How Heat Damages Plants?

Plants take in carbon dioxide that they need to prepare food through tiny pores in the leaves called the stomata. The tradeoff is they also lose water through these holes. This process is called transpiration. At times when they are losing too much water or, during water scarcity, plants shut these pores. That also prevents the intake of carbon dioxide and affects the food supply.

Usually, a heatwave occurs when temperatures are around 90°F or above for a week or more. This can result in soil water shortage and increase the soil temperature.

When a heatwave coincides with a water shortage, it gets tough for the plants. With higher temperatures, the rate of losing water gets faster. This leads to water stress, which prevents the plant from functioning normally. The rise in air temperature also affects the production of enzymes that assist the process of photosynthesis.

In some scenarios, the plant is unable to prepare food while trying to prevent water loss. This causes the plant to starve. It may also happen, the plant loses its ability to absorb water from the ground as the soil dries up. Death can also result from a combination of both of these scenarios.

If the situation continues, the plant will eventually die due to the combined effect of heat and water stress. However, not all species of plants feel the effect of heat equally. Usually, the deep-rooted species are more drought-tolerant than the shallow-rooted crops.

How to Care for Plants in Hot Weather?

Here are six effective tips to protect plants in hot weather on the homestead.

Proper Watering

The first step is to make sure your plants never get too thirsty. The best watering time is during the evening when the temperatures are lower. That way the water can reach the roots without evaporating. Apply sufficient water so that it penetrates deeper into the soil and the root zones. Use a sprinkler that allows the water to hit the ground gently. Using a strong jet can erode the soil.

Heat burns can happen during the hottest part of the day. To prevent them, you can also plan a second session of watering. Maintain a regular watering schedule to keep the soil damp, but not soggy, at all times. Keep in mind, plants in containers will need more frequent watering than garden plants. Also, make sure to water directly over the root area to maximize the water intake.

In case your area is prone to water scarcity during the peak of summer, you need to stockpile sufficient water to properly care for your plants.

Keep Plants in Shade

Providing shade is a simple but effective way to protect garden plants during a heatwave. Shade helps the soil to stay cooler, retain moisture for longer periods, and also prevents the scorching of the leaves.

The question is, how to shade plants properly?

Ideally, you should use a material that allows at least some part of the sunlight to reach the plant. The degree of shade can vary between 25 to 90% depending on the type of plant.

Lighter fabrics can be draped over the plants while heavier fabrics can be placed over the garden area by using hooks or stakes.

You can also plan to erect a large canopy over the entire garden area if possible. Make sure the structure permits sufficient airflow that allows the heat to escape. However, strong winds can make the soil lose water faster. Using a fence or a hedge as windbreakers in combination with a shade is also a good idea.

Potted plants can be moved directly under existing shaded garden areas. Placing smaller pots or seedlings under the shade of bigger plants with a stronger root system is also effective.

Use Mulch

Plants are more distressed by a change in the soil temperature as it affects their roots. Ask any veteran gardener the question, ”How do I keep plants cool?” One common answer you will get is mulching.

Mulch is an extra layer of material placed on the topsoil that keeps the soil temperature stable and also prevents evaporation. It keeps the soil wet for longer periods and reduces the overall water requirement.

Pick a light-colored mulch material that will reflect the sunlight. Around 2 inches of mulch can be placed around the roots or across the entire garden bed. Organic mulch like grass clippings, small bark or wood chips, straw, shredded leaves, or pine needles can do a great job of keeping the soil cool.

Stop Fertilizing

To reduce water loss during a heatwave, plants can roll up their leaves or stop producing new flowers. You may feel adding some fertilizers can give your plants a boost, but in reality, that is not a good idea.

The fact is, a sudden increase in nutrients can trigger a growth phase in the plant. However, to process fertilizers, plants need water. When temperatures are above 90°F and water is in shortage, this can lead to damaging consequences for the plant.

To protect your garden during a heatwave, do not fertilize and concentrate on proper watering. It is also best to stop any chemical treatment for plant disease and insect infestations during a heatwave.

