How to Stay Safe and Cool in the Hot Weather

Please Keep Clean Water in Shallow Dishes to Help Birds Survive The Current Heat Wave!! by Koshyk

My heart bleeds for the parts of our country and the world where people have been under a heat wave for such a long time. Here on the East coast where I live, we had a week of the hot weather but only 3 days of the really brutal weather that others are experiencing. I worry about all of your gardens and farms that have had to suffer this heat wave.

But most of all I worry about you- the gardeners and farmers. I hope you are taking every precaution to prevent succumbing to this heat. After all, if you get sick from the heat, the gardens or farms will not have anyone to help in the future.

Noel Coward wrote the famous song that said, “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.” I will have to review the lyrics of the song, but I imagine that if Englishmen go out in the midday sun, they must be concerned about their gardens as all gardeners are. And a dog has to venture out in this heat when “nature calls” whether it is mad or not. But they do have products to keep dogs cool.   See here.

And they do have products for anyone who has to go out in the heat. I hope you are putting on, and reapplying sunscreen to exposed skin areas. I hope you are wearing good sunglasses and a hat.  Make sure you go out in the morning and evening; avoid 10-3.  Wear light fabrics, loose clothing, and light colors.  Take breaks.  If you start to feel lightheaded, nauseated or sick, get out of the sun immediately.  And take extra care with children and the elderly

To keep cool under your cap or hat, put a cold cabbage leaf on top of your head under the hat. They say that the great baseball player, Babe Ruth, did this to keep cool. (To make the cabbage really cold, you can put it in the freezer and then cook the unused part.)

There are polymer neck bands that you can buy to keep cool. The same polymers that I wrote about to help retain moisture in the soil are also used to make these neck bands.   See here. (Check out the craft ideas on their website that you might want to try if you are stuck indoors.) There are numerous companies that sell items to keep one cool- check sports or camping equipment. One company has towels that stay cool for 4 hours and one company from Australia has a great selection of sun hats and also sells clothes with a 98% UV protection.

I am sure you already know to keep hydrated by drinking a lot of water. But do not drink the water from your hose. Apparently when hoses are made from PVC, that can leach into the water.   See here.  I keep plastic bottles and freeze my water in these bottles so that the water stays cool longer. If you received a warning saying that it is unsafe to freeze plastic bottles, according to a Johns Hopkins professor, Professor Rolf Halden of Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health , this is false.   See here.

This GardenLady is not a physician so a good site to read about supplements to take if you have to be out in the heat and what to be concerned about if you think you are having heat exhaustion is from the University of Maryland Medical Center.  See here.

Stay safe and cool.

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