Having A Bad Hot Spell.....

Well you must be doing a good job with your watering as it all looks to be flourishing. Must be St Francis looking after it for you...

Your garden is doing well. 98 F sounds hot. I only do C and it was 35 C in the shade here recently. Everything is turning crisp.

36 C Hywel ....we’re both cooking good Hywel. I have one more day to go before the heat breaks with rain. I hope.

You are doing very well to have your garden looking so lush & verdant, no mean feat in this heat!

What stunning colour you have I love your garden its joy to look at love all your animals in between your plants . Keep cool .

the garden looks very lush and no wonder you are pleased with the colourful result. glad the solar pumps are effective.
I must say apart from the odd plant or 2 in mine I haven't been watering at all, though I do think its getting to a critical point when I will have to . suspect a hosepipe ban is in the offing soon.

Your garden looks beautiful and lush, so you must be keeping the watering going. The combination of Lysimachia and the yellow edged Hosta is stunning and the Lilies, amazing. My Lilies are devastated by Lily beetle, not enough to stop flowering, but the leaves very tatty! My Coleus, which I imagined just like your, rounded, bright and lush, sadly dislike the amount of heat and drought we are having.

Your garden looks great; very lush. you must be an avid waterer.

Hello L'strife, its good to see you, your garden looks as beautiful as ever, its a pleasure to see, like my garden I am wilting in this heat and both the garden and myself are browned off, only bonus is the fact that brown lawns do not need mowing and the weeds aren't growing, I know typically British we do tend to moan about our weather but it has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous now...

I have a formula now.....Mulch, conserve Moisture,
Make maximum use of shade space........ cardboard boxes shoved into the plastic greenhouse shelves..........
Well thats alright for plants in pots and tubs.
Its heartbreaking, it really is.
Owdboggy told me to empty the plant saucers after watering Auriculas. I leave the water in 24 hours now.
Then empty it into a small bucket to use on something else.

Thank you all for your comments....there will be no break in the 35-36C heat for the next 5 days. This means that I will be Gunga Din to my garden but I have no doubt that there will be casualties in that kind of prolonged weather. It is so hot that I am now carrying my 3 little dogs to their “favorite grounds” to do their business. The air is too hot to breathe as well as the ground to painfull for them to walk on.

My Gerbils are paying off. They love to chew cardboard, egg cartons mostly. This gets mixed up with the woodchip
litter. All gets mixed up with potting soil so conserves moisture. They live in an old big fish tank and only need attention once daily. Cost little. Recommend.

I did keep tarantulas. Though their end product was not conservation of moisture they did conserve maintenance time for me in my more active years. Though I did not receive loving looks from those eight eyes theirs I found them easy to keep and satisfaction came in the form of successful molting once their environmental conditions were met for that process. I kept and do recommend for others to keep the docile and SLOW moving Rosehair and Mexican Red Banded Tarantulas. There are other interesting varieties but they are very fast moving if they get loose and once cornered for recapture they are more than willing to take you on for a fight.