We suggest you promote soil fertility during the other seasons by adding the right macro and micronutrients. These include potassium, phosphorus, calcium, boron, manganese, and selenium. Adding these elements can help the plants perform better in the heat and show more heat stress tolerance.

Keep the Soil Undisturbed

Digging the soil during a heatwave can make it worse for your plants. This can release the trapped moisture from the soil and dry it out faster. Other acts like planting or weeding can also have the same effect. For proper care for plants in hot weather, keep the soil undisturbed during the hottest period.

Harvesting and Weeding

One of the best ways to prepare your plants for the heatwave is to complete the harvesting before temperatures rise. Flowers and fruits take a lot of toll on the energy reserves of a plant. By removing ripe and almost-ripe fruits and veggies, you let the plants conserve resources. Thus they are better equipped to tackle the heatwave.

Other than that, you can also complete weeding before the heat reaches its peak. Weeds compete with the plants in deriving water and nutrients from the soil. Removing them will ensure more resources are available for the plants.

However, pruning is not advised during an ongoing heatwave. Removal of leaves and branches will expose previously shaded parts of the plant to light. This can result in sunburns.

Conclusion

So these are some steps you can take to protect garden plants during a heatwave.

Gardening during the hottest part of summer can be a challenging task. With these tips, you can effectively reduce the overall heat stress on your plants and keep them safe. Surely, the plants will love it when you take the right care of them.

Lastly, make sure you take proper protection while gardening in the heat. Avoid moving out in the hottest hours. Also, do not forget to use sunscreen and wear a hat for protection. Only when you remain safe, can you keep your plants safe.

The post How to Protect Your Garden During a Heatwave appeared first on Homestead.org.

Campfires are one of the best things, in my opinion, about summer nights.  A tent pitched in your own backyard is transformed into a real camping trip once a fire is built.  There are just a few simple rules for building great fires safely.

First, you want to be sure you build your fire in a proper place.  This means your fire needs to be a safe distance from your tent and low-hanging branches, and close to a water source.  Do not use flammable fluids to start a fire.  Build your fire only as big as you need it to be and never leave it unattended.  Finally, make certain you have completely extinguished the fire when you are finished using it.  It is not the end of the world if you ruin a few recipes while you are learning to cook on a fire; letting a fire get away from you could be.  Safety is the only hard-and-fast rule when it comes to cooking outside.

In order to build a fire, you first need to put a handful of tinder in the center of your fire ring.  Tinder can be wood shavings, small twigs, or dry leaves.  Alternatively, it could be crumpled up newspaper or lint from your dryer.  It should be dry enough to light immediately with a match.  Ignite the tinder and slowly add more.  Once your tinder is burning you can start adding the kindling, gradually increasing the size of your kindling sticks.  As soon as you get a good fire going, add the larger pieces of wood that will act as fuel for your fire.  The manner in which you place the wood depends on the cooking technique you will be using.

For quick cooking, such as hot dogs on a stick, the best choice is a tepee fire.  To make this type of fire, simply lay the larger logs over the kindling like a tepee. This is a good fire for any quick outdoor cooking technique because the fire is concentrated in one spot.

If you are interested in stewing or baking in a Dutch oven, you need a lower flame.  This type of cooking works best with a crisscross fire.  A crisscross fire creates a long-lasting fire with plenty of hot coals.  As the name suggests, lay the larger wood over the kindling in a crisscross pattern in order to make this fire.

A Dutch oven is a great investment.  You can make cakes, stews, and casseroles outdoors if you have one.  Once you have all of your ingredients in the Dutch oven, put the lid on upside down.  This will make it much easier to cover with coals.

Bacon and Cheese Potatoes

• potatoes
• bacon
• cheese
• onions
• salt and pepper
• herbs – rosemary or thyme match well with potatoes

The amount of ingredients will vary, depending on the size of your Dutch oven.

Put the Dutch oven on the hot coals to warm the pot.  Slice the potatoes and onions.  Chop the bacon and add it to the warm Dutch oven.

