10 Time-Saving Garden Cheats to Make Life Easier in This Crazy Heat
Cut garden chore time with these quick tricks that de-stress your plants as well as you.
This summer's heatwave means it’s getting too hot to garden comfortably, yet your plants need extra TLC to survive the intense conditions. The solution? These pro gardening tips that will not only cut chore time but help your plants through this hot spell.
From smarter watering to avoiding heat-stressed plants, protecting rapidly ripening fruit from birds to keeping your borders flowering abundantly, these 10 pro gardening tricks mean your garden will flourish with minimal effort from you. A heatwave isn’t the time to be doing any jobs that stress plants, either, so leave your essential July pruning until this heat dome has passed. Pause July tasks that involve more work for you, too, such as sowing seeds in midsummer for a fresh burst of color, and concentrate on helping your garden survive the heat.
Once you see how much time these gardening cheats save, and how much happier your plants are, I’ll wager you stick with them even once this heatwave has passed. After all, there’s World Cup football to be watching!
1. Deter Birds With Reflective Tape
Protecting soft fruit such as strawberries, raspberries and tomatoes from garden birds typically involves erecting a fine mesh net over your plants. It’s very effective at keeping your fruit safe but boy, it’s a faff when you need to remove the mesh so you can pick it. And in hot weather, fruit ripens so quickly, that you may find yourself having to harvest every day.
Tying strips of reflective tape such as this from Amazon to sticks or canes stuck in the ground is a great alternative to mesh. No, it won’t protect 100% of your fruit, but it does a pretty good job and it’s far cheaper and much less hassle. Freed from the mesh net, your plants will enjoy more airflow, too, meaning less stressed plants and better harvests post-heatwave.
2. Leave Lawn Clippings as a Mulch
Those grass tips you snip off your lawn whenever you mow are packed full of nitrogen, and they can be left in place to rot down and feed your lawn for free. They’ll also act as a mulch to hold in moisture.
There are a couple of provisos: you need to mow when the grass is dry and, unless you have a mulching mode on your mower, you need to mow regularly so the clippings are short. That shouldn’t create any more work as grass growth slows in dry conditions. It’s a smart move to raise your mower height a notch, too, as slightly longer grass blades will encourage deeper roots that are better able to find moisture. Both of these are simple mowing switches that lead to a healthier lawn.
3. Plug Border Gaps With Hanging Basket Plants
The edges of beds, and in particular raised beds, can dry out very quickly in a prolonged heatwave, making it near impossible for smaller, shallow-rooted perennial plants to survive. You may also get border gaps where perennial growth is more compact than usual due to the heat. A smart solution is to use hanging-basket plants to temporarily fill these bare spots.
Bred to survive life in the arid, exposed environment of a hanging basket and bloom profusely for months on end, these will tolerate heat where others keel over. You can use trailing petunia, calibrachoa and impatiens as groundcover or let stems cascade over raised bed edges, and if you use a bulb planter, it’s super-quick to add plug plants to your garden. Head down to your local garden center and see what bedding plants it has to offer.
4. Weed With a Stirrup Hoe
It’s tempting to ditch weeding altogether in this heat, but believe me, those weeds will be taking full advantage of this hot weather wherever you’re watering. Not only does this mean super-speedy growth, those pesky weeds will be sucking up valuable moisture that could be helping the plants you want to grow to flourish.
The solution is to do a weekly three-minute weed with a stirrup hoe, sometimes called a scuffle hoe, like this tool from Amazon which has an adjustable handle that can be shortened for use on raised beds. A stirrup hoe has a metal loop that you pull through the soil to slice through weeds' roots, which means you can simply leave the toppled weeds where they fall. If you do this every week, it’s really effortless as the hoe head is small enough to whizz around the plants you want to keep.
5. Embrace Chop and Drop
Chop and drop is a relatively new practice that’s become hugely popular in Europe. It simply involves cutting out the compost heap middle-man and dropping pruned plant material directly onto the soil, where it will slowly rot down and provide nutrients. While this method is primarily used when cutting down old herbaceous stems at the end of the growing season, it works equally well when you’re deadheading. So when you're snipping off faded flowers, leave them where they fall.
