For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."
vegetables that thrive in hot climates (+ a warning about coir)
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I grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, where temperatures always topped triple digits before summer even started. In fact, my mom just told me every day this coming week will be over 100°F! 🔥 That kind of weather makes it tough to have a summer vegetable garden, because many of our favorite crops (tomatoes, cucumbers, squash) stop setting fruit once temps soar above 90°F. Yes, these are warm-weather crops, but they're not hot-weather crops. If it's blazing all day and the nighttime lows never drop below 75°F, they definitely start to suffer. Which means that many people in similar hot climates (like Texas, Arizona, and other parts of the southwest) probably shut down their gardens for a couple months until things start to cool off. And people who live in the high desert (like I do) probably struggle with plants that bolt prematurely or blossoms that keep dropping in the heat. If you've ever wondered what you can grow when it's crazy hot out, the surprising answer is—quite a bit! The key is planting the right plants at the right time, and growing them strategically. ​Here's what can truly take the heat in your garden as summer approaches.​ This is one of my favorite hot-weather crops (above). Do you know what it is? Seasonal tipsIs your coco coir mix stunting your seedlings?I recently did a garden consultation with a gardener in Idaho who was frustrated that half her indoor seedlings seemed to be stunted. As in: tomato seedlings that were still only a couple inches tall 4 weeks after germinating, lettuce sprouts that stopped growing after the first true leaves, etc. She even started a new tray of different seeds with the same results. We ruled out watering issues, light issues, and old seeds, and realized that the common denominator was her seed starting mix. She made her own (following my recipe) but used coco coir instead of peat moss. The problem with coco coir is that it's naturally high in salt, and unless the manufacturer specifically labels their coco coir as triple washed and/or pre-buffered, you don't really know how much salt is in it unless you have an EC meter on hand (a tool that tells you the concentration of dissolved salt in water and soil). Sure enough, the gardener made a new batch of seed starting mix using some peat she had around, and reported that the new seedlings were developing normally. This probably warrants a blog post of its own, but I'll briefly share my experience. Last year I tried a popular brand of coco coir in my seed starting mix and had the same problems with stunted seedlings. Not only that, but the galvanized metal tub I used to make the seed starting mix—and where I let my leftover mix sit for several months—started rusting badly on the inside, which I've never had happen (even with galvanized tubs I've stored outside over 10 years). Since then, I've done quite a bit of research on coir and found that most brands of compressed coir bricks are hit or miss for seed starting (since salt content varies and seedlings can be very sensitive to it). You can correct this issue by buffering the coir yourself, but honestly, that's way more work than I care to put in when I can just use something else. Higher-salt coir doesn't seem to have this negative effect on more mature plants and certain types of seedlings (like fava beans, from my experience), but until I can find a reliable brand of buffered coir, I'm avoiding it for seeds. P.S. You can still have a healthy and thriving vegetable garden in summer. These heat-tolerant crops will grow all season long in high temps.​ P.P.S. Got plant problems you can't seem to solve? Book a garden consultation with me over the phone or in-person (in Central Oregon) and I'll help you through it! |
Garden Betty
For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."