Summertime Vegetable Garden Tips to Protect Your Plants (2024) #25

#gardening #gardeningtips Garden expert Susan Mulvihill shares great tips to help your vegetable garden get through the hot summer months. These include watering, mulching, using shade cloth, why plants bolt to seed, choosing heat-tolerant vegetable varieties, monitoring veggies in containers, and important sun protection for you! From Susan’s in the Garden, SusansintheGarden.com.

Susan gardens in Spokane, Wash. where the hardiness zone ranges from 5b to 6a.

You can order signed copies of Susan’s newest book, The Vegetable Garden Problem Solver Handbook, by sending her an email at Susan@SusansintheGarden.com. Her other book is The Vegetable Garden Pest Handbook, which is all about insects and how to deal with the damaging ones organically.

Here are her affiliate links to the books on Amazon:
1. Vegetable Garden Problem Solver Handbook: https://amzn.to/3uIMA0A.
2. Vegetable Garden Pest Handbook: https://amzn.to/3Jh6aXS.

Susan has much more than this YouTube channel! Follow her on:
Blog: https://susansinthegarden.com/
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Email me: Susan@SusansintheGarden.com

[Music] hi everybody I’m Susan Mill welcome back to our vegetable garden in Sun East bokan Washington our hardiness Zone ranges from 5B to 6A now since summer is here and a lot of us are experiencing some hot temperatur or we will be soon I thought a great topic for today would be protecting our vegetable plants from the heat we use drip irrigation to water our entire vegetable garden and just in case you missed it that was the topic of my video last week so be sure to go to my YouTube channel and watch that as well because it’s very detailed but the thing that I really like about drip irrigation is that it’s putting water right right at the soil surface where plants Roots can get to it there’s far less evaporation than you would get with overhead watering another option would be to use soaker hoses although as I explained in last week’s video we found that they started clogging a lot so we like drip irrigation better but I do realize that not everybody has a drip irrigation system and so I wanted to give you a few pointers so that your garden is watered def ficient L first and foremost remember to water the soil not the plants because again it’s those roots that are taking up the moisture and delivering it to the plant tissue if you were to water your plants in the middle of the day which is definitely not ideal during the summer and if you’re using overhead watering of some sort if those leaves get wet they can burn from The Heat Of The Sun early morning is the best time time to water your garden that way they can absorb that moisture from the soil and be ready to face that summer heat the next best time is in early evening and the reason I say early is if you are needing to water using overhead sprinklers or you’re using a hose and you get the leaves wet know that wet leaves can make it easier for disease pathogens to move about on the plants you don’t want that always remember to monitor your garden on a regular basis see how the plants are growing make sure they don’t look wilted which would tell you that they’re probably not getting enough water or make sure they’re not getting too much water which is just as bad and one last thing know that as the summer gets hotter you will probably have to increase the amount of time that your garden gets watered let’s talk about place placing Mulch on the soil surface of your garden there are so many benefits from this the first is that it helps your soil retain moisture longer that’s great for the plants and it also is a great way to conserve water the second benefit is that it makes it almost impossible for weed seeds to germinate I don’t know about you but I’m not crazy about weeding and so if I have to do less that is fantastic and another important benefit is that when you have mulch over the soil surface that makes it harder for disease pathogens that are in the soil from splashing up onto the leaves of your plants so that is a great way to prevent or greatly reduce the amount of disease issues in your garden what type of mulch do I use grass clippings and that’s because they’re free we do not use herbicides such as Weeden feed on our lawn and that means is perfectly safe to use these in the garden those herbicides kill broadleaf plants and guess what the majority of vegetable plants are yep broadleaf plants so if you do use a herbicide you cannot use grass clippings so other examples of mulch would be straw and shredded leaves it’s very helpful to use shade cloth if your temperatures are excessively hot it’s easy to find at home centers and I recommend purchasing a 30 to 50% density it’s best if you can suspend the shade cloth above the plants you want to protect rather than just draping it on the plants because that will trap the heat you want some air circulation this photo shows how we protected Our tomato plants during the very hot summer of 2022 as you can see we attached it to the squash Arbor and then suspended it above of the beds of tomatoes did you know that heat can make some vegetable crops bolt to seed and what does bolting mean anyway that’s where a plant will prematurely stop growing then Bloom and set seed like this pack Choy plant is doing and some crops automatically stop growing when summer arrives for example this happens with most lettuce varieties the plant’s leaves tend to get leathery and develop a bit taste this means you should Harvest heat sensitive crops like lettuce bok choy pack Choy spinach and radishes so you can enjoy the last of them while they still taste good remember to plant those crops again late in the season so you can enjoy them through the fall months now one thing that I like to do is I watch the forecast closely and when I know that hot weather is coming I start covering my lettuce bed with shade cloth and that gives it a little bit more time in the garden I know a lot of us have been experiencing hotter Summers lately and if you have a tried andrue variety that is struggling in the heat you might want to research some more heat tolerant varieties so that’s what happened with the beans that we used to grow on this Arbor I grew Mica for years it’s a wonderful pole bean but boy it sure didn’t like the Heat that we experienced during the summer of 2021 so that fall I researched heat tolerant pole bean varieties and two names kept coming up Forex and rattlesnake so in 2022 I grew both of them and we really really like Forex so that’s what I’ve been growing ever since it does beautifully in the heat it’s very prolific so this is the variety for us now but this me means that if something isn’t doing well that used to do a little bit of research and see if you can find another variety that will work great for you if you’re growing veggies in containers keep in mind that the soil within them can dry out more quickly than it does in the ground so poke your finger into the soil see how much moisture is in there and you might need to increase the amount of water you’re giving them as many of you know I had skin cancer surgery in January and I’m recovering well from it but sun protection is always on my mind because I don’t want to go through that again and I don’t want something worse so my advice to you is always wear a sun hat always wear sunscreen and then either wear a long sleeve shirt or garden sleeves like these your health is so important and so is mine so we need to be careful okay that’s all of my tips for now I hope you found them helpful stay cool and thanks so much for watching today everybody remember to like And subscribe happy gardening [Music]