Sudden onset heat

Summer 2023 came with a bang in late June. By that time, most of the vegetables we’d planted had matured nicely and were beginning to bear fruit. The sudden arrival of summer was annoying but not tragic. Alas, summer 2024 decided to one up its predecessor.

The heat this year came with zero warning, as suddenly as last year’s but a month earlier. It was as if the Sun said “Oh, look, June 1st, let’s get shining!” And shine it did, until the plants that were not protected by any shade because “They like direct sunlight” began succumbing. And there was nothing we could do about it.

You know that tired old pearl of wisdom how life is what happens while you make plans? Well, we made plans for a rich harvest of, if nothing else, beans. Last year’s crop turned out so well we had no reason to expect otherwise from this year. Until we did.

The beans were the worst hit by the heat because most were planted in places with no shade — because beans like sunlight as every plant-growing source would inform you. As a result, the only beans that survived scorching were the ones that were inadvertently planted under trees for lack of space. The expected harvest: maybe about a third of what we planned. This is a picture of one of the survivors. No one needs to see devastation.

The tomatoes took the heat hard, too. Per expert literature, temperatures above 30 C are potentially devastating for the plant because growth stops and fruit formation slows down. Or something. But it’s definitely not good for tomatoes to be in high heat for a long time.

They made it, though, with a few wasted flowers which we attributed more to the constant rains in May than the heat. But we had to step up the watering. We really had to step up the watering, which led to extra-early morning rises to water the poor things before the Great Punisher in the Sky made its appearance for the day. So far, so decent. We’ll see how July goes but the cherries, for one, are a bunch of hardy little solanum licopersicums.

As with tomatoes, so it was with the rest of the plants: we had to water a lot more. As we watched the level of water in the rainwater tank creep lower while the sun crept across the sky in all its summer glory, we realised we’d need to compromise some moral positions if we were to have any harvest this year. More specifically, we’d have to use tap water to feed them when the rainwater ran out.

Using tap water for gardens is officially illegal although many do it for lack of alternatives and ingenuity. We were staunch believers that this is one of the decent, sensible laws, protecting our common water resources and aiming to avoid outages in the middle of summer when it’s bleeding hot and everyone needs a shower.

We are no longer staunch believers in anything. If the choice is between watching our crops die and break the law to avoid that death, the choice is really quite obvious. (This is a pepper plant, it’s alive because it has a pear tree nearby to shade it during the worst of the afternoon, and it’s flowering. Fingers crossed)

The first two weeks of June were a heavy ordeal but we came out of it alive and bearing a silver lining. We are now planning adaptation measures. Among these we have so far listed buying more trees for shade (screw the “They like direct sunlight” refrain) and designing some sort of modular, portable shade/hail protection system for the most vulnerable crops, which is what Cris will be doing during the long winter evenings.

Everyone knows you can’t trust the weather but farmers know it best. What you can do, to some extent, is anticipate its mood swings and prepare accordingly. For farmers, this is well nigh impossible since you can’t very well shade a whole field. But for household amateurs such as ourselves, it may be possible to do something about it.

For starters, we quit plotting to dig out the second self-planted mulberry. Instead, we shaped it as a tree and are letting it grow — there are plant beds right below and right above it, and mulberry trees make pretty decent shade. It’s the one in front of the vine whose regularly scheduled annual destruction will take place in the autumn. Until then, it’s free to go wild and provide shade cover to the okra in the row below.

The heat broke on June 14. We had some decent rain that watered the plants and refilled the water tank. We also had massive luck because barely 18 km east of us people saw their crops completely devastated, because while we got rain, they got hail. The size of chicken eggs. You can’t trust the weather. All you can do is try and adapt as best you can.