Well, rant on! I'll join in. I despise this heat; it's intolerable, miserable, ridiculous. My plants are struggling or dying; there are very few that look healthy. Every seed that I planted died soon after sprouting. My electric bill is way past ridiculous, mostly because we put an air conditioner in the shed for the dogs. (There are five, too many for the house and can't be left alone in it, anyway.) We don't have a pool; if we did, I think I'd spend most of my time in it!

Me too. Murphy, our rabbit, has an awesome air conditioned dog house.
I guess it's time to pay up for a pretty mild June & July.

I actually dont mind summer for the fact that it brings awesome storms and if we're lucky rain. It also keeps the snowbirds away ;) I believe our desert is beautiful and would not be what it is without a climate like ours.

On another note, 110+ is HOT!

I'm just happy to have air conditioning. :)

It's true, haname - my neighbors (a couple with 6 kids) only have swamp coolers and fans. I'd be in the library or shopping for most of the day if I had to live that way.

Hi, one way to cope is to take weekend trips to hi country or the coast. I live in San Diego County and will be coming back to the desert this fall. Gardening visitors welcome until I move in fall!

richsd - getting away is nice but not always possible....animals, plants, work.....

Our a/c went out last week for one day, it was 115 here that day. We do have a swamp cooler and it helped but only up to a point. That was one ugly day at the old homestead, every piece of paper on my desk stuck to my forearms and I was sweating onto paperwork. Margarita's starting around 3pm helped best. [hahhahahahah]

I'm with you CAST1, the 35' mesquite on the SOUTH side of our house blew down in last Sunday's storm, just in time for this horrific heat wave.

Our front yard now resembles a sawdust-covered parking lot. To add insult to injury, looks like I'll be replacing most of the plants that thrived in its shade -- even the natives!

But it can always get worse. At least I'm not one of the roofers that has to fix our roof! Youch!

well, I sure hope my beautiful southern live oak doesn't blow down. It's 17 yrs old now- big!!

The guy on the radio, said it was 115 here today..by 3pm. I have a pool, but unless I can keep my head under water, it was even too hot to swim, never thought I could say that. Everything under shade cloth, looks very bad, everything under king size bed sheets, doing very well..cheap at the thrift store, should have bought more of them and less of the expensive cloth. Even the basil is loving it under there. Peppers are blooming and putting out nice fruit; my first year of actually getting habaneros..need more sheets I guess..

That's interesting - the bed sheets work better than the shade cloth. Thanks for the tip!

Welcome Marymcp..it's funny, but a tomato (the only one still doing well, all my peppers, basil, eggplant and some flowers, all doing really well, under these sheets, the whole area is very shaded. I think really a lot of shade during our really hot points of summer is making a huge difference..I mean it's been 112 and now 115..even the desert plants out in the sun look crazed..but the sheets shade almost the whole garden and the plants are doing well..picking lots of peppers everyday, still blooming away, and I have such beautiful Habanero's..they have never survived this type of heat before, only difference..sheets..colored ones at that..lol

How are you suspending the sheets above the garden?

Morning Marymcp. My husband built a pergola over the garden to attach shade cloth (50%) so he attached the sheets to the structure, as the shade cloth was still not protecting the plants well enough. The shade cloth worked well before the intense heat hit, but when the plants started to fail, I asked for him to shade it some more; ego, the sheets, lol..He used small lumber to do that with and nailed it right into the structure, they look kind of like bright colored sail shades, so not too bad, and it's saving my plants, so worth it. He used four king size sheets to cover the main four beds and it also covers my potted vegs as well..

Sounds like a trip to Goodwill for K/S colored sheets is in order! Hey, I put up bright (read neon) beach umbrellas, so why not a colored sheet? I've got the shade cloth, too, and it's doing very little from the looks of the plants.

Sounds like pretty umbrellas Tomatofreak!! I kind of like the Oasis look myself, lol..the sheets don't look bad, it does make ya think of tents out in the desert, with camels somewhere near by..And it's saving the plants. Everything that has the sheets over it is doing great, with no sheets, they died. Even desert plants died, just turned brown and burnt to the ground.

At first I thought it was rather comical that somebody was stating the oh-so-obvious about Phoenix, but then I remembered making similar posts during extreme cold weather during winter here in NM.

I guess it's a trade-off, too hot or too cold. Even if you guys down there in Phoenix have several months during summer when you can't really be outside, the rest of the year should be great! I don't envy the cost of running the AC during that time (I just burn wood to keep warm in winter here, and don't even have AC), but I sure do envy what you can grow in your climate with such mild winters!

Nature is a frivolous B, lol. To prove it, she often schedules killing frosts the day after a balmy winter day. We all (well, almost all) run around like chickens with our heads cut off, trying to cover those beautiful plants that we worked so hard for, just so we could have a ripe tomato in winter. Most of the time it doesn't work and we wake a few days later to a black landscape. There's no perfect environment anywhere, but it's interesting that we all harbor the thought that there might be one - Somewhere! If only we could find it...

Yeah, I know what you mean tomatofreak... The closest we can come in North America is San Diego. Of course it's not perfect either, but there's no frost, scorching heat, hail, stifling humidity, endless rain, or months of windy weather. The city with the best weather in the world just ahead of San Diego, is said to be Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands (also a Mediterranean climate). I've always loved middle elevation mountain climates in the tropics. Every day is not too hot nor too cold, with just the right amount of sunshine and moisture. Maybe I've never stayed long enough to experience any dramatic and nasty weather events, but they sure seemed perfect to me.

San Diego! Sighhhhhhh...........