Ruud Kleinpaste: Gardening in the dry heat

Gardening in a dry, hot time<br />Always tricky; evaporation and transpiration really take it out of the ground and the plant’s system.<br />Water when it gets cooler (late evening or better still: really early morning).<br />Try not water all over the plants – it needs to end up in the root zone, so aim for that.<br />Water on leaves causes burning and that hurts the plants.<br />Droplets can act as a microscopic lens that magnifies the sun rays.<br />Imagine an upside-down plastic bottle buried into the root-zone of a shrub… with its bottom cut off.<br />Now fill the bottle with water and that water slowly leaks out of the neck under the soil surface right into the zone where the roots are.<br />Easy to re-fill and therefore delivering the water exactly where it’s needed<br />(not on the leaves, but on the roots)<br />Instead of just water: put some very diluted liquid fertiliser in; water and minerals at the same time!<br />Sprinklers are quite dodgy: the small droplets will largely disappear (evaporation) before they hit the ground;<br />Also: you can’t really control where these droplets (or the remains there-of) will fall.<br />Mulch is a covering material that literally protects the soil from direct sunlight. It cools that soil and the root zone and will significantly reduce evaporation from the soil<br />Because mulch consists of large particles (and not the fine clay or loam and sand particles) it breaks the hygroscopic movement of water in the soil; it’s all to do with interrupting the capillary action and that stops water moving from cooler, wetter areas down below to the hotter, drier areas of soil near the surface<br />DESIGN<br />With the disruption of climate, some areas will get drier (East Coast) others get wetter (West Coast) or windier.<br />Adapt planting to these conditions.<br />Succulents and Mediterranean plants will deal better with drier conditions; as do Salvia, Hosta, Corokia, thyme – do a google search there’s plenty of great plants!<br />Some of our native wetland species can cope wi