Too hot to garden? Try these survival tips

by Sharon Parker
published July 7 2008

A birdbath and a beautiful garden.

There’s nothing quite like engaging in a labor-intensive garden project on a hot, muggy day, sweat stinging your eyes as you wipe them with the back of your dirty glove, then finally going inside to clean up and get some refreshment, when your cheerful spouse says, “You must really enjoy gardening, I see you out there smiling as you work!”

“That’s grimacing,” you say. “Grimacing and squinting because of the sweat in my eyes.”

Sometimes you have to get that hedge planted because the bare-root stock cannot wait until fall, and you just have to tough it out, working in the shade as much as you can, drinking lots of water, and keeping a clean towel handy for wiping the sweat from your brow.

But let’s pretend we can leave the big projects until September and figure out only what we have to do to keep our yards and gardens looking just good enough until then. Naturally this leads us to those pernicious nasties: weeds. Don’t they grow rampantly in July though?

One summer when I fell hopelessly behind on weeding and was tempted to give up and either let it all go or mow it all down, I instead broke the daunting task down to a manageable scale: I carried a 5-gallon bucket out to the garden along with my favorite weeding tool (an L-shaped hand hoe called a Cape Cod weeder) and once I filled the bucket with weeds, I dumped them into the compost and stopped. I sometimes did this three or four times in a day, sometimes only once, and even if I never quite got all of the weeding done, I managed to keep enough of it looking tidy to maintain a modicum of self-respect.

Still, it surprised me when someone would compliment my garden. My eye tended to go right to the unweeded messes, but others didn’t seem to notice those areas so much. I wondered if it was the overall look of verdant abundance that fooled them? Then I read a tip in an issue of Organic Gardening magazine that led me to believe it was my edges that created the illusion.

The magazine had made the suggestion that, if you don’t have time to weed your garden, edge it instead. The garden will look well maintained if the edges look neat.

I happen to like tidy edges, I either border them with bricks or pavers, or I use an old-fashioned edging tool I picked up in a garage sale to create a shallow ditch, cutting off the spreading grasses and pulling back the creeping charlie that sneaks in from the lawn (I leave it alone in the lawn). The end result is that the garden looks neat, even if there are weeds in the middle.

Then there’s the grass. Who wants to mow when it’s 88 and humid? I figure, the less we have to mow the lawn, the better, but how do we do that and maintain some respectability, or at least stay out of trouble?

First, don’t water or fertilize your lawn. It shouldn’t need it, especially since we got plenty of rainfall early in the summer, which should have encouraged the grass roots to work their way down into the deeper, moister soil below the surface. Grass doesn’t really need fertilizing, especially if you leave the clippings on the lawn after mowing, although once a year in the fall is a good idea if you want a lush, green lawn—and that will encourage more growth in the fall, when it’s not so bad to mow.

City ordinance only requires that you keep your grass below 8 inches long. Anything less than that is OK by city inspectors, if not so much your neighbors. For the sake of appearances, I mow the front whenever it starts to look shaggy, which in the middle of a hot dry spell can take a couple of weeks. The back, which is mostly our private domain, can go a little longer between mowings.

Coincidentally, if you don’t water the grass it won’t grow as fast, and if you don’t mow it too often, it won’t need as much water: win-win.

Finally, don’t forget to enjoy your garden whenever you can. After pulling out an oxeye daisy that had volunteered in an unfortunate spot, I hated to let the pretty flowers just wilt, but it was inconvenient to bring them in the house to put them in a vase, so I cut off the blossoms and floated them in the bird bath. They looked sweet and the birds didn’t seem to mind.

Since evenings are when you are most likely to relax in your yard, be sure to plant plenty of white and pastel-colored flowers that show up as the daylight wanes. Red flowers may look spectacular in the middle of the day, but they disappear at night. As an added bonus, white flowers are often more fragrant come evening (especially petunias and lilies) and are more likely to attract moths, who add their lovely fluttering movement to your garden after dark, when the mosquitoes subside and sitting outside is most pleasant.