5 Ways to SAVE Your Garden During a Heat Wave!

I don't know where you are in the world right now, but here in California and in many areas around the USA, it's really, really hot. So in today's video, I'm giving you five tips for beating the heat in your garden. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb. Part of that is deleting the negative effects, or at least mitigating the negative effects of extreme heat. I've done a video on too much rain or cold weather. So I figured why not do the opposite and flip it over to heat. So without further ado, cultivate that Like button for Epic heat protection. And let's get into the video. Tip number one is to water your plants deeply and really early in the morning. So, you know, become a morning person and get out there and actually water. It's kind of peaceful out in the morning. This is the evening though, so don't follow my lead here. But you want to come in, give it a nice deep water. And the reason why is because the deeper the water is, the longer it's going to stay in the soil, the more access the roots are going to have to water throughout the heat. And it's going to do it early in the morning so that they're going to be able to suck up all that water into their leaves and really stay healthy over the course of the heat. You may even have to come in and water another time. But watering deep and early is a fantastic way to put your plants in a good spot to prevent heat stress. Tip number two is to create some kind of shade structure. So this is a simple three by three PVC framing that I just zip tied a shade cloth to. Now shade cloth comes in a bunch of different colors as well as strength. When I say strength, what I mean is the ability of it to block the sun. So it'll be sold as like 50% shade cloth. That means it's blocking half of the sunlight. So of course blocking the sunlight as I put it over this tropical milkweed plant here. Now I've cut about half the sunlight off of that plant, which means that there's less transpiration and there's also less evaporation of the soil. So that's a fantastic way to get that done. Now this is a mobile shade cloth. If you're doing it in a raised bed or in some other system, you can grab these hoops and then lay it over the hoops and create like a shade low tunnel or even a shade high tunnel if you want to. But a lot of different ways to do this. The basic principle is the same. Block some of the light from actually hitting the plants. Tip number three is going to be to apply or thicken up your mulch layer. Now this is a bed of corn and beans that doesn't have mulch yet. So I'll apply it here. And what I really like is using a lighter colored mulch, especially when you're dealing with heat because that's going to throw a little more light off the surface as opposed to a darker color of mulch, which really will sort of absorb that heat and transfer it into the soil. So I'm going to lay down about three inches of this straw mulch here. This is from a company called Garden Straw, which I'm actually partnering with to develop a smaller bag that you can ship pretty much anywhere in the US for about 10 bucks. And so if you're interested in that, take a look in the video description. I'll leave a link for you. But you want to lay down at least two inches of mulch. In heat, you can throw a couple more inches on top to really protect that soil. So you're going to keep the light off the soil, keep the heat off the soil. So less evaporation, more moisture in the soil. And you're going to keep the soil temperatures down as well, which is going to help quite a bit. Tip four when it comes to hot weather is to really go to zero on your fertilizing or if at all, go very, very light. So something like compost or worm castings would be fine. Really low NPK value. It's not going to cause this flush of growth. Whereas, you know, a really heavy fertilizing regimen in the heat is going to cause a lot of root and shoot growth, which is going to only deplete the water from the soil faster, cause the whole plant and the whole system to use more water and just really cause a lot more heat stress in these really hot temperatures. So for example, this cucumber, honestly, it's seen better days. It's getting hit with a little bit of issues, but the top growth seems to be completely fine. I'm just keeping it well watered. Cucumber loves, loves, loves a lot of water, but I'm not throwing like a blooming style fertilizer in here, something high in phosphorus and potassium because honestly it's putting out tons and tons of fruit. There's some huge ones I'll show you and it doesn't need it. It's going to cause way more heat stress than I really need to deal with at this point in time. Tip number five and it's kind of a minor thing is I don't do a lot of heavy pruning during a heat wave. I don't want to remove a lot of foliage because it's going to expose more of the soil, more of the plant to blinding heat and light, which can cause some stress on the actual plant itself, but also just opens the soil up to losing even more water. And so even though some of those tissues like cucumber leaf down low, tomato leaf down low might look a little messed up and a little kind of dead, there's still some life generally left on those. They're still doing something for the plant in general. So I like to leave them at least through the heat wave and I kind of push all that pruning off till later in the summer or later in the fall. Those are the tips I have for you guys on beating the heat. I don't know why I decided to wear a long sleeve shirt, but at least we have a little coastal breeze as it's getting to be sundown right now. I have an entirely separate YouTube channel guys called Epic Urban Homestead that I'm doing a lot more about the practical homestead type of stuff, like energy, solar, water, canning, preserving, that type of stuff. So if you're interested in that, hit that up with a subscribe. As always, tips are going to be flowing out on the Epic Gardening channel just like normal now that I'm done with a bunch of huge deadlines that I had this summer 2020. So a lot to tell you. But again, thanks so much for watching. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.