THIS JUST IN!

Flash!!! It’s hot. How hot is it? We’ll spare you the corny jokes.

The current heat wave has pounded the southland with scorching temps for three days already, and the forecast for the next few offers little relief. What to do in your natural garden:

First, if you have been keeping up on DS & RS (Deep Soak and Refreshing Sprinkles, see below) you can be fairly confident you have good moisture down deep in your soil. Congratulations. Still, plants are going through stressful times. If you’re certain your soil is moist, you only need to do Refreshing Sprinkles. If your soil is dry, you have to play catch up, which is every grower’s nightmare.

1. Deep Soak (DS). Do an emergency Deep Soak in the driest sections of your garden without unduly wetting the leaves for long periods. Don’t use a sprinkler. Try running the hose at low volume on the surface of the soil, and leaving it in one spot 4-6 hours (or longer), moving it a couple times, all through the night. Open the hose bib to the maximum flow rate your soil can absorb without runoff. Do not water this way in the heat of the day, unless in a shady spot. Start at 7 pm and set your alarm to move the hose around midnight. See, aren’t you happy to break out your headlamp from the camping gear? Then use the same hose for a Refreshing Sprinkle at 6 or 7 am, then leave the water off  all day.
2. Refreshing Sprinkles (RS). It’s amazing how much water a thirsty plant can take in through its leaves. However, natives are not built for water falling out of the sky when it’s hot, but early morning and early evening are both safe times to cool everything down by spraying the whole garden for 5 minutes or so. During a heat wave, you can do two RS per day, one around 6 or 7am, before the sun hits the leaves, and one around 6 or 7pm so the leaves will dry before nightfall.

Leaves and branches: Remember “midday depression” is the term for the wilting that a plant growing in moist soil might experience for a few hours while the sun is hitting it directly. Not every wilting plant is telling you the soil is dry. If the branch tips on a plant are wilting at 2pm, and then turgid, (standing back up, full of water) at 7pm, the wilt was caused by midday depression. If the plant is at the wilting stage regardless of the hour, the soil is too dry for the roots to take up water.

Roots: Fortunately, before this week, the nights were getting somewhat cooler and the days are still getting shorter. Hopefully, the overall soil temps are getting a little cooler, so root rot caused by untimely warm season watering should be less of a threat than it would be in a July heatwave. Always water deep with the DS! Always sprinkle early and late with RS! Good luck!!!

Back to normal: After the heat wave, do a proper DS with sprinklers or by hand, applying the equivalent of 1.5” precipitation to the entire garden.