Once the bacon has cooked, scoop it out, leaving the grease in the oven.  Layer the potatoes, sprinkled with salt, pepper, and herbs, on the bottom of the Dutch oven.  Top with onions, then cheese and bacon.  Repeat the layers and cover.  Nestle the Dutch oven in the hot embers.  Using tongs, carefully place 3-4 hot coals on the lid of the Dutch oven.  Cook for approximately 45 minutes, until potatoes are soft and cheese is melted.  Take care when removing the oven from the embers.  It will be very hot.

The hot coals left by the crisscross fire also work really well for cooking in foil packets.  Foil packets are an easy way to give everyone their own individualized portion and clean up is a snap.  The following recipe is a dessert, but don’t stop there.  Fish can be cooked the same way, with the lemon and side vegetables in the same packet.

Foil Packet Pineapple Upside Down Cake

• pineapple chunks, fresh or canned
• pound cake, cut in cubes, or donut holes
• butter
• brown sugar
• cinnamon
• cooking spray
• foil

Spray a double layer of foil with cooking spray.  Add a handful of pineapple chunks.  Add some pound-cake cubes or donut holes.  Top with a dollop of butter and brown sugar.  Sprinkle with cinnamon.

Fold up the packet and place it on the hot coals for about 15 minutes.  The butter will have melted with the brown sugar to make a sauce.  Top with a scoop of ice cream if desired.

The next outdoor cooking technique is a super simple box oven.  You can bake food, just like in your home oven, by trapping heat from charcoal briquettes inside an insulated cardboard box.  Because the briquettes are in the box along with the food you are cooking, do not use self-starting charcoal.  Self-starting briquettes will negatively affect the taste of your finished product.

In order to make this baking box you will need a sturdy cardboard box that is larger than your baking pan.  Line the box with heavy-duty aluminum foil.  Tape the foil to the outside of the box with duct tape.  Again, you do not want any adhesive on the inside of the box which could change the taste of the food.

Lay a sheet of heavy-duty foil, slightly larger than your box, on the ground where you will be cooking.  Place a large, flat rock on each of the corners of the foil.  One side of your box will sit on these rocks, allowing a small amount of airflow necessary for keeping the briquettes burning.  Next, place four soup or soda cans on each corner, approximately 1 1/2” in from the edge of the foil.  Use these cans to elevate and stabilize a small grate.  Put your baking pan on top of this grate.

Calculate how many briquettes you will need for your recipe.  The temperature is approximately 35 degrees Fahrenheit per briquette.  Spread the briquettes on the foil under the grate, light, and carefully place the box over the food.

You can bake anything in this small cardboard oven, from cookies and mini pizzas to casseroles.  One of my favorites is a Good Morning Breakfast Bowl.

Good Morning Breakfast Bowls

• 12 slices bread with crusts removed – any type of bread is fine but whole grain bread holds up better.
• 1 dozen eggs
• 12 slices cooked bacon (not crisp)
• butter

This recipe bakes at 350 degrees.  You will need ten briquettes.

Grease a standard-size muffin tin with butter.  Place one slice of bread into each muffin cup and press down in the middle.

Crack one egg directly into each slice of bread.  Place one slice of bacon on each egg.

Bake until eggs are done, 11-17 minutes, depending on how hard you like your eggs.

For the next technique, you will use basic supplies to create a vagabond stove and a homemade burner.  This stove will become very hot, as will the burner.  Exercise extreme caution, especially if there are children involved. This is a good option for times when you do not want to build a fire.

First, gather your supplies.  For the stove, you will need: a 1-gallon #10 tin can, can opener, tin snips, punch opener, and gloves.  In order to make the burner you will need: 1 shallow tin can, such as a tuna can; corrugated cardboard or sawdust, scissors, and paraffin wax.

To make the stove you first need to remove the lid from the can.  This will be the bottom of the stove.  Use tin snips to cut a 3”x3” door on the side of the can.  Bend the door out but leave it attached on one side.  This will be for ventilation control.  Punch three small air holes on the opposite side of the door.

