What's up everyone? Welcome back to the show. I don't know about you, but where I live here in San Diego zone 10b. It's been pretty darn hot and the garden has suffered as a result and I hope that that hasn't happened to your garden but if it has then this episode is definitely for you.

So hot weather you know typically that's what we want as gardeners in the summer we want those long

days we want that nice heat so that our plants can just thrive especially the

things we're growing like tomatoes peppers squashes all that stuff we really want that heat. We want that light because these are

fruiting plants, right? But the truth is, right now, it's a little crazy. And for many plants,

even plants that are acclimated to this, it's a bit much because it's simply

too intense.

And so here are some strategies you can use.

Now if you haven't listened to Stephen Cornette's episode a few days ago about the

shade cloth I would highly recommend going back and checking that out. You can go to

Epic Gardening.com forward slash podcast and then kind of scroll down. There's a

player with all the different episodes, but let's talk about this.

So during the heat, what's going to happen to your plants is the leaves will typically wilt

because they're going to be releasing a lot of moisture to protect themselves from that excessive heat.

So if the leaves wilt, there's actually less surface for the sun to hit, which means that they're sort of protecting themselves in that way. So one thing I would do is

be sure not to over water in the heat. That can actually be dangerous. So you can think, you can see the

leaves wilting and be like, no I need to over water well actually

What can happen is the soil can actually still be quite moist in heat and you can start to drown out your roots which is going to have a doubly bad effect on the plant.

Now what I like to do is I do a double combo like a one-two punch.

So I like to do mulch and my preferred mulch these days is straw. I find

straw number one it's light colored so it does reflect some of the heat off of the

soil surface but also it's pretty darn cheap You got to make sure you buy straw and

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