Smoke, Plant Health Tracking, and Your Garden
When smoke fills the valley there isn't much to be doing in your garden aside from keeping your plants watered. Even the spiders - who are hopefully helping to eat your tiny garden pests like aphids - you will notice making their webs around entrances to your house because they want to get inside and out of the smoke.
Having spiders and their webs in your garden is an organic way to help cut down aphids if you have them. You can also get lady bugs and release them into the aphid infested (most commonly brassicas = kale, broccoli, cauliflower, etc) areas of your garden so that they eat them up.
Another thing to note is that when we have heavy rains, you can end up with health problems with your trees. It is harsh in some cases, because the smoke lowers oxygen levels right after the too much moisture from the rains starts the disease process. When you have too much moisture - watering everyday combined with heavy rains - this can encourage fungus and disease for plants. Especially if drainage/air flow, and in some cases deepening on the plants preferred amount of light, sunlight isn't the best. Lack of oxygen and too much moisture is a breeding ground for ill health.
The picture below is a Dogwood tree that was affected by too much water. When you see signs like this that come all of a sudden after a spell of heavy rains, you can assume this may be causing the problem if the plant was other wise looking healthy right up to that point.
My solution to a problem like this is to cut back the watering until the plant shows you that it is recovering and creating new healthy growth. Then from there, after a cycle of growth and recovery has proven things are coming around, you can prune away any dead areas that are left.
When heavy smoke is here, the most important thing to do is take care of yourself, your children, and your animals first. I know first hand from trying to work out in heavy smoke that it is not a good idea to be exerting yourself outdoors when the air quality is below par.
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