What is Heat Stress and How Can You Treat It?
The summer season in many parts of Arizona and Colorado is unlike summer in most other states. Many of the issues other states have to deal with are tripled here by the extreme heat and low humidity we experience. One of the things that landscapers face everywhere is heat stress. If you’re not sure what heat stress is, you’ve undoubtedly seen the effects of it on your lawn or those around yours without even realizing it.
If you need to learn what heat stress is and how to treat it, the experts at Pioneer Landscape Centers can help.
What is Heat Stress?
Heat stress is a state of being that any living thing can reach. Once we reach a temperature beyond our threshold to endure, we will sustain injuries after a period of time. While plants and humans are not the same, we both have our own heat thresholds, but where we can go inside, plants cannot.
Thankfully, many plants have a high threshold for heat, which is why they can grow here. However, this doesn’t mean that they never experience heat stress. This only means that you have some wiggle room.
Symptoms of Heat Stress
Heat stress in your plants can be hard to spot before it's too late. Heat stress affects several different processes plants utilize to live, such as:
- Photosynthesis
- Respiration
- Transpiration
- Membrane thermostability
- Osmotic regulation
If these processes are slowed down, they won’t be able to absorb and retain water to live, their growth will be slowed, and they won’t develop properly, which can lead to an early plant death. This can affect any and all of your plants, and you can see signs of it happening. These signs include:
- Wilting
- Leaves and foliage curling
- Browning
- Leaves dropping from plants in the summer
- Fruits losing their blossoms
- Vegetables bolting, or producing seeds
If you don’t catch these signs in time, your plants will die out.
How to Treat Heat Stress?
The best way to treat heat stress is to remove the factors causing it. This doesn’t mean you should try blocking out the sun.
Instead of leaving plants under direct and intense heat, try to place them in places where they’ll be under shade for most of the day. Build your gardens closer to your house, or build overhead tents that can extend over your plants.
If need be, you can spend the extra time to pull up plants, place them in pots and move them around as needed. Trees are resilient and will survive most cases of extreme heat. You can rely on them to provide shade but don’t plant too many other plants near them. If you do, their roots will compete for water and nutrients.
Since the heat is so prevalent during the day, water your plants in the evening as the sun is going down so the water doesn’t evaporate before plants get the chance to absorb it. You don’t want to wait until nighttime though so you’re catching your plants during their photosynthesis process.
Contact Pioneer Landscaping Centers For Help
If you notice that your plants have started to experience some extreme symptoms of heat stress, it’s not too late. You can also try to rejuvenate them with new mulch, topsoil, compost, amendment, and more. There are many materials that you can use to add nutrients to the ground and help it retain moisture even under the extreme summer heat.
Don’t let heat stress kill off all of your plants. If you’re not sure what materials will work for your plants, contact the experts at Pioneer Landscaping Centers for help. We can help you find everything that you need.