the past week set all-time heat records around the world and temperatures in
California are reached well over 100 degrees in many areas in this episode we
look at the aftermath of the heat wave and how you can protect your plans and
extreme heat conditions some of the inland temperatures reached 117 degrees
and you can see here a comment from our YouTube viewer Big Papi who hasn't
experienced this kind of temperature since 1984 so it's quite alarming let's
look at what was affected in the heatwave beginning with avocados the
avocado plants leaves the new leaves especially were completely burned by the
heat you can see here this time the avocado plant actually sends out new
growth and the 100-plus degrees he was especially brutal you can see the gem
avocado plant that has completely burned leaves right here and the container
avocado plant also hurts some leaves that was damaged
and although the plant will send out new leaves the damage to the avocado trees
were the most visible as you can see here
taro plant is actually a tropical plant and could not tolerate the 100-plus
degree heat and you can see here the taro root leaves are completely burned
due to the heat despite deep watering
banana plant is another tropical plant that was affected the leaves got
severely burned especially the new leaves and it found it really difficult
to withstand these high temperatures the Jasmine plant in the container was also
completely burned out the vegetables like cilantro which do not grow well in
the heat you can see here they've completely yellowed out the radish
seedlings as well although I was able to protect the radish seedlings a little
bit by watering them more and you can see the citrus trees were
also affected almost all the citrus plants were affected this time the
Washington Navel orange tree you can see here the leaves have completely dried
leaving the oranges exposed and this heat was really brutal citrus
trees and other tropical trees subtropical trees they are not used to
this kind of heat and when the Sun blazed down for two days with over 100
degrees temperature the leaves were burned out as you can
see here now let's look at some techniques to protect your garden during
a heatwave the first thing is to water your plants a little bit more than usual
so two to three times a day is good enough and set up a drip irrigation
system if you haven't done already it's just easy to run multiple cycles even if
you're watering your raised beds make sure all your emitters are working
properly that they are emitting the right amount of water and that they've been
running well if you're using soaker hoses make sure that your soaker hoses
are not clogged and they're dripping water as expected
now mulching is a very important step as well and conserving the water that your
plant can uptake when you're mulching your plants do not use the mulch that is
dyed you can see that the mulch here which I'm showing you has a dye on it
and is not recommended for vegetable plants this is the cheaper models that
you will usually find on sale at most gardening centers but it's not supposed
to be used with vegetables
what you need to use is something called garden mulch which is specifically
formulated for fruits and vegetables this kind of aged mulch this is just
tree bark that has been aged and does not contain any chemicals it doesn't
contain any residue or paint and you can see here it's like very beautiful
looking almost fine grain mulch and it also improves the water retention a lot
and all you do is take that mulch the mulch that is formulated for the
vegetables and put them around the base of your plant and this is especially
true for containers containers get dry very quickly because the water that
evaporates from the surface and it can hold only so much of water so make sure
that you are mulching your container plants very well
you can also use compost as a mulch but just layering it on top of your plants
and you can also use some bright leaves that are readily available in your
garden for mulching your plants shade cloth can be used to protect your
plants this is a 40% shade cloth which blocks about 40% of sunlight and I'll
provide a link on Amazon for this product now I don't use shade cloth
because I have a bigger garden and for me it would result in buying a lot of
shade cloth which is not really productive I would be spending a lot of
money so I did not use the shade cloth for my garden so whether you are in
California or not do let us know how the heatwave affected you I know this
heatwave was all around the world so do put in a comment below with how it
affected you and what did you do to protect your garden from the heatwave
we'll see you again soon happy gardening