Taking care of the landscaping of your property is no easy task. It demands a lot of time and work and often comes with a substantial expense. Once you have your landscaping and your garden exactly the way you want it, then you now have the responsibility of maintaining it and keeping it healthy. One of the challenges is going to be in protecting your plants from the high level of heat that comes with the summer season.
While your garden is definitely going to thrive from the sun and heat, too much of a good thing is just as bad as not having enough. You have to monitor them carefully to see if any potential damage is being done from the heat and the hot winds that are prevalent during the summer months.
One of the best protective resources you can use is mulch. What this will do is help to keep the evaporation down and help to protect the roots of the plants, so they remain cool and are not getting damaged by the heat.
The key here is to choose the right mulch for the type of plants that you are protecting. For your veggie garden, you may want to use a light colored mulch because these are good for reflecting the heat and it is easy to turn them into the soil when you need to do your replanting. In your garden beds, try to go with a fine pine bark. Make sure that it’s not the big pieces of bark, because they’re too thick. One of the advantages of using mulch is that it helps to keep the weeds down, and when the garden is full of weeds, they’re actually robbing the plants of their moisture.
Make sure that you keep your plants as healthy as possible by feeding them the right nutrients they need to thrive. Having a sprinkler system is certainly going to help you meet the challenge that the hot sun is presenting to your plants. You will find that it is more beneficial to use your sprinkler in the morning while it is still cool. This way the plants are receiving a good watering, which helps them to ward off the ill effects of the sun throughout the day. If you do note that through the days the plants are looking a little wilted, then you can give them more water, but water them at the ground level aiming to get the water down to the root ball.
You may also want to consider using shade cloth for seedlings that are considered sensitive. When you do use the cloth make sure that it is not touching the plants and that there is a good opportunity for cool air flow. You could use garden stakes which you drape the shade cloth over so that it’s giving the protection that is needed a but not touching the plants.
Probably your biggest challenge of the garden area that needs protection is going to be your lawn. You will still want to mow it, but don’t cut it as short as what you may be tempted to. Set your lawn mower on the highest level possible and use this setting during the hottest days, which gives the grass a little bit of a better chance of staving off the potential damage that the sun is going to create.
These few steps will help to preserve your outdoor space from the potential damage of the hot sun and humid weather.