Making Your Garden A Cool Place To Spend The Summer
✨ Key Points
- Create Shade Spots: Construct garden features like covered decks, gazebos, or awnings to provide all-day shade. This is essential for enjoying your garden during the hot summer months without overheating.
- Install a Swimming Pool: Adding a swimming pool can make your garden cooler and more enjoyable. DIY pool kits are available, and while fitting and filling a pool can involve some investment, it increases home value and saves on annual swimming pool memberships.
- Plant Trees and Bushes: Plants, especially trees, cool the garden by blocking the sun and reducing heat absorption. They provide canopy cover and use evapotranspiration to cool the surrounding area, making your garden a more pleasant place during hot weather.
A garden should offer relief during hot weather, but exposed patios, heat-absorbing surfaces, and poorly placed seating can make a backyard uncomfortable by midday.
Creating a cooler outdoor space requires more than frequent watering, it depends on shade, airflow, suitable plants, and responsible moisture management.
Trees and other vegetation cool outdoor areas through shade and evapotranspiration.
According to the EPA, vegetation can also reduce heat absorbed by hard surfaces and help lower the temperature around a home.
Before beginning your backyard transformation, identify where sunlight falls during the hottest part of the day. Then consider:
- Planting suitable shade trees for long-term cooling;
- Adding a pergola, arbor, shade sail, or large umbrella;
- Training climbing plants over a strong garden structure;
- Moving seating away from heat-reflecting walls and paving;
- Using light-colored materials that absorb less heat;
- Adding two to three inches of organic mulch around plants;
- Watering deeply in the early morning instead of frequently and lightly;
- Using drip irrigation or soaker hoses to reduce water loss;
- Preserving open areas that allow breezes to move through the garden.
The University of Minnesota Extension recommends early-morning watering because plants can absorb more moisture before daytime evaporation increases.
Targeted drip irrigation also delivers water directly to the soil.
A thoughtfully designed garden can become a cooler place to read, eat, work, or reconnect with family instead of an area you avoid during summer.
The following ideas will help you create useful shade while protecting plants and making everyday outdoor life more comfortable.
Create Shade Spots
If you have taller plants or your garden is north facing, shade spots will already be common throughout.
However, if it’s 24/7 sun out there during the summertime, you’ll have to construct a few shade spots of your own.
You can do this by constructing garden features like a covered deck, gazebo, and/or trellis, or even just some awning pitched over the patio.
As long as you get some shade to sit in, and it provides shade all day round as the sun moves, you’ll be good to go.
Fill a Swimming Pool
It’s quite obvious that a ‘cool’ garden needs a swimming pool, in both senses of the word!
So, maybe it’s time to dig out part of the yard and get a swimming pool fitted instead?
Doing so will not only add a bit more value to your home but could also save you a lot on swimming pool memberships each year too!
Swimming pools can be constructed and fitted on a DIY basis, as long as you’ve got the time to commit to the job.
You can invest in kits that’ll provide you with everything you need, and then you can contact water distribution and well services to get the pool filled in with safe and clean water.
All in all, fitting and filling a swimming pool doesn’t have to be too expensive!
Plant Trees and Bushes
You might not know this, but plants make a place cooler.
If there’s a plant in the way, the sun can’t bake the ground, the fencing, or the side of the house it’s facing.
That means less heat absorption during the warm months of the year, which are getting pretty hot and humid now!
Trees especially are good at cooling down the garden.
Their branches and leaves provide canopy cover, they make sure there are cool patches for the bugs and critters to call home, and they can even provide water directly to the surrounding area through evapotranspiration.
All in all, the more plants you have, the cooler the garden will be, and that’s very good news for all life within!
Is summer heating your house up?
If you want to spend time outdoors without sweating and burning, make sure you focus your attention on the garden. It can be a very cool place to be when you design it just right!
