We have increasingly hot, hot and dry summers, the vegetable garden is suffering. Periods of very high temperatures and heat waves have the same consequences as summers that are very rainy and cool: crops are poor, plants are stunted. But by following our tips, it becomes easy to protect your vegetable garden from the heat wave.
The Effects of Heat on the Vegetable Garden
When temperatures are hot, when they exceed 30°C day and night and sometimes even more than 40°C for several days in a row, drip irrigation like the one offered by the bricoprive site is essential. It allows you to keep the soil moist at the foot of the vegetables but sometimes this is not enough. In this case, the leaves of the plants dry quickly, they are sunburned.
However, many vegetables need coolness and shade to grow. When it is very hot and dry, the plants are under pressure that awakens a survival instinct: they start producing their seeds very quickly to be re-sown before they die. So, in dry hot weather:
- Turnips become bitter and hard.
- Radishes are spicy and hollow.
- Lettuce wilts very quickly, its leaves become hard and are no longer edible.
- Beets also harden and bolt, like Swiss chard.
- The sowing and transplanting of spinach, lamb, watercress, carrots, as well as aromatic plants such as chervil, parsley, coriander, mint or even chives do not take place or dry out despite frequent watering.
How To Protect Your Vegetable Garden From The Heat?
It is just as important to protect your garden from the sun and heat wave in summer than bitter cold in winter. A few simple tricks allow you to keep your plants cool when the thermometer goes crazy.
Organize Your Vegetable Garden With The Heat Wave In Mind
In the spring, when you plant and sow all your vegetables, take the time to draw a plan of your vegetable garden to determine the best locations for your vegetables.
So you will plant the plants most sensitive to sun and heat (salads, beets, chard, spinach) in a place where they can be in the shade during the hottest hours of the day: between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m.
How to Make Shade in the Vegetable Garden?
Pour shade on the seedlings you just made or on the young plants you transplanted, you have to be inventive. You can salvage and use fine mesh plastic netting, burlap, old door mats, unused beach umbrellas, cardboard boxes or even vegetable crates that you attach upside down to sticks.
ANOTHER pleasant way to shade the vegetable garden is to plant tall, heat-tolerant plants such as corn, sunflowers, dahlias or cosmos along or between vegetable rows. In addition to providing you with cut flowers, these perennials offer shade and provide natural shade to nearby seedlings, young plants and vegetables below.
Keep the Soil Cool by Watering with Oyas
Oyas are terracotta water reservoirs buried directly at the foot of the plants before or at the start of cultivation. The water they contain gradually diffuses into the earth through their porous walls to the roots of the vegetables growing around them.
The use of oyas allows:
- To water less, thus making significant water savings
- Keep his soil always fresh even in hot summer
- Water your vegetables gently because they only draw the amount of water they need to grow well.
- Do not wet the foliage when watering, limiting the risk of diseases.
Cover the soil with rotting leaves
In addition to watering everything, from the beginning of growing your vegetables, do not hesitate to spread a thick mulch on their feet to protect them from the sun.
You can use:
- Plant materials such as straw, dry grass clippings, pine bark, chopped branches, flax flakes, etc.
- Gravel, stones or pieces of tiles: then choose them in a light color to reflect the sun’s rays.
Composting has many advantages in the vegetable garden. Under thick smear:
- Air continues to circulate, which benefits soil microorganisms and plant roots
- Soil temperature rise is limited: your soil stays moist longer when you water, it never dries out completely.
- The earth always remains flexible and easy to work with, no crusts form.
- Unwanted weeds are suffocated.
Biner To Break Earth’s Crusts
If you do not soften your vegetables in the vegetable garden and do not use oya, the sun’s rays dry the soil on the surface, creating a crust that is both hard and waterproof and airtight. Vos then watering can be ineffective plants suffer.
In this case, it is necessary to regularly use a hoe to break the crust: thus you promote the respiration of the roots again and the irrigation water manages to penetrate deeply.
Even when spreading a mulch, take the time to remove this covering from time to time to run your fingernail through to aerate the soil. Then put the mulch back in place.