For the burner, you will need to cut cardboard into strips slightly narrower than the depth of the shallow tin can.  Roll the cardboard strips into coils and set them in the can.  Melt the paraffin wax and pour over the cardboard.  Allow to harden.  It is a great idea to make extra burners.  They are fun and easy to make and essential to this cooking technique, but also extremely handy to have on hand for any emergency cooking situations.

To use your vagabond stove and homemade burner you first need to find an area that is relatively protected from wind.  This homemade oven can be used just like you use your skillet at home.  It is perfect for frying an egg or grilling a sandwich.  To extinguish the burner, remove the stove with a pot holder.  Smother the flame with a lid from a tin can.  Wait until the wax hardens before handling it.
vagabond stove

For our last outdoor cooking technique, we are going to build a smoker.  Old refrigerators make terrific homemade smokers for three reasons.  First, the large doors make loading and unloading food extremely easy.  Next, the metal racks (not plastic) can be used either to hang food from or lay food on.  Finally, old refrigerators can be found for next to nothing on sites like Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace.  They can be found for free on sites like Freecycle.

You need an old refrigerator.  One-compartment refrigerators work best, but you can adjust them to suit the type of fridge you have available.  You also need a drill, a metal pan, four bricks, charcoal, and wood chips.

Remove all the bins, such as the meat and produce drawers, from the refrigerator.  Place the bricks in the bottom of the refrigerator in order to protect it from heat.

Drill a 4” hole on top of the refrigerator, using a 3/4” drill bit.  This will be the vent that allows you to control the airflow and how the smoke exits the refrigerator.  You can control the airflow by covering this hole with a brick.

Next drill three 3” holes on each side of the refrigerator.  These holes allow air to flow into the main smoking chamber.

Finally, season your smoker before using it.  Place a small amount of charcoal into the metal pan.  Light the charcoal and let it burn down to embers.  While the charcoal is burning, soak the wood chips in cold water.  Once the coals are glowing, open the refrigerator and place the pan of coals on the bricks you have laid in the bottom of the smoker.  Place a handful of soaked wood chips on the coals.  Close the door and regulate the time it takes for the smoke to diminish.  Replenish wood chips as needed.  Once you have seasoned your smoker, you are ready to use it.

You can use your smoker to cook anything from fish, fowl, and meat to vegetables and even salt or sugar.  If you have metal racks, purchase S-hooks from the local hardware store.  They will make it easy to hang any type of meat.  The following is a simple recipe that gives eggs a slightly smoky flavor.  The eggs are great eaten as is, but really delicious in a chicken or tuna salad.

Smoked Eggs

• 4 oz. non-iodized salt or kosher salt
• 2 tsp black pepper
• 2 tsp garlic powder
• 4 dozen quail eggs or 6-10 chicken eggs, hardboiled and peeled

Place the salt, black pepper, and garlic powder in a ziplock bag and shake.  Add eggs and shake to coat.  Put the eggs in the refrigerator for two hours.  Take them out of the bag and place them in the smoker.  Smoke for forty minutes.  Store the eggs in the refrigerator.

I hope you will try one or more of these outdoor cooking techniques on your homestead this summer!

The post If You Can’t Stand the Heat… Cook Outside appeared first on Homestead.org.

A Winged Will-o’-the-wisp

And what they look like is pretty weird.

They have a large head and a strange short bill creating a flat little face reminiscent of a bulldog or Persian cat (they even have whiskers).  Their legs are short, giving them a movement more like hopping than walking, and their wings are short and rounded.

Even standing still in broad daylight these birds are just plain hard to see as their mottled plumage of blacks, browns, and grays becomes almost invisible on the deciduous forest floor, their natural habitat.

Not only is the whippoorwill a master of camouflage, but she’s also nocturnal, so even if you’ve been hearing that familiar call all of your life, you may never have actually seen the bird in the flesh.

Or perhaps you have.  If you’ve ever been driving along at night and seen a dark blob in the highway ahead that suddenly fluttered away as you approached, chances are, that was a whippoorwill.

