How to Help Your Plants Beat the Heat

As the July heat sets in on us here in the Midwest, we are dealing with keeping the vegetables watered and productive.  This article from Dave's Garden offers some good tips on dealing with the heat.

How to Help Your Plants Beat the Heat

We are dealing with 100's too, and now we are getting dirt up from our well in our kitchen sink. It's been 26 days without rain. Even with soaker hoses neatly circling the squash and melon hills, and soaking them 5 hrs at a time, they look terrible again in 3 days. And that is in my regular garden.

My SFG's have to be watered every 24 hrs, and soaked pretty good. Sat eve I went easy on the everything because of the dirt in the line, but by Sun eve the cukes were all pretty limp. I'm skipping the laundry, and washing hands and brushing teeth with bottled water to leave more for the plants and avoid the dirt. At least we don't care about our grass enough to water it!

My rain barrels are empty, but we are talking about putting out a couple more so we have more backup. I usually only use the rainwater for the blueberries, because my well water's pH is way too high for their liking, We have a barn we could rig with gutters and channel the water off that to collect.

I had to use shade cloth for my peas and brassicas this spring because it got so hot so fast, but they still did poorly. I fear that continued climate change may make it much harder to grow anything, and I'm not that far south.