Surviving a Phoenix August: Shade, Mulch and When You Water
The garden charts sell hoses, nozzles and fertilizer. What gets a plant through a Phoenix August is shade, mulch and the hour you water.
Freyr gave away his sword to win Gerðr, the giantess of the walled garden. At the end of the world he meets Surtr, the fire giant, with nothing in his hand.
Every Phoenix gardener knows how that one goes. August is Surtr. You do not fight it. You get the plants through it.
What the charts sell in August, and what they do not
Amazon’s garden charts, read this morning, are a picture of what people reach for when it is a hundred and ten degrees. The watering chart is a hose at number one with a hundred thousand ratings, four spray nozzles in the top fourteen, a sprinkler, a splitter, and a set of quick connects. The soils chart is potting mix and Miracle-Gro, seven times. The plant-covers chart is frost cloth and fruit bags.
What is not on any of them: shade cloth, except one frost blanket that mentions sun in its listing, and mulch, because mulch is bought by the cubic yard from a landscape supply, not by the bag from a warehouse.
So the chart sells the one thing that gets a plant through August, and none of the other two. The nozzle is on the chart. The shade is not.
Shade, mulch, and the hour
Three things separate the plant that survives a Phoenix summer from the one that survives a Phoenix August.
Shade, on the west side. Morning sun is fine. The four hours after two in the afternoon are what cook a pepper plant, and a length of thirty to fifty per cent shade cloth over a frame on the west side of a bed changes the temperature at the leaf by more than any amount of water. The chart barely sells it. The garden centre does, by the foot.
Mulch, three inches deep. Bare soil in August is a griddle. Three or four inches of bark or wood chips keep the root zone cool and cut evaporation by a large fraction, which means the water you put in stays in. It is the cheapest thing on this list and it is not on Amazon’s chart at all.
The hour. The chart’s number one product is a hose, and how you use it matters more than which one. Water deep and early, before the sun is on the bed, so the water goes down instead of up. Watering at noon feeds the air. Watering at night in a wet-monsoon week feeds the fungus. The drip line in our earlier piece exists so that the hour is decided by a timer and not by whoever remembers.
Where these picks came from, honestly
Read off Amazon’s own watering, plant-cover and soils charts this morning, rank, rating and review count together, best-sellers first. The product picks are research picks. The advice about shade, mulch and timing is ours: this climate is the one we live in, and a bed of peppers under shade cloth is not a research topic here.
The one honest warning
The strongest seller on the soils chart is the one to leave in the shed.
Miracle-Gro’s water-soluble plant food has sixty-three thousand ratings and a 4.7, and it has earned them in every month that a plant is growing. In August a Phoenix plant is not growing. It is holding on, and feeding it now pushes out soft new leaves that the afternoon sun burns off by Friday. The plant spends what it does not have, and you have paid for the privilege.
Shade it, mulch it, water it before dawn, and put the fertilizer away until the nights drop under eighty. The plant that makes it to October will forgive the month it spent doing nothing.
The picks
Flexzilla garden hose, 5/8 in. x 50 ft.
Number one on the watering chart and number thirteen on the whole of Patio, Lawn and Garden, with a hundred and two thousand ratings. It is on the chart because every other hose on it is either a coil that kinks or an expandable that splits in its second summer, and this one is a plain lightweight hose that stays flexible after a day on hot gravel.
- Best for
- Anyone who has thrown away an expandable hose, and any yard where the hose lives in the sun.
- Watch out
- The 4.3 rating is honest: the fittings are the weak point, and a hose left pressurised in August heat is a hose that bursts at the coupling. Turn it off at the tap, not at the nozzle.
Biswing 2-way brass hose splitter
Number eight on the watering chart, 4.6 stars across ten thousand ratings, and the most useful cheap thing on it for a desert yard. One tap, two outlets, each with its own shutoff: the drip line stays connected on a timer and the hose comes off the other side. It is the fitting that makes the drip system in our earlier piece live alongside a hose instead of fighting it for the tap.
- Best for
- Any yard with a drip line and a hose on the same tap, which is most of them.
- Watch out
- Brass and heat expand together. Hand-tight in the morning is a drip by afternoon, and a splitter that leaks at the tap all summer costs more water than it saves. Check it once a week.
AlpineReach plant cover, frost and sun protection, 10 x 30 ft
Number ten on the plant covers chart, and the only product on that chart whose listing says sun as well as frost. A few hundred ratings, not tens of thousands, and it is here for that reason: the chart has almost nothing for shade, and this is the closest thing on it. A light fabric over a frame gives young plants the thirty per cent of relief that is the difference between scorched leaves and September.
- Best for
- Vegetable beds, new plantings, and anything with leaves facing west between two and six in the afternoon.
- Watch out
- It is frost cloth doing a second job. Real shade cloth, rated by percentage, comes from a garden centre or an irrigation supplier, and for a whole bed that is the better buy. This is the chart's answer, not the best answer.
Miracle-Gro water soluble all purpose plant food, 3 lb
Number three on the soils and planting-media chart, 4.7 stars across sixty-three thousand ratings, and Miracle-Gro holds seven of that chart's top fourteen places. It is the best-selling plant food in the country, and it is on this list so that we can say the next sentence.
- Best for
- Spring and October, when a Phoenix plant is actually growing.
- Watch out
- Not in August. A plant in this heat is not growing, it is holding on, and feeding it pushes soft new growth that the afternoon sun burns off the same week. The number-three product on the chart is the one to leave in the shed until the nights cool.
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