Whippoorwills in American Culture

The Mohegan Tribe believed that whippoorwills were enchanted little people who moved through the forest at night (a story that’s still hard to disprove to this day) and other Native Americans felt the familiar call of the birds to be a death omen.  This latter belief was adapted by European settlers and it was accepted as fact in the Nineteenth Century, prompting H.P. Lovecraft to later write,

“It is whispered that they linger and flutter around houses where death is approaching, hoping to catch the soul of the departed as it leaves.”

There’s a lot of American folklore invested in the whippoorwill, from Hank Williams’ “So Lonesome I Could Cry“:

“Hear that lonesome whippoorwill?

He sounds too blue to fly.

The midnight train is whining low,

I’m so lonesome I could cry.”

…to James Thurber’s hilarious short story, The Whip-Poor-Will about a man who is driven berserk by a whippoorwill that roosts outside his bedroom window.  Thurber suggests that the bird isn’t so much an omen of death, as a cause when the protagonist finally murders everyone in his household and commits suicide, all because he can’t get enough sleep due to a whippoorwill roosting outside his bedroom window.

I think these two pieces make a good example of the extremes of appreciation we have for the Eastern Whippoorwill.

Anyone who’s ever heard the beautiful, haunting song of a lone whippoorwill echoing down a country valley will relate to the loneliness Hank Williams wails about, and if you’ve ever had one perch close outside your bedroom window, then you know how loud and infuriating the sound can be, even if it doesn’t quite drive you to slaughter your family.  You may be, as I was, reduced to screaming at the top of your lungs, “will you JUST SHUT UP?” out the bedroom window, but that will only deter them for a few seconds, if at all, and they can go on for hours.

Just in case yours has been a particularly sheltered life, I found this recording for you of a whippoorwill’s call.  In it, you can just hear the part of the call that always piqued my curiosity, that’s the very last note, which sounds like two blocks of wood striking together.  You can’t hear this so well at a distance, but when the bird is close by, it seems quite loud.

Whippoorwills belong to a class of nocturnal birds known alternately as nightjars, or goat-suckers.  The latter stemming from an old belief that they sucked the milk from goats.

Whippoorwill Weirdness-es

Whippoorwills have been known to repeat their call over 400 times without stopping or until someone bludgeons them to death.

Whippoorwills don’t build nests like more conventional birds, they simply lay their eggs on the bare ground, preferring shaded places, or a covering of a few leaves.

Shortly after they’re hatched, whippoorwill chicks begin to move away from each other, scattering among the leaves, and if they don’t, their mother gently pushes them apart, presumably to make them less visible to predators.

Grown birds have short beaks that open up into cavernous mouths almost as wide as the birds’ whole head.  This benefits them because of the way that they eat and drink.  They feed at night, looking for heavy concentrations of insects such as around a street-light or over the backs of farm animals and fly through the swarms with their mouths open vacuuming in all the yummy mosquitoes, moths, and other flying insects they can hold.  Perhaps even stranger, they drink in the same way, flying over bodies of water while scooping up water in their broad beaks.

The male whippoorwill’s call serves not only to attract females but to establish his territory among other males.  Once he secures a promising date, the male performs a dance for the female which consists of circling her on the ground and touching her with his beak as she nods her head.  During the dance, he repeats what is apparently an effective pick-up line in whippoorwill circles, which sounds like a low, throaty and lascivious “waddle-waddle-waddle?”.  (I inserted the question mark of my own accord, knowing little about the punctuation habits of whippoorwills, but the sound does seem to have the air of a proposition.)  This apparently has the desired effect on the female, and mating commences.

The birds appear to time their nesting such that the moon is always more than half full at the time they are feeding the young.  It’s thought this is to take advantage of the better light while foraging for food and caring for the chicks.

Whippoorwill Distribution

Eastern Whippoorwills are commonly found in most of the Eastern United States and Canada, and they migrate as far south as Central America.  In 2010, by acknowledging small differences, the species has been divided into two, the Eastern Whippoorwill Caprimulgus vociferous, and the Mexican Whippoorwill, Caprimulgus arizonae found in Mexico and the western US.

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