Care for Your Garden and Yourself in the Heat
It’s hot. Back dripping, forehead wiping, ear perspiringly HOT. This morning’s weather report said temperatures are ten degrees above normal this week, and unusually humid too. So how can you help your garden handle the heat?
First, take care of yourself. Garden early in the morning and from late afternoon until dark. Stay out of the garden in the middle of the day, except for a midday snooze in the hammock.
When you work outside, wear sunscreen, a hat, long pants and long sleeves.
Summer garden garb: hat, long sleeves, long pants. Sunscreen, too!
Sunglasses are a good idea too, as is a wet bandana under your hat or wrapped around your neck.
Drink lots of liquids to stay hydrated.
Keep Plants Hydrated, Too.
If plants are droopy at the end of the day, don’t worry. Roots work overnight to replace the water lost through leaves during the day. If plants are droopy in the morning, though, give them a good soak.
Drooping leaves in the afternoon are not an issue, but they shouldn’t droop in the afternoon.
When you water your garden matters too. Run overhead sprinklers early in the morning; run drip irrigation overnight. Roots are deep in the soil, so run your irrigation system long enough to saturate the soil deep into the entire garden bed. How do you know how deep the soil is saturated? After you water, dig into the soil. If it isn’t wet six or eight inches deep, keep watering.
Don’t water natives or plants in the Protea family (Protea, conebush, Grevillea, pincushions, Banksia, Hakea and a few others). Soil fungi thrive in warm, wet soils, and those fungi attack the roots of Protea family plants (and our natives too). These plants are adapted to drier soils, so don’t water.
Vegetables, however, do need regular watering. Use soaker hoses or drip irrigation so leaves don’t get wet. That helps prevent powdery mildew and other leaf maladies that can kill vegetable plants.
Check your garden’s mulch. Maintain a layer three to four inches deep at all times. Thick mulch helps hold water in the soil. It also makes it hard to wet the soil if you irrigate using overhead spray. With the mulch as a barrier, the water never reaches the roots in the soil. This is another reason to switch to in-line drip irrigation.
In inland and desert gardens, use shade cloth or spun row cover fabric to protect vegetable plants from the intense sunlight. That much sun can be really damaging to leaves and fruits. With the combination of too much sun and too little moisture, plants can really suffer.
There Are Some Benefits
The garden feels almost like a jungle this time of year!
Heat and humidity are not all doom and gloom for the garden. Garden plants are growing like crazy right now. Many of my garden’s ornamental plants have doubled in size in just a few weeks. Leaves look gorgeous and plants are more filled out than is typical this time of year.
Flowering plants that have finished blooming, then, are ready for a good haircut. Be sure to cut back to a branching point; don’t ever leave stubs.
I’m ready to prune the new fruit trees I planted as bare root plants for our recent episode on fruit trees. This is the time for these young Pluot™and Aprium™trees to get their first summer haircuts. The idea is to keep them small, so all the fruits are within reach. In winter, I will prune them again, but focus on their shape.
— Nan Sterman
