7 Perfect Vegetables to Grow in Hot Climates

It gets hot in the greenhouse Jacques. Way too hot for me. In fact, it doesn't just get hot there. It gets hot in our climate and maybe in yours too. I mean, last year was definitely one of the hottest, driest years on our record. So yeah, in this video, we're going to give you seven crops that do really well in hot, dry weather. Our first crop for heat loving climates is going to be spinach, but actually not this beautiful spinach that I have right here. This will not love the heat. In fact, I'm talking about Malabar spinach named after a region in India, where it is from. Sort of a tropical, subtropical vining plant that you can use the leaves of in curries and stir fries and such. But it grows quite a bit differently from our classic spinach friend right here. In fact, you really want to give it a healthy amount of soil, rich, well-draining soil. Keep that soil moist at all times. If it dries out, the flavor goes a bit bitter. And you really want to put it on some kind of climbing structure, trellis, cage, et cetera, because it is a crazy vining plant. In fact, about 50 days after you plant it out, just start harvesting it. Just start eating it as much as you want because it grows like absolute crazy on the sort of vining setup. You've got two different types, Bacilla alba and Bacilla rubra. Alba has the white stem and rubra has the red stem. Kind of dealer's choice. I've grown red in the past. I've enjoyed it. But to be honest with you, it works in the heat. But if I can grow standard spinach, I will. Because I do prefer this flavor. But let's say you're in Arizona. Let's say you're in New Mexico. This might not really be an option for you much of the year. So give Malabar spinach a try. This next one is a classic Southern staple and that is okra. Now there are a lot of different varieties of okra. Clemson spineless 80 is probably the most classic and spineless is the key word there because there are some okras that have some crazy spines. I remember reading a review for this one called Alabama red, where somebody literally said they had to burn down their garden because there were so many spikes that they couldn't even harvest it. So here's what you want to do. You want to grow your okra out beforehand because it's a heat loving plant. This is truly one that loves the heat more than probably any other that I could think of. Now, this is a staple in the South, which makes sense. And it hails from Ethiopia and Africa. When you plant this out, you want to kind of do 18 inch spacing. And the cool thing about okra is that it actually forms very tall spires and it's not very leafy. So it's actually a really nice thing that you could interplant around. As the okra gets taller, you could put things underneath it like lettuce, and the okra will shade it out and provide you a second harvest underneath. There are some like funny old methods with okra where you actually beat the side of the plant. It's called okra blooping. And that's supposed to stimulate more growth. I don't know about that, but it is a wonderful summer crop. And just be aware that as it gets older, these spines on the stalk will actually be very irritating on your skin. And it produces kind of a latex sap. So you want to wear gloves. You don't want to rub up against the plant too much. Next up we have a crop that I absolutely love, but I've only grown once in my life. And it's not even related to the crop here, but they share a name and that would be the sweet potato. This of course is a field of potatoes and it's actually coming to the end of its life soon. So there's going to be a huge harvest coming up soon on the channel. But sweet potatoes are a crop that are thought to be native to Central and South America. But there's evidence that they were cultivated from about 1100 AD onwards in Polynesia and was brought to the Americas from Polynesia. So a really interesting crop, but man, a sweet heat loving crop, if there ever was one. You've got four months worth of warm season that it needs to grow. And I'm talking, it really loves the heat, 80 Fahrenheit and above. It really is fine growing in that situation. But with sweet potatoes, not potatoes, what you need to do is make sure that soil is nice and loose. If you have the ability, I might add a bit of sand into that mixture. That's really helped me in my sweet potato cultivation. But what you want to do is get them in relatively early in the season. Once that temp starts to ramp upwards, keep them in the ground for at least four months. You can let them continue to grow. And then when frost starts to kill them off in the fall, you know the energy is shot down into that tuber. You can claw them out of the ground, one of the most fun harvesting experiences and have these monster honking sweet potatoes that store quite well throughout the season. Now if you're growing in a container, which is the only way I've ever grown them, 20 to 24 inch container, I really like a half wine barrel for them. Then you can make your own custom mix and plant them with slips. Now you can buy those slips in or what you can do is just take a sweet potato, stick some toothpicks in it, put the bottom half in water, let the slips come out the top and then snap them off, root those in water and plant them in the ground. We have a whole video on it, but we'll do another one here soon because it again is one of the most fun plants to grow. Much like the name implies, summer squash is actually a wonderful thing to grow during the summer when it starts getting too hot. Over here I have two of my early squashes planted out and they're really starting to respond to this spring heat because that's what they need. They need the heat to grow, need the heat to thrive. Now squash has been grown for over 8,000 years, at least in Mexico. It's been traced back that far. And if you want to grow a squash all year round and harvest it, even in the hottest times of the year, you can try to get away with the summer squash, which is the cucurbito pepo. But then there's also the Moscato varieties, which are like the things like butternut squash. When if harvested young can actually be in like a summer squash and those do really well on the heat. So if you want plenty of produce, actually so much so that there's a national giveaway of zucchini on some of these porch day, then definitely try out some summer squashes. But don't be stuck on the zucchini cause there's a lot of great varieties out there. One of my personal favorite is the duriani, which is more of like the Cusa style. So give them a try and you'll be happy to see that you'll have plenty of food to eat all through summer. Next up one of my favorite crops of all time, the versatility and the variety of this crop, not only but also the fact that it does really well in a hot dry climate. And of course that would be the humble pepper, of which I've grown over a hundred varieties in my lifetime. So peppers are thought to have originated in Central America. In fact, the Nahuatl peoples of Mexico were the first to cultivate them. All hail from one initial species, Capsicum annuum. Now there's thousands of cultivars and also different species like Fluxuosum or Chinense, et cetera. But what you really need to know is that if you're in a hot climate, zones nine, 10, 11 plus, you can plant pepper seeds directly in the ground as soil temps get to about 70 Fahrenheit or so. Now, if you're in a cold climate, of course, you want to start those indoors about two months before your frost ends and then get them in the ground then. But they are one of the more heat tolerant solanaceous crops. Basically you have your tomatoes, your peppers, and your eggplants all related, all in the same family. And in that order is how they like the heat. Tomatoes like it a little bit less. Peppers are in that middle ground and then eggplants can really handle the heat. But these guys are so, so versatile. Sweets, hots, super hots, different colors, sizes, and varieties. The only thing I'll say for protecting them through a really hot time of the year is you do want to water them pretty deeply and infrequently and throw a bunch of mulch around them and then just sort of let them get blasted. I mean, 80 Fahrenheit and above, they can handle pretty well as long as you've controlled the moisture in the soil and made sure they have just a little bit of fertility. Little care tip, we've talked about this before here on the channel is you don't have to do what's called topping your pepper. What you might do is, you know, clip this top right here, let growth come out and bush this pepper out. It's a technique. You can do it. If I was going to do it, I'd do it on something perhaps like, like these, the Jimmy Nardello peppers, or maybe shishito peppers, those smaller ones. But if I wasn't going to do it, which I typically don't, that would be on my bigger peppers like Bells. They're only going to give you three, four, five per plant. Why slow that plant down? Now, if you are in a hot climate, you can extend that season by overwintering your pepper, cutting it down by about two thirds or so, removing most of the foliage and just leaving it in the ground. And it will come back as a perennial next year. So peppers might even be the best heat tolerant crop you can grow. If you want a truly heat tolerant bean, in fact, so heat tolerant that it's primarily grown in the desert Southwest, look no further than the tepary bean. These tiny beans are absolutely packed with flavor. They come in either bushing or climbing varieties and I grew them last year and it made the most delicious bean broth I've ever had. Now these can handle alkaline soils and sandy soils very well. In clay, it's a little bit trickier, which is what I have here. That's because they don't like that much water. They're truly heat and drought tolerant. Now if you're looking for a more traditional bean that does also work in the heat, then something like Kentucky wonder pole bean is a fantastic option. This is something that can tolerate more heat and growing up on the pole means that you do save a lot of space while getting a lot of beans, even when it gets really hot. Next up we have sunflowers. Absolutely my favorite flower, at least for the time being, partially because they do what you're seeing here. I didn't plant these. They're just coming back up because I had a honking mammoth sunflower in this area last year. And as I let that seed head die, I think birds and just the natural patterns of the wind kind of spread it around the garden and it's just popping up. So I have one in my onion bed, have one in my bed of alyssum here and I could not be happier. But this is a North American native cultivated by indigenous peoples in New Mexico and Arizona, 3000 years BC. 3000 BC, a very, very long time ago. And the cool thing about this plant is you think of it as these huge sort of flower heads and that's what a sunflower is. But in fact, it's not really true. You've got Jerusalem artichokes or sunchokes. That is in the same family, edible tubers. So more focusing on that tuberous part of the plant. You can actually eat every single part of a sunflower. I can eat this leaf. I could cut this stem open and eat it almost like a celery. In fact, last year Jacques and I ate an entire immature sunflower head. We roasted it up on our Epic Homesteading channel, which is really more the story of myself buying the property I'm in now and how I've built it out. So I encourage you to check that out. But it was absolutely delicious, I have to say. And I'm not just making that up, but why are we talking about it? It is a heat tolerant, heat loving plant growing up, so to speak, in an area that is quite hot and dry, Arizona, New Mexico. So when you plant this, care-wise, it's basically a set and forget. As long as the roots are well-established, it doesn't even require all too much water and you'll see it start to shoot up. In fact, like I said, you'll get volunteers pop up the first year you start growing sunflower and letting those seeds spread around. So for me, absolutely a must grow if you're in a hot, dry climate. These crops are guaranteed to work in a hot, dry climate. And we have a lot of them available at botanicalinterest.com. So definitely go grab some. And if you want anything else, shop.epicgardening.com to deck your garden out with beds, tools, et cetera. And until next time, my friends, stay cool and keep on growing.