What are your favorite hot and humid weather plants?

The dog days of summer are upon us, and as surely as the sun bakes bare ground, half the garden will surrender to the heat and wither.  While that's expected of cold weather crops like lettuce and broccoli, many varieties of tomato, pepper, and other normal garden plants also fail as the temperature climbs.  When reading the back of the seed packets, it isn't always clear which varieties are actually adapted to the sticky hot American South, the arid Southwest, etc.  I'd like to hear about your experiences growing in a hot and/or humid climate and what plants do well (or horribly) for you.  I'll give some examples to start:

Tomato: Purple Cherokee - gloriously productive if the temp stays between about 70-85F, but goes dormant or dies above that
              Roma - sad, only produces until the weather is in the 80's then dies
              Cherry (hybrids) - I bought a few packs of assorted cherry tomato seeds a few years ago and try to cross pollinate them.  I now get constant production from about a third of my starts while the other 2/3 die by 90F
Okra (Hill Country Red) - consistent, productive, and resilient.  I usually get one harvestable pod per plant every other day
Amaranth (Hopi Red) - almost becomes a weed with how quickly it grows and how many seeds it produces.  Provides a pretty purple color on the green and brown garden background
True Indigo - one of my favorite shrub layer plants.  Produces countless blossoms (bees love it) and is a N-fixer.  I trim the limbs regularly to use as compost/mulch
Vitex - lavender-like scent and crazy drought tolerance.  Blooms are gorgeous and attract pollinators all day long

Mosquitoes are the only things thriving here right now.

Fruit trees for me.  They love the heat and give me sweet juicy treats to get through hot days.

Although I have been thinking of adding some cut flowers to the garden next year so I can bring the garden inside when I'm hiding from the heat.

Tom's wild cherry tomato keeps producing all summer in the misdsouth. Oddly, it is also somewhat frost tolerant. The outer leaves will get frostbit in a short light frost. If it gets below 36F* I expect it to die like all the other tomatoes.

Arkansas Traveler tomato slows down a bit, but keeps setting fruit for my full summer.

Cowpeas are grown by farmers with only rain. It is usually planted about the same time as our seasonal drought begins. Cowpeas at Southern Seedsavers Exchange.

Joylynn Hardesty wrote:Tom's wild cherry tomato keeps producing all summer in the misdsouth. Oddly, it is also somewhat frost tolerant. The outer leaves will get frostbit in a short light frost. If it gets below 36F* I expect it to die like all the other tomatoes.

Arkansas Traveler tomato slows down a bit, but keeps setting fruit for my full summer.

Cowpeas are grown by farmers with only rain. It is usually planted about the same time as our seasonal drought begins. Cowpeas at Southern Seedsavers Exchange.

I bought a farm-sized bag of cowpeas this year and am blown away by the growth!  Mine are at 6+ inches in less than two weeks after sowing

Hi, excuse me. I know it's not related with the threat but i cannot find info  about this. Whats The name of that brick that allow to create curved shapes?

Thanks

Mitchell Johnson wrote:

Joylynn Hardesty wrote:Tom's
wild cherry tomato keeps producing all summer in the misdsouth. Oddly, it is also somewhat frost tolerant. The outer leaves will get frostbit in a short light frost. If it gets below 36F* I expect it to die like all the other tomatoes.

Arkansas Traveler tomato slows down a bit, but keeps setting fruit for my full summer.

Cowpeas are grown by farmers with only rain. It is usually planted about the same time as our seasonal drought begins. Cowpeas at Southern Seedsavers Exchange.

I bought a farm-sized bag of cowpeas this year and am blown away by the growth!  Mine are at 6+ inches in less than two weeks after sowing

I got these bricks from a neighbor, so I do not know the exact name.  The closest I found online were "curved edge interlocking bricks," but sites seem to have different names for them.  

Ronaldo Montoya wrote:Hi, excuse me. I know it's not related with the threat but i cannot find info  about this. Whats The name of that brick that allow to create curved shapes?

