How to keep your garden from drying out in the summer
Get smart gardening tips for a thriving summer garden! Learn how you can keep your garden lush during the summer with a few simple tips. Perfect for garden enthusiasts looking for eco-friendly ways to maintain a green garden in the summer.
Are you facing dry conditions in your garden? No worries, I've got some tips to help your garden stay cool and hydrated for longer, especially during the summer.
If summer is anything like last year, you can expect serious droughts during the year's warmest months. So how do you keep your garden hydrated so your plants don't die off in these droughts?
Sure, you can water your garden more often, but that's not ideal. It takes a lot of time and you're using a lot of water. Especially during these dry periods, you should be conscious of how much water you use.
Luckily, there are a few ways to keep your plants hydrated that don't take a lot of time and are eco-friendly.
Let's find out how you can keep your garden from drying out in the summer!
Native plants
If you're still actively creating your garden and are looking for plants that will do well, even when it's dry in the summer, go for native plants. With native plants, I mean plants that already grow naturally where you live.
Native plants are perfectly adapted to your climate and will be fine in any season, including the dry summer months. Most of them will also come back year after year. Buying them once will give you plants for many years to come.
Water strategically
In the summer, when the days are long and hot, you'll need to be a little more strategic when it comes to watering your plants. If you water your garden in the hot afternoon sun, the moisture will evaporate quickly after hitting the soil. The much-needed water might not even reach your plants' roots. So all this time you spent on water your garden would have been for nothing.
Instead, water your plants in the morning or evening, when the sun is at its weakest and the water won't evaporate as quickly. I prefer to do this during the mornings because the ground is still nice and cool from the night, but that takes a bit of planning, and doing it during the evening is more convenient.
About sprinklers
If you're using sprinklers to water your garden during the summer, it's important to do this during the morning or evening too. Sprinklers are convenient, but they're not very effective. The small water particles evaporate very quickly, so they don't really water your garden unless you keep them running for a while. Keeping them running for a while uses a lot of water.
My preferred watering method is a simple watering can, but I also know that my garden isn't the largest, so I can see why this is not an option for everyone. If you do have a larger garden and are looking for a more effective watering method, I recommend looking at trickle tubes.
Drip irrigation
Drip irrigation is amazing! Drip irrigation is a network of tubes laid out throughout your garden with a tiny hole in the bottom of the tube. When you turn on the water, it slowly drips water drops directly onto the soil.
The tubes prevent the water, traveling around your garden, from evaporating before reaching its final destination. And because the water drips almost directly onto the soil, in regular intervals, it's much more likely to reach your plants' roots and water your garden evenly.
So if a simple watering can is not an option for you, I can highly recommend using drip irrigation for your garden.
Rainwater
If you're interested in saving even more water when taking care of your garden, you might want to look into methods of collecting rainwater. You can collect the rainwater from your gutters and use this when it's time to water the garden. If you get a rain barrel with a tap at the bottom, you can even hook your trickle tubes onto it for hands-off, semi-automatic garden watering. Just open the tap when it's time to water and let the tubes do all the work for you.
I use a rain barrel to water my garden and it's such a good feeling to not always have to rely on the water net to keep your garden healthy. Instead, I can use the free rain to keep the garden happy when it's not getting any natural rain.
Mulch
Earlier, I mentioned that moisture evaporates from the soil in your garden quite quickly during the hottest part of the day. But what if there was a protective layer on top of the soil to keep the moisture in the soil? That protective layer is mulch.
When you place a layer of mulch (cut grass, wood chips, coconut fibers, etc.) on top of the soil, you help to protect the soil from the sun, as the mulch absorbs the sun's heat during the day and keeps the soil cool. Because the sun can't reach the soil underneath the mulch, it won't evaporate the moisture in the soil as quickly.
Mulch is by far the most useful trick I've learned in the past year to help protect the moisture levels in my garden during the summer. I used to have to water my garden daily, but now it keeps itself hydrated for a few days. This helps me to save a lot of time and a lot of water.
Skip mowing the lawn
Okay, this section might not be for everyone. If you love a well-manicured lawn and your garden has to look perfect all the time, you can skip this section.
So, you're willing to have a lawn that doesn't look perfect to help keep your garden hydrated? Perfect!
When mowing your lawn in the summer, you might have noticed that grass turns yellow and you get dead patches. This is because you're cutting the top of the grass off and the hot sun evaporates the moisture from the plant (the grass), but also the soil under the grass. Short grass can't protect the soil as well, as the "protective" grass layer is thinner.
By letting the grass grow a little longer, you help trap the moisture in the soil for a little longer. I bet you've never seen a tall lawn that's yellow, that's because it has trapped enough moisture in the soil to stay hydrated.
A wildflower meadow or other ground covering
You might have heard that grass needs a lot of water to stay green. Even if you skip mowing your lawn, grass will still need quite a bit of water compared to native plants to stay healthy. But do you know why that is?
Most lawn and turf grasses have shallow root systems: they only grow roots 10-15 cm (4-6 inches) into the soil. This means that you're constantly fighting against the evaporation rates. The moisture evaporates from the top layer of the soil first, which is also where the grass is looking for moisture. This means you'll need to keep refilling these moisture levels. But there are alternatives!
Wildflowers
This is where wildflowers can play a huge role. A lot of perennial wildflowers have very deep root systems, with tap roots that can grow several feet into the soil to help them survive in droughts.
These wildflowers help to improve the soil structure by creating channels that allow water to get pulled into the soil deeper. This improves the overall water infiltration of the soil, which could help to keep shallow-rooted plants like grass hydrated.
Wildflowers have other benefits, like attracting insects and providing a little shade. Attracting insects sounds like a bad thing, but this helps to increase the biodiversity of your garden. A garden with a higher biodiversity will do better in any season and is much more likely to look fantastic in the summer.
Clover grass
If you don't want wildflowers, but you do want a low-maintenance, tough, and green lawn, perhaps clover grass is the ideal choice for you. Clover grass is grass that includes clover plants. The clovers have deeper root systems, so they keep the grass hydrated for longer, they don't need to be mowed as often, and they're fine with being walked on often, unlike normal lawn grass.
The best part of clover grass is that it looks like a lawn, but you don't get the downsides: more free time to enjoy the lawn, instead of mowing it.
Shade is your best friend
Last but not least, we'll have a look at shade. You can have all the self-reliant plants, all the water-saving techniques, but if it's warm and hot for weeks at a time, you're going to need some extra help. This is where shade comes in.
You can create shade in a few different ways: have an actual roof to protect some plants, plant some trees, or create some vertical gardens to name a few.
The actual roof and planting trees are quite self-explanatory, but a vertical garden might be a bit more of a surprise. You can do this in a few ways, but the idea is the same: Get some plants that love direct sunlight all day every day, like strawberries and tomatoes, and use these to provide shade to plants that won't survive in the same conditions.
To be successful with this, you'll need a trellis or vertical planters. Tomatoes grow upwards and you can help them be more stable by giving them a trellis to lean against. Strawberries are ground-covering plants, so you can let them grow their vines and make a tiered planter so the plant can keep spreading.
You can even use a parasol to protect your plants from the burning sun. Anything for some shade is a great option.
Thank you for reading this post! I hope it helps you to keep your plants healthy and beautiful! If you're looking for more guides on specific plants, you can always request a plant guide to get a guide for the plant you have trouble with.
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