Keep winberley beautiful

How does your garden grow when the temperatures are regularly above 100? Well, it is struggling.

There are some advantages to this weather. I haven’t needed to mow for a month. It is so dry that the chiggers are not bothering me and unless you have some open standing water around, the mosquitoes are not active.

We continue to encourage the use of native plants or adapted plants in the landscape which do not need much watering once they are established. If you put in new plants this summer you will need to water them regularly to get them established. However, when it is this dry, you will need to give established favored plants some help. The plants prefer rainwater and so water collected in rain barrels are especially appreciated. It only needs to rain a tenth of an inch to fill my rain barrels. My wildflower meadow “lawn” areas do not receive water until it rains. Yes, it is currently brown. Not to worry, once it rains the seeds germinate and the plants come back.

Another native plant that blooms in the heat of the summer is Yellow Bells (Tacoma stans). I put a wire around mine in deer accessible areas. Another way to protect plants the deer might eat is to put them near plants deer hate. My Yellow Bell is right behind a large Copper Canyon Daisy. Yellow Bells can get up to 6 feet tall. The hummingbirds like the trumpet shaped flowers.

This hot dry weather is survived by many plants by a kind of “hibernation” known as estivation. They may lose their leaves and stop growing. Then when the rains return they “awaken” and resume growth. August 14 my yard received 0.2 inches of rain. Just this small amount refreshed my garden.

We look forward to fall when we often receive rain more regularly.

Written by Jackie Mattice, Hays County Master Naturalist