Thanks

The closer to the equator one goes, and the hotter the weather, the more useful it is to seek plants and information originating in the tropics.  Be sure to parse out humid from arid, and the search is on.  When I lived in Georgia and Florida, my experiences from living in Bangladesh did me good.  There is a whole cadre of heat-loving veggies that most Americans don't even know about...greens like kangkong/water spinach, basella/Indian spinach, and talinum/Florida lettucs, all of which thrive in hot humid places and are edible as salad greens as well as cooked.  There are eight or ten more cucurbits than the ones Americans commonly grow, all of which are more or less like summer squash when picked and eaten young....snake gourd, ash gourd, bottle gourd, teasel gourd, and so on.  Yardlong beans. Okra of course, and roselle, and don't forget sweet potatoes (and their very edible greens!).  Pay attention to varieties....there are winter squash that thrive, and resist the insects and diseases that make short work of "mainstream" varieties like Acorn and Butternut. (thinking Seminole pumpkins and the "African" squash now popular in parts of Georgia) Ditto with eggplant and peppers....look to Oriental and Indian varieties for starters.  

Alder Burns wrote:The closer to the equator one goes, and the hotter the weather, the more useful it is to seek plants and information originating in the tropics.  Be sure to parse out humid from arid, and the search is on.  When I lived in Georgia and Florida, my experiences from living in Bangladesh did me good.  There is a whole cadre of heat-loving veggies that most Americans don't even know about...greens like kangkong/water spinach, basella/Indian spinach, and talinum/Florida lettucs, all of which thrive in hot humid places and are edible as salad greens as well as cooked.  There are eight or ten more cucurbits than the ones Americans commonly grow, all of which are more or less like summer squash when picked and eaten young....snake gourd, ash gourd, bottle gourd, teasel gourd, and so on.  Yardlong beans. Okra of course, and roselle, and don't forget sweet potatoes (and their very edible greens!).  Pay attention to varieties....there are winter squash that thrive, and resist the insects and diseases that make short work of "mainstream" varieties like Acorn and Butternut. (thinking Seminole pumpkins and the "African" squash now popular in parts of Georgia) Ditto with eggplant and peppers....look to Oriental and Indian varieties for starters.  

Those are exactly the types of plants that work here.  The Malabar Spinach (basella) grows very well and reseeds itself, so I've gladly let it take over a short fence.  Jewels of Opar (a Talinum species) are native to my area and grow readily.  As a bonus, the chickens love their leaves.  I saw kangkong at HMart and successfully rooted the stems in a glass of water in the window, so once I put together the water planter box, I'll try expanding that.  There are several other SE Asian greens I'd like to try, but many are import restricted or hard to find from reputable sources.

You're right about the standard squash varieties.  I planted acorn and spaghetti the past few years but only got a few gourds before either the summer or squash bugs killed them.  Butternut is supposed to be more resistant to pests, so I plan to try that once temps aren't in the 90's every day.  I'll look into the varieties you listed and maybe try them next summer...  thanks for the recommendations!

Another shoutout for cowpeas here in South Carolina (7b / 8a). I have good and bad years with most vegetables, but the Pinkeye Purple Hull cowpeas seem to produce no matter what.

The infamous Everglades tomato does well here, even self-seeding in woodchips and shady forested areas.

I tried the Seminole pumpkins a couple times. The plants did well, but it seems like our season is barely too short. We got a few ripe ones, but lots of immature squash still on the vine when first frost hit. The next year I tried South Anna Butternut with great results. Heavy producer, almost no bug damage. I believe South Anna is a cross between Seminole and Waltham butternuts.

The title doesn't say which region or climate we're talking about, and "hot and humid weather" mean very different things in Albion and Alabama. Since the OP is in zone 8 or 9 in the South, I think it's best to use that context.

