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Apr 11, 2011
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Caring for Your Landscaping During Heat Wave

During the hot Texas summer heat waves, all our hard work from the spring can go right out the window on our lawn and landscapes. Extra care needs to be done in order to keep the plants in our landscapes alive during the summer and especially during a heat wave. Here are some tips to keep your plants healthy and help them survive a heat wave.
Water, of course, is essential to keep your plants alive. If you are used to watering once a week, you will need to increase that to twice, and possible three times a week.
Note that young plants and trees that were planted during the spring will need extra care. Where a full grown older tree can go a weeks without any watering, a young tree still needs help. Water them every 2-3 days.
Potted plants need to be watered every day. They should be fine in the summer sun, but if there is a heat wave it may be necessary to provide shade for your potted plants or move them under a tree, until the heat wave passes. Because the potted plants are young and because the pot causes the soil to dry out they need to be tended to every day.
Mulch on your plants keep the soil from drying out and helping you to cut back on your watering. The thicker the mulch the better. You should have mulch on your potted plants, too. Another trick is to group your potted plants together and pile mulch around the outside of the pots.
During the summer do not fertilize your plants. The plants will slow their growth down during the hot days, to fight the heat and you do not want to put fertilizer on them to encourage them to grow.
Some rules for watering lawns with heavy clay is to water more frequently for shorter periods of time. If you have an automatic sprinkler system, adding time usually just runs water off of the lawn and into the street. On your controller there are 3 or 4 separate start times that you can set up to run at night. For example, run a lawn zone for 5 to 10 minutes or until the water starts to run off. Sometimes it will only take 3 or 4 minutes, but the problem is that you need more time to saturate into the soil. In this case, set up 2 or 3 more start times at short intervals and run them through the night at different times to allow water to soak into the soil.
Plants are different. I usually set our controllers to operate 2 or 3 times per week, watering down to the roots for say 10 to 15 minutes and don’t water again for at least a day or maybe even 2 to 3 days later. Remember, too much water can damage your plants.

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