A lot of Gardeners are having tough growing seasons this year - just what we DON’T need with inflation and the boneheads in DC throwing wrenches into the works at every opportunity!
My garden is catching up nicely from a COLD, WET spring - that went STRAIGHT to HOT.
It’s always something. Adapt. Improvise. Overcome! ;)
My only real advice I have is to learn from this, and stock up on shade cloth and other items needed for future HOT growing seasons in the off-season when you see them at a good price. Or, consider yourself in the next higher growing Zone and plant in a different time frame than on a ‘normal’ year for you.
Definitely am learning and will be adding infrastructure. If I had that high tunnel up and had shade cloth for it, that would have helped a lot. The high tunnel is already a structure so you just toss the shade cloth over it and tie it down. I also could have started things much earlier. The cold crops could have produced before it hit 96 for quite a few days in May. I could also do the smaller tunnels like Pete has and they would serve the same purpose. It adds a month or so on either end of the season which gives you some cushion for weather variables. Row covers inside a tunnel give you even more time on the ends of the season.
I also want to get more heat mats and grow lights. I ended up stealing a couple of shop lights when I potted up and everything took up more space. A small lean to greenhouse on the South side of the house would help with that. Those mini-greenhouses that hand on the outside of the house's windows would work too.
Mulch has been a big water saver and since we don't have a well, water is a big deal. I'm up to four tanks now for a total of 1,200 gallons. We use a 225 gallon tank for household water and I'm also using that for the little garden right now because it's 10 feet from the tank. I have two 265 gallon tanks that will be for the bigger garden area out back and ideally, they would get filled by harvesting water from the high tunnel. By August, I'd likely have to fill them with Spring water which is what I use for the household tank. It's on a trailer and I go 1/4 mile down the road to fill it.
We have a 55 gallon drum I fill from the neighbor's 300+ foot well to use for drinking/cooking. I have it mounted to a pallet and have forks for the back of the little tractor. It lays sideways and has a spigot on it so we fill gallon jugs or our drinking water bottles from it. When it's below freezing, I buy bottled water. There's a tank heater in the household tank and the RV hose that goes from that to the house goes through flexible insulated duct and I have a computer fan that blows air from the house out the duct that keeps the hose and spigot from freezing. It's MacGyver-ized.
I'm not putting in a $10,000.00 well until the property is paid off.