And unfortunately, it's slim pickings. Traditional vegetable varieties were mostly bred in Europe or in the northeastern and midwestern US, or more recently on the west coast. None of those places have climates like the South. And even the wild species that most fruits and vegetables were bred from are almost all either from cool temperate regions, Mediterranean regions, or in the case of New World plants, alpine areas of the tropics. There are of course south and southeast Asian plants, but those are typically fully tropical. Aside from a fairly small region of China, almost nowhere on earth has the climate of the South, with long, hot and humid summers but also comparatively cold winters that get substantially below freezing on occasion.

As a result, not only are there not many varieties bred for these climate conditions, few plants adapted to such a climate have even been domesticated in the first place. Additionally, there's not much can be done culturally to make things work. Southern California is too dry for most traditional fruits and vegetables, but that's easy enough to fix, just irrigate. Alaska has a really short season, but there are a lot of varieties that mature and ripen early. In the South, the issues are the heat and humidity in the summer, and the subsequent disease and pest pressure, and the cold in the winter. There's no easy fix for those things.

To an extent, you can mitigate things by finding the most pest and disease resistant varieties and trialing them. Millennial Gardner on YouTube has done a good job of finding some good ones, and also busting the ones that are claimed to be but fail when put to the test.

To an extent, you can also pull from more tropical agricultural traditions, especially for annuals. Roselle is too long season, but sweet potatoes work great, for example. Occasionally, there are even plants that have a decent amount of breeding and selection already done so there's varieties adapted to the region, like the aforementioned sweet potatoes. Zone-pushing is often particularly effective in the South given the tropical-like conditions in summer, and the cold spells in winter, while severe, are short, so protecting and actively heating citrus for example is eminently doable.

So:

For tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and some other common vegetables, see Millennial Gardener's recommendations or those of other people who have been fairly rigorous in their selection and trialing.

For greens, you might be able to use sweet potatoes if the flea beetles aren't too bad in your garden.  Ditto for amaranth, though for them there are a handful of other insects that are likely to cause issues. Madagascar spinach though is almost bulletproof outside of some grasshopper damage.

For beans, focus on either traditional southern varieties like cowpeas/black eyed peas, or on Indian and Chinese varieties, though be mindful that some Chinese varieties are from northern China or from tropical China and might not work, and a lot of Indian varieties are actually from semi-arid regions or dry-summer regions and might not actually be that pest resistant.

For carrots, beets, turnips, and the like, give up. Ditto for potatoes for most parts of the South. It makes far more sense to grow sweet potatoes, hardy taro species, perhaps jicama if your season is long enough.

For herbs, it's mostly fine as far as perennial varieties go. Annuals other than basil will almost all bolt far too quickly to be worthwhile. For some, like dill, you can find more heat-adapted substitutes like fennel, though expect to lose the whole crop some years to caterpillars.

Also:

Give up! Well, sort of. Learn to grow in the shoulder seasons. Late summer and early fall tend to be much less humid, and therefore generally have much lower pest and disease pressure, and the spring warms up very quickly most years, so if you've given some plants a head-start you can get them to harvest before the summer really sets in. Also, learn to use plastic in winter and shade cloth in summer. Winters are mild most of the time with just short cold spells, usually with clear skies--which means growing under plastic through almost the whole winter is perfectly viable and likely to be completely pest-free. Plants that can take a light frost are the best candidates. And don't be afraid to plant your early spring plants in the fall and pray they survive the winter. If we get a mild winter, it's totally possible they will, and then come March rather than waiting for your peas to sprout and grow, you'll already have three foot tall plants. Maybe they don't make it and you lose $0.30 of pea seeds. Oh well, plant some more at the normal planting time.

Similarly, you can "plant" out tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and such plants in pots and grow bags surprisingly early, especially if the containers they're in are black and sitting in full sun. Just watch out for some late frosts, but otherwise, you should be able to have a super early crop of summer plants going, and once the soil warms up, you can plant out your regular small transplants, and you can plant out your give one gallon plants that are about to start fruiting. You'd be surprised how little blossom end rot you get in May while the weather still feels like a New England summer.