I bought extra hoses and soaker hoses yesterday. My yard is huge - no way to haul buckets of water. I am soaking my trees individually very well. I am looking at about 20+ huge oaks to care for so its quite labor intensive. I have a horse farm, so oaks everywhere. Fortunately, I have lots of water spigots. Water bill will be like the national debt but trees are irreplacable. Just wish I knew if these with brown leaves are dying or just stressed. Dont drink coffee or tea, but thanks for suggestion - will use this for smaller plants, didnt know coffee grounds helped anything but roses. We dont have hope of any rain in the future, so I am just soaking my oaks, one by one, in the hopes I can get them through this drought. I am afraid many trees are going to be lost if we dont get rain soon. Slight chance today, but I will believe it if I see it. I am thankful at this point we are not on water restrictions - a friend in Houston said they will only be able to water twice a week starting next week, so want to get these trees soaked before that happens. Only 2 more weeks in August......maybe things will change before its too late for the trees. Judith

I still fight with container citrus trees (and in-ground young trees) in our hot 100+ weather. The in-ground trees do certainly get sunburned badly (not just the young leaves that haven't hardened off from Spring) and the recently planted ones in ONLY the West direct sunlight will sit for an entire year+ before showing growth (these are all properly planted, in raised beds). Ones in partial shade or morning only light do much better and typically show growth in the first spring. The containers are by far the worst. I've been forced to pot-in-pot on every single one: there is no container mix (gritty, 511, or bagged soil) that can adequately protect roots in direct summer sunlight. The soil temps are easily 100+ around the edges. Yes, black containers are the worst. Supposedly painting black plastic white will drop surface temps 15 degrees. Besides pot-in-pot (best with 1" of largest bark chunks separating each container), I do have success with wrapping the containers with the foil backed bubble wrap (radiant barrier); alternatively, just burying the container can work extremely well (but careful as roots will leave the container or nearby roots invade). Overall, I think burying has worked best (easiest?) if you don't have root worries. However, I do also have to put shade cloth over them. The cloth went up for me mid-June (early heat waves here in central CA). The shade cloth exception: mature trees. If there is a GIANT canopy (very well established tree), this is less important as the outer leaves do protect the interior leaves and bark enough from burning up. That's why you can't compare entire groves of mature citrus trees in hot weather to container or young in-ground. You can't say "citrus are high heat tolerant trees, there are groves of them in 110F weather, heat isn't an issue". It very much is an issue until the tree is very mature and established. IIRC, all other conditions in place (nutrients, humidity, leaf temps) root temps are ideal growing at 90F but quickly shut down and burn up just over 100F+. Leaf temps shut down photosynthesis somewhere above 115F or so -- which means the majority of photosynthesis occurs is the morning sunlight. It's not ideal to only exposed them in afternoon, but /shrug I have some that are only afternoon exposed due to limited space.

Cheelo, I doubt the figure would be anywhere near 1/4 doing vermicomposting. I now have 2 other friends into it, one with a COW, the other using an old fridge on a small farm. I have also come across 3 families that had worms but no longer do. Lost interest I guess, one donated his old worm factory to me. He had used it himself, then passed it to his son, but he had lost interest too. COWs are popular though, but there is also a lot of ignorance about getting them to work well. I recently went to a worm/composting session run at the local library. It seemed a lot of the people there wanted to get their COWs eating more waste, yet the expert was a totally clueless lady that has been composting for 20 years and hasn't learnt anything new since. One example, talking of harvesting, she said worms move towards the light!! When somebody suggested she was wrong, she held up a plastic bag of worms/compost that had been sitting on the table tipped it over to show the bottom where the worms had congregated to get away from the light and cackled "See, the worms have come to the light!". Anyway, I think the biggest issue is losing worms due to heat, and as long as you leave the lid on during summer, worms are going to die. Reln has also recently gotten greedy and reduced the COW to only coming with 2 working trays instead of 3 with a small reduction in price. This has annoyed a lot of the local worming communities, so COWs are not getting the same support on the ground that they used to get.

I first encountered and bought some SunPatiens a year ago in June 2017. It's reportedly a heat & sun tolerant variation on Impatiens (at first I suspected some would consider it the "Hostess Twinkie" of fine gardening). They didn't bloom profusely for me. But 4 of 6 plants survived the winter and got a head start in 2018. They get full sun from 12-5 or so. This year they started flowering in late April, then in July started pooping out. One of the survivors with more shelter from sun and wind kept blooming, although not abundantly. I'm patiently waiting to see any response to last week's big rains, milder temps and cloudy skies - nothing yet. This year's full blast summer started 2 months early (in May) so everything endured a double dose of mid-summer extremes. Forgive unsightly visual distractions in frame, some were temporary wind deflectors, and it was too late in year to prune live oak tree, etc. Below: Late April, just starting 2 weeks later, 8:30 am (below) 2 weeks later (end of May) in the shade 8:45 am (below) mid july, 11 am, the southernmost plant on right stopped producing as many flowers (below); the one on the left with more shade also gradually reduced # of new blooms, there were even less in August