The benefit of this isn't just saved time, but the fallen organic material will help to reduce evaporation and lock moisture into the soil.
6. Water Earlier to Halt Evaporation
Efficient watering is key in your efforts to help plants survive a heatwave. Irrigate your plants when the sun is high in the sky and the soil has heated up and you’ll lose between 20% and 50% of that water to evaporation. Get out the hosepipe early in the morning, when air and soil temperatures are far cooler, however, and much less water will evaporate. That means you can water for less time and your plants will enjoy the same level of hydration.
Keeping the water stream directed at the soil, rather than as a shower that covers the whole plant, also reduces evaporation.
7. Bury Flowerpots in the Ground
Another trick you can employ to reduce the amount of time you spend watering is to make your own ollas by burying flowerpots in the ground. Pronounced ‘oh-yah’, an olla is an ancient irrigation method that buries porous vessels filled with water to slowly deliver moisture into the soil. This not only cuts evaporation to almost zero, but it’s far faster to aim the hosepipe stream into a pot than it is to try not to disturb the soil too much as it slowly absorbs the water.
Plants will naturally grow their roots towards this reliable, more consistent water source, too. Terracotta pots with saucers such as these from Amazon make great ollas and the bigger they are, the longer they’ll last between filling. Seal the drainage hole with an exterior silicone sealant such as this from Amazon, then bury with the pot rim just above the surface and use the saucer as a lid.
8. Dampen Down Your Greenhouse Every Morning
A bucket of water thrown over the greenhouse floor, or a quick spray of the hosepipe, can save you a ton of time dealing with heat-stressed plants. As the water evaporates, it acts as a natural air conditioner, cooling the air by several degrees. This process also adds moisture to the air, which slows how quickly plants lose water through their leaves, keeping plants hydrated and less stressed, so they’re far better able to deal with all manner of threats.
Daily dampening down also deters red spider mites that typically thrive in the hot, dry air of a greenhouse and suck sap, damaging leaves and potentially killing plants.
9. De-Stress Sun-Baked Patio Pots
Heat-stressed plants need a heap of TLC to keep them alive so, rather than fire-fighting and watering them morning, noon and night, take some preventative action to lower their needs. First, move pots into a partially shaded area to give them some respite from the sun. If that’s not possible, plant parasols such as these angle-adjustable umbrellas from Amazon can create much-needed midday shade, or hang up a sail shade.
Adding a moisture retention mix such as Miracle-Gro Water Storing Crystals, also available from Amazon, to the soil will help keep the plant hydrated between waterings, as will topping pots with clay LECA pebbles to hold onto water.
Grouping pots of plants with the same watering needs together will also save you time – both when you're watering and when you're explaining to neighbors what needs watering, when, if you’re off on vacation.
10. Grow Basil Alongside Tomatoes
Recent research has shown that basil releases volatile compounds that prime a tomato plant’s defence mechanism. So, a tomato plant with a basil plant alongside it will react faster and more vigorously to a threat than one without. So much so, that planting basil with tomatoes can increase yield by 20%. In hot weather, plants are more susceptible to both pests and disease, so beefing up their response will save you a ton of time dealing with problems later on down the line.
Greek basil (Ocimum minimum) is the variety used in the tomato stress reponse study and seeds are available from Amazon.
11. Replace Needy Plants With Low-Maintenance Lovelies
Ok, so this isn't so much a cheat as a change of attitude – but as far as gardening tips for a heatwave go, it's perhaps the most important. More and more of us gardeners are turning towards drought-tolerant plants that practically grow themselves as trad water-dependent plants such as hydrangeas start to struggle in our increasingly hot summers. If you're wondering how to help plants survive a heatwave, then perhaps it's time you did too.
I operate a strict no-diva policy in my garden: I only add low-maintenance plants and if one I inherited starts to struggle, I don’t wait for it to die, but dig it up and advertise it for free on my local online marketplace group so a gardener with more time on their hands can bow to its needy ways. And honestly, that's been the biggest time-saver of all.
I hope all these pro gardening tips save you time and stress in the garden, so you can put your feet up in the shade.
