FAQ: How can I keep my landscape alive during the hottest part of the year?

Answer: Watering your landscapes infrequently and using other sustainable landscape practices will keep your flowerbeds, trees, and shrubs alive during peak summer heat.

In this blog post, you’ll learn tips and tricks for keeping your landscape alive in the summer heat, including

• Best hacks for watering your landscape during the summer heat
• Boost your landscape’s plant health for summer survival
• 11 landscaping tips for heat management.

Best Hacks for Watering Your Landscape During Summer Heat

You can design your landscape into hydrozones for improved water management. Hydrozoning means that you group landscape plants based on their irrigation needs.

For example, you’ll break your flowerbeds, trees, and shrubs into four zones:

1. Routine irrigation: This primary hydrozone, called the principal hydrozone, uses the largest amount of your outdoor water usage.
2. Reduced irrigation: A critical visual landscape zone is considered a secondary hydrozone because it doesn’t get high foot traffic.
3. Limited irrigation: This hydrozone needs less irrigation because it’s not heavily used as an outdoor destination spot.
4. No irrigation:  This hydrozone lives only on rainfall and doesn’t need any supplemental irrigation.

LoveYourLandscape.org says that designing your landscape based on hydrozones takes a lot of upfront work. However, hydrozoning ensures a lasting, eco-friendly landscape.

LoveYourLandscape shared these six ideas to help you with hydrozone design:

• Turfgrass, flowers, trees, and shrubs in direct sun need more water than plants in shaded areas.
• If you have slopes in your landscape, you must water plants at the top of the hill more often and reduce watering on plants at the bottom.
• Employ drought-tolerant landscaping for areas that will get minimal irrigation.
• Use native plants for low-water hydrozones that can live on less water than non-natives.
• Aerate and overseed your lawn in spring for warm season grasses and in the fall for cool season grasses.
• Use a hand fork or hand cultivator to aerate the soil in your flowerbeds.

Boost Your Landscape’s Plant Health for Summer Survival

Let’s face it. The sun in July and August depletes the moisture in landscaped beds and container gardens’ soil. Als-GardenCenter.com says high summer temperatures can fry your plants, leading to plant death.

They recommend these hacks for ensuring your plants survive the summertime heat:

1. Do the finger test up to the second knuckle to see if the soil is moist before you water your containers.
2. Water your plants, especially your container plants, deeply.
3. Irrigate your trees, shrubs, and flowerbeds in the early morning.
4. Don’t fertilize during extreme heat because it can burn the plant.
5. Skip pruning your trees and shrubs even if they look like they need it.
6. Move container plants and mobile raised beds into the shade during a heat wave.
7. Mulch your flowerbeds, trees, and shrubs with up to 4” of mulch; don’t spread mulch against tree trunks.

 

11 Landscaping Tips for Heat Management

A heat wave can kill your flower beds. Soaring daytime temperatures also weaken trees and shrubs, exposing them to disease and insects.

You can avoid that when you follow these 11 landscaping tips for heat management:

1. Mulch your landscaped beds.
2. Water your plants, including woody plants, deeply and infrequently.
3. Irrigate your landscape in the early morning hours between 4 a.m. to 9 a.m.
4. Plant the right plant at the right place.
5. Cover your plants with lightweight landscaping fabric designed for tree and shrub shading.
6. Divide your landscape into hydrozones.
7. Use weed control and hand-pull weeds to keep them from competing with your landscape plants.
8. Use natives and other drought-tolerant plants better suited for hot summer temperatures.
9. Don’t fertilize during the hottest part of the summer.
10. Transplant perennials in the spring or fall, not during the dog days of summer.
11. Invest in drip irrigation and bubblers that deliver water directly to the plant’s roots and conserve water at the same time.

Keep Your Landscapes Thriving During the Summer Heat with K-Rain Bubblers and Drip Irrigation Kits

Your flowerbeds and other landscaped areas will survive hot summer temperatures and thrive when you use drip irrigation and bubblers.

K-Rain® Dripline System is a specialized irrigation solution for non-lawn areas that provides an efficient and reliable watering system without overspray and other common problems.

Our K-Rain® Tree Bubblers are pressure-compensating bubblers with small irrigation heads designed to flood the soil around the tree or shrub. The water sinks down into the root ball, helping to establish a deep root system.

The tree bubbler pressure compensation ensures consistent flow rates over lower pressure ranges and eliminates excess runoff or waste.

Invest in K-Rain® today to give your plants the deep root systems they need to flourish all season long. Shop for your K-Rain® Tree Bubblers and Dripline System at these retailers or shop online.

Do you have a question about your K-Rain products? Contact our customer service online or call us at 800-735-7246.

Sources:
Als-GardenCenter.com, 5 Ways to Help Your Plants Survive the Heat.
LoveYourLandscape.org, Designing a Yard Using Hydrozones.