Heat Stress vs Drought Stress in the Vegetable Garden - Ep. 308

What's in this episode

It's two o'clock on a July afternoon. You walk out to check the garden, and your squash leaves are drooping so low they're nearly touching the mulch. Your tomato plants look like they've given up on the whole season. If your first thought, every single time, is “I need to water right now,” hold on a second before you grab that hose. Because that dramatic afternoon collapse you're looking at likely has absolutely nothing to do with how much water is in your soil. So today on Just Grow Something we're covering three things: what's actually happening inside a plant's cells when the temperature spikes, the specific ways to tell heat stress wilting apart from drought stress wilting, and what heat stress does beyond the leaves, because your tomatoes and peppers and squash can look perfectly fine and still be failing to set fruit, and that's a heat problem too. Let's dig in. Join the Fall Garden Challenge: https://justgrowsomethingpodcast.com/fall References and Resources: Graci, S., & Barone, A. (2024). Tomato plant response to heat stress: a focus on candidate genes for yield-related traits. Frontiers in Plant Science, 14, 1245661. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2023.1245661 Sellami, D.,

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