Post heat wave, a mama raccoon found succor (and some juicy fruit) in the top of my cherry tree.

How hot was it anyway?

It was so hot you could fry an egg on an ice cube.

It was so hot I saw a bird pull a worm out of the ground with an oven mitt.

It was so hot they installed a fan in the debt ceiling.

It was so hot I saw someone with a sign that said, “Will work for shade.”

And that’s the way it was last Sunday. I was sitting inside ratatatting away on my computer when around 3:30 p.m. I decided to take a break and wander out into the blast furnace. My jaw dropped when I saw that my hydrangea was burned to a crisp. It happened in a matter of hours.

But that wasn’t the end of it. As the days went on, other damage appeared: my well-established forsythia browned up, a little volunteer cedar is scorched, all the leaves at the top of my Asian pear are burned, and even a hedge of salal — which I’ve considered indestructible — is a crispy shade of tan. I’ve never seen anything like this before at the beach.

There’s some difference of opinion about how hot it actually did get on the Peninsula — a friend driving through Chinook said the temp there registered 107 and possibly the same in Long Beach. On my porch facing Willapa Bay it got decidedly over 100. But does it really matter? Whatever the number, it was too hot. The effects can be readily seen all over the county. Hundreds of people died of heat stroke or related problems in Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia this past weekend. And who’s measuring the impacts on our neighborhood wildlife? For those still pooh-poohing climate change, c’mon, wake up!

Garden tails

Then a couple days after the Big Hot, crows were bombarding my Montmorency cherry tree and finally I went out to see what the heck the ruckus was all about. In the topmost branches there was a mama raccoon eating the ripest cherries. I’ve never seen a raccoon in my tree before, and because I will never be able to pick those tippy-top fruits — my rule: no ladders after 60 years-of-age — I let her have at it for a while.

Then I saw she was breaking branches. So, how do you get a raccoon out of a tree? Talk reasonably to her. No. Throw rocks. Useless. Get Jackson on the case. Noisy, but no go. (Needless to say I do not have a gun and, even if I did, would never use it on any creature, animal or human.) At long last I landed on a stout spray of water — that finally convinced her. I know she has babies; all the neighbors have seen them. I just hope she can find other juicy morsels to feed herself and her tribe.

Yikes, now what?

But back to the weather. As I watched various plants, trees, and shrubs in my garden wither, I decided to call master gardener Rachel Gana to get some advice about the best reparative action. My instincts were all wrong — do not trim off those dead and burned up hydrangea leaves.

“First of all, hydrangeas are a partial shade plant,” Rachel says. “That’s their ideal place to grow, though down here we are considered ‘partial shade’ because of our cooler climate. But this is their main growth time, so they were hit hard by the unusually hot weather. Don’t trim off those dead leaves — those will protect the plant in case we have more of this heat. And if we do have other days of hot sun, create some artificial shade because they’re not going to be able to take another day like this one. I put up an umbrella from my picnic table. Water consistently and remove any weeds that will compete with your plants. Mulching helps conserve moisture and also keeps the soil cooler.”

“You don’t want to fertilize now. That will trigger a new flush of growth that will be tender. And definitely don’t prune. I think another thing to remind people is this heat damage can look like a disease. But it’s also a very bad idea to apply any kind of insecticide or fungicide to plants that are already damaged. In weather over 80 degrees, any spray on leaves can further damage them.”

The other thing Rachel advises it to keep your eye on future weather trends. If you know there’s another spate of hot weather coming, get a head start on protecting your garden by watering consistently. Rachel also has chickens to tend. “We have an electric fence, which gives our chickens a pretty big area to wander. I watered really well and kept it nice and muddy for them. I was still out watering when the sun went down.”

Your future garden

Since we’ve started our summer with unseasonably hot temps, our plants will be more susceptible to hot weather ahead. “Any temperatures above the 90s for a long period of time will damage plants,” Rachel says, “and in anything higher than that you’ll see different kinds of stress. Definitely don’t transplant anything now — it won’t have time to develop a good root system. The best time for new plants is in the fall when the plants are dormant. It takes a year before they are established and can tolerate these kinds of stresses.”

“But the heat doesn’t just damage and scorch the leaves, it can damage stems too. Fruit trees sometimes will drop their fruit. Or they can get scalded and cracks will open in the bark which can make them susceptible to bacteria. They always say plant native trees and shrubs instead of ornamentals because they’re more adapted to our environment — they’ve been changed genetically over millennia — but a lot of them were damaged too. Many of our trees were already stressed because of climate change.”

“One day of hot weather can cause greens to bolt, like lettuce and spinach. But you can reseed those plants — July is winter garden planting time. And I’ve been reading posts about another thing to worry about: a hot day combined with smoke from fires can contribute to ozone damage. During photosynthesis (daylight) plants use oxygen and give off carbon dioxide. The reverse happens at night — oxygen is given off as plants turn energy from the sun into plant tissue. But smoke changes the quality of the oxygen, adding particles into the air so plants close their stomata because they don’t want to take in those contaminants.”

Yep, smoky air contains large amounts of ash and other particulates which can coat the leaves and clog the plant’s stomata, the tiny pores plants use for this oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange. Of course this negatively impacts trees’ and plants’ abilities to photosynthesize and grow efficiently.

I always felt that as lucky inhabitants of the PNW we would be spared from some of the most egregious effects of climate change; after all, we’ve got rain, we’ve got cooler temperatures, we’ve got green around us, and we’re mostly protected from the smoke of inland fires. As Rachel says, “We’re blessed with the ocean giving us fresh air every day.” But this past week of plant damage and outrageous heat has changed my mind.

It’s clear that no one will be exempt from the impacts of our changing climate. And this is just the beginning. These suggestions for plant first-aid are short-term mitigations. Let’s stop kidding ourselves about climate change and start making macro-system changes now. Our lives — all lives — depend on it.

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Next week I’d like to write about our responses to the past week of fireworks: if you have some reactions you’d like to share please write me: categable@gmail.com.