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Four Brussels sprouts plants totally and utterly frazzled. Have replacements I can put in in their place tonight. So could be worse.
Two courgette plants looking very much the worse for wear. The Soleil that wasn't doing well anyway will just about survive but is now looking even worse. I can't see it producing more fruit. Will remove and use the space for something else. The Black Beauty next door looks like about 80% of the leaves won't survive long. Splotched with huge patches of yellow. I could remove that too. Will remove the cardboard from underneath the top layer of muck while I'm at it. (The three other courgette plants are OK. Five was too many anyway, so not heartbreaking.)
And the sweet corn plants have suffered too. The silks were just starting to emerge and I was hoping the male flowers in the tillers would provide enough pollen, but the hot wind has dried up the silks and leaves. So not looking good. Fingers crossed for some cobs...
In fact, writing this, I realise that there is a stretch of the veg patch that has suffered much worse than the rest. The tomato plants, all in line with the above, look awful this morning, so haven't perked up in the night, which I hoped they'd do. Leaves dry and rolled or limp. Same on the exposed and the shaded side, so I'm guessing wind damage rather than just the sun. A few of them are looking a bit terminal. Dry, rolled leaