Muddydogs, I am freaking out, too! I water once a week (I pick drought tolerant plants, so I can usually get away with this)... but this heat wave is scary.

I would love to know what everyone is doing to prepare/deal with the heat wave!

Mulching greatly reduces drought effects by shading the soil. With late May-June being almost rainless soils are prematurely baked this year. Native/naturalized roadside trees are wilting in some places.

This is when horticultural darwinism weeds all the wimpy plants out of our gardens.

Forget the plants!! I'm more concerned about trying to keep myself cool and hydrated. Working outdoors in full sun all day at the nursery without dropping from heatstroke is challenging at best. The day is spent watering....both myself and the plants and some need to be hit at least twice daily in this heat.

As to my own 'garden', since every plant I currently own and grow is in a container, watering both morning and evening is an absolute must.

Long time PNW residents are just not accustomed to prolonged heat :-)

I have big pots which I normally only water every other day. I'm watering them daily. My soil is heavily mulched but I've got umbrellas stuck in buckets of rocks shading some of my newly planted babies. It looks funny, but a gardener's gotta do what a gardener's gotta do. Someone ought to invent umbrellas of shade cloth with pointed ends you can just stab into the ground. Not giant sized like a patio umbrella, just regular umbrella sized.

When my Los Angeles friends feel sorry for me, then I KNOW I'm in trouble! I moved here because I prefer cool, rainy and overcast. Yikes!
Even my heavily mulched, shade areas are parched. We watered this morning and probably will have to do it again Thursday. Thank goodness I don't care at all about the lawn.

And the lawn does not care at all about drying up. It's natural for adapted grasses to aestivate in summer, that's why it's such a chore to keep turf green through the whole season. You have to maintain a spring-like condition with copious watering to overcome the lawn's natural tendency to shut down and wait out the season.

Watering, watering! I am thankful for the new automatic timer that we put on four beds, but I am still watering twice a day. everything is okay so far. Today it was 90 F. on our shady thermometer.
I have used more heat-lovers lately too - lavender, yucca, sedums, Romneya, Crocosmia, all doing well. Roses, not so well...

They've now extended the Extreme Hot Weather Warning in the Portland area through Thursday.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, they say we may break all-time records for highest temp ever.

No relief in sight.

1st thing we did when buying this house May2005 was install the biggest Trane heat pump made, so glad, even with 300 trees starting to grow and provide shade it's hot hot hot here. 107 degrees here today.

Watering watering watering, soak the ground and by nightfall it's bone dry.

Cascadian, can I have your address please? I'll bring my own blankie.

Our deck here in Olympia was 99 when I got home just after 5pm. I feel like I am running in circles doing nothing but watering! I have a huge deck with a ton of containers AND I have been collecting trees and shrubs for a massive sloap recontouring and planting! We have been turning on our automatic sprinkler system daily which is a first. I have still lost two shrubs (so far) I had in nursery pots. Tonight I put all of the pots in plastic bags so they can at least sit in the water a bit.

I have been loving our hot sunny summer so I hate to complain but boy it sure is hot and tomorrow is supposed to be over 100 here!

I'm in the same situation as gardengal. Watering plants, and hosing down all of the concrete areas every so often just trying to keep things a bit cooler at the nursery. Splashing water on my own feet and lower legs as well, anything to cool off! Come home and water my own plants and hose down my old dog! Some of my established plants are even suffering. My main problem is a healthy community of moles tunneling about!

I remember heat like this when I was a kid. Back then the priority was running through the sprinkler or walking down to the community swimming pool or perhaps chasing after the popsicle man.

Dottie, you won't need a blankie, LOL

We keep the inside at 62 at night, 72 daytime. It feels really good after reeling from the intense heat outside.

Normally it's annoying hosing myself while watering but now it feels great.

Have a lot of raised beds which require morning and evening soaking.

Can't wait for cool overcast rainy weather. It doesn't rain enough anymore. I have to start watering in February. If I had known what it would be like I would have planted far fewer trees and different types. These are all swamp trees that want water. *sigh* But surprisingly they are doing really really well. All except the snowbell which croaked.

Today it was 94 degrees in Port Angeles and 103 here in Sequim. At midnight it was still 80 degrees. I'm really glad I have nearly all the plants set up where sprinklers can water them adequately, though I do still have to move one of them around to cover everything. I'm now running them daily, which is seldom necessary.

I've been up at 5 every morning dragging hoses around and toting buckets, and have been for a couple of months now. We put in a lot of azaleas and dogwoods this spring, and they've really been suffering with all this dry weather. Although some of them are actually starting to harden off. Even with this hot spell, some of them are only needing water ever few days or so.

The last time we had decent rain was back in May. We had one day when it rained a little bit around the 20th of June, but other than that it's been almost 3 months without rain at my house. I'm about ready to dance nekkid in the street if it will make some rain fall.

We have about a 20F cooldown over Mon and yesterday here on the coast. And a nice generous breeze coming from the ocean. With everything that has a screen open and the fan-only unit to my heat pump running, house is staying at about 78F...yesterday the a/c was running non stop to keep it at that same temp.

But it's so very very dry, I've been trying not to overdo the a/c because my water bill is going to be frightening :)

Today when I sprayed the gravel driveway, it sounded like I was putting out a campfire!!!! smokin hot! 7:35PM
102 degrees!
wishing I lived by the ocean instead of the mountains right now!

Vancouver, BC, broke its all time high temperature ever recorded at the airport today at 33.7 degrees C (about 93 F). B/c the Vancouver airport is right on the water, it is not as hot as the inland areas. Here, in the nearby Fraser Valley, Abbotsford broke its all time record for any date today at 38 degrees C (about 101 C). Not only is it hotter than ever but the hot spell hasn't been broken as quickly by marine air as normally happens here.

I know that is not nearly as bad as you people in the Columbia and Willamette Valleys are experiencing. When I saw that Portland hit 107 F today, I found it hard to imagine that kind of heat. We were down in that area and the Willamette Valley last week and noticed how dry things looked at that time.

We are dry here in the Fraser Valley too but a good thundershower last weekend helped a litle. They are forecasting the possibility of more thundershowers tomorrow evening. Here's hoping.....!

This has been a hard year on the garden. We lost shrubs to the record cold and snow of the winter and now the drought and record heat is scorching some plants.

109 at my house today on the Eastside at 4:30pm. Both my digital thermometer in my car and the old one in the shade by the driveway had the same reading.

Every living thing around here is miserable. :-(

So... yesterday it got to 103 degrees in Sequim. Today was a bit cooler at 96. It's also about 5 degrees cooler as I type this, than it was at the same time last night. So like it or not, I think "peak heat" time is behind us.

Temperatures in the 100-106 range were pretty widespread across much of western Washington, but some places were even hotter. Here are a few really hot temperatures today from official NWS or NWS-affiliated recording stations.
Kirkland 112F
Castle Rock 109F
Chehalis 114F
Quilcene 108F

Today it was up to 108 in our backyard. I have been also dragging the hose watering in the mornings and evenings. Luckily, I have been offsetting it with my daughters pool by siphoning the water out into the flower beds. Works great since I don't want any standing water to attract mosquitoes.

Hot, hot, hot in Kirkland (my office) and Woodinville (my home). I came to work this morning (5:30 a.m. and the house temp downstairs was already registering 88 degrees) with a long white linen skirt (no stockings, absolute torture in this heat) and long, gauzy white tunic. Slap a burnoose on me and I'd be a female version of Lawrence of Arabia. Lost a couple of pots of annuals while up in Whidbey for five days, but had watered and moved most of them into the shade before leaving and they did okay. Expected to come home and find tons of ripe, juicy tomatoes, but I think the sudden onslaught of heat made them re-think life as they know it in the not-so-moist-and-mild PNW.

Rain (ironic, innit?)

some plants are lovin' it though. Hedychium greenii (red leafed ginger) just started sprouting all sorts of new lil nubbies at the base. somehow it encouraged my Zanthoxylum simulans (Sichuan Pepper) to sprout a lot of new growth.

basically all the heat and humidity lovers that are OUT of the sun are happy.