Wonderful Weeds

The heat is up and all of my plants are growing like, uh well, weeds.  All thanks to the actual weeds growing in among the plants  The four o' clocks especially are blooming in the morning. By this time they are usually just hanging on and waiting for September to roll around.
The cantaloupe plant has started growing again after fruiting and I hope to see new flowers soon for a possible fall crop.
The tomatoes in the back are a healthy green with many flowers. Trying to pollinate early in the morning before the heat rises in hopes of having more tomatoes.  Not much of a crop yet this year.
Planted some leek bottoms which are already double the size they started out as and are still very healthy looking. Hopefully they'll keep it up and we'll have leeks available all year.

Gren Mulch to the Rescue

This is not the time of year to be weeding the garden. If there's weeds then you have a great protection from the unbearable heat, might be setting another record this year of most 100 degree or hotter days.
The area I did remove weeds from is looking really bad now whereas the area I left the weeds alone is still looking pretty good. The basil plants and the cucumber plants are what I'm basing this off of. I've lost the basil plant already in the weeded area and the cucumber, although still alive this morning, is fading fast.

Green Mulch

We're going on day 26 of 100 degree weather. Most of my plants are really feeling the heat and trying to wither on me. On the bright side, literally the bright side of the house even, the planter that's full of weeds is doing pretty well. I pulled half of the weeds out yesterday trying to make it look better since the weeds are growing up and over the little concrete wall I put in.
Today I'll check on the plants to see how much the weeds were protecting the plants I actually wanted.

Green Mulch

It's not the typical use of the word green when describing compost. What I mean is the use of living green plants to help prevent moisture from escaping the soil. You might be more familiar with the term weeds but in the end there will be no weeds since the meaning of a weed is a plant that is growing somewhere you don't want it to. Sure you don't want all plants to grow in the beds such as grasses but after these are removed the ramaining plants can actually help your crop by promoting competitive growth even though they aren't really competing for root space.
The key to successfully green mulch is to be selective as to which plants you will let grow. In the end what you have effectively done is companion planting. Most of us know some of the basic companion plantings but for some reason can't wrap our brains around maybe a less noticable benefit to letting some plants grow in the area.
Plants are far more sensitive to infrared light than our eyes are and since over half of the radiation from the sun hits our planet as infrared light it is important to know what our plants think about this. Infrared light stimulates growth which is why plants grow faster as the days get longer. Plants also reflect a bit of the infrared light and thus when smaller plants reflect this light up to our crop plants, the crop plants get more infrared light and, although they might not realize they are competing with space, they respond to the added infrared light and grow even faster. They push their roots down and produce more leaves. Again, they don't know that they are competing with another plant or what kind of plant they are trying to compete with. So, if you are letting plants like clover grow under the crop what you have is a competitive response to a plant that isn't trying to compete and is instead merely helping to hold moisture in the ground giving an added bonus to the growth effect.