Garden In Heat
(Garden • )
It happens around here. One week the weather was garden-friendly – relatively speaking, for almost-South Texas in early June, with highs not much above 90 and the lows still dipping sometimes into the heady 60s. The next week (like, this week) we’re at or just shy of 100 every day with the heat index climbing above 105, and the lows dropping only to 75.
Most critical for the Deep South gardener, the forecast is for a high of at least 97 degrees for at least the next seven days.
That means it’s time to rely on your water plan. For me, that actually started a couple of months ago, kind of like emergency heat planning. My goal is to help the tomatoes, peppers and eggplants build up their drought resistance. 
Once the plants are strongly established in my raised beds, beginning by mid-April, I try not to water them until they show slight signs of wilting – near-wilting if you will. Then I water each bed deeply, sticking the hose head right into the dirt and allowing it to slowly trickle out. My raised beds tilt slightly from east to west, so I can generally let the bed soak from the east end and water almost all of the plants without having to move the hose. This minimizes any water splashing up on the leaves, which tends to spread disease from the dirt, especially on the tomatoes. As soon as the weather starts to warm from springish to summerish, I put down a layer of mulch over the vegetable beds to help the plants retain some moisture when the going gets hot.
This year I feel like the tomatoes all have acclimated themselves to the current hot, dry conditions about as well as I can expect. This afternoon, with the mercury tilting at 99 degrees in the midst of a 20-mile-per-hour blast-furnace wind, some of the peppers and eggplants looked like an ad for the Dust Bowl. But the tomatoes appeared completely impervious.
By now they tower above me, inside their big bird-netting zoo-cage. Many stems have reached the top of the “cage,” 7 or 8 feet, and I’ve begun training them out, down, anywhere to get them away from the netting. It’s clear their root systems are deep and wide, and if I can just keep tomato diseases at bay, I have hopes that at least a few plants will make it through August and produce a second crop of fruit.
I have not had equal luck with the peppers. The mirasol and guajilla chiles are producing well, along with one of the few hybrids in the garden – a green (Anaheim) chile. But few of the plants are as robust as I would prefer. Or, it may be that they just look puny compared to the King Kong tomatoes this year.
Out amongst the flowers, most of the hibiscus are laying low in all this steamy weather, except one called Cinnamon Girl, which seems to like to carry two to four blooms regardless of whether it’s 45 degrees or 98.
The heat has really caused the plumeria to sit up and take notice, and we’ve never had a better blooming year. I also grow a number of orchid cacti, and several of these have also perked up in the heat, in about equal proportion to my heat exhaustion.
With water running me $95 a month under more normal conditions, I foresee at least one fruit casualty as a result of what is shaping up to be a hot, dry summer, and that would be our bananas. The Raja Puris need steady water and fertilizer in order for their fruit to achieve maximum size and sweetness, but I’m not convinced their needs are cost effective when measured against the potential harvest.
Also, the heat and lack of rain has somewhat stunted the blackberry harvest thus far, although our Cherokee berries ripen very late and most of the crop still is before us.
Meanwhile, the figs seem to feel we’ve been having ideal weather, and they are looming larger and larger behind the rolls of bird netting I applied a couple of weeks ago. Clearly I must find some new recipes, but quick.
→ B.Dunn, Jun 12, 2009, 08 14 pm
