States and Japan, and one species, Naganishia albida, that can make immunocompromised people sick. In the lab, they were able to revive and culture spores from 15 different fungal species, among them several plant pathogens. Mostly, the results show that their sampler works. Now, the researchers want to set up regular flights to track airborne fungal biodiversity and seasonal variations. They also want to identify how events such as wildfires or volcanic eruptions inject spores into the stratosphere.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Chris Pelkey was killed in a road rage shooting in Chandler, Arizona, in 2021. Three and a half years later, Pelkey appeared in an Arizona court to address his killer. Sort of. “To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me, it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances,” says a video recording of Pelkey. “In another life, we probably could have been friends. I believe in forgiveness, and a God who forgives. I always have, and I still do,” Pelkey continues, wearing a grey baseball cap and sporting the same thick red and brown beard he wore in life.

Pelkey was 37 years old, devoutly religious and an army combat veteran. Horcasitas shot Pelkey at a red light in 2021 after Pelkey exited his vehicle and walked back towards Horcasitas’s car. Pelkey’s appearance from beyond the grave was made possible by artificial intelligence in what could be the first use of AI to deliver a victim impact statement. Stacey Wales, Pelkey’s sister, told local outlet ABC-15 that she had a recurring thought when gathering more than 40 impact statements from Chris’s family and friends. “All I kept coming back to was, what would Chris say?” Wales said. […]

Wales and her husband fed an AI model videos and audio of Pelkey to try to come up with a rendering that would match the sentiments and thoughts of a still-alive Pelkey, something that Wales compared with a “Frankenstein of love” to local outlet Fox 10. Judge Todd Lang responded positively to the AI usage. Lang ultimately sentenced Horcasitas to 10 and a half years in prison on manslaughter charges. “I loved that AI, thank you for that. As angry as you are, as justifiably angry as the family is, I heard the forgiveness,” Lang said. “I feel that that was genuine.” Also in favor was Pelkey’s brother John, who said that he felt “waves of healing” from seeing his brother’s face, and believes that Chris would have forgiven his killer. “That was the man I knew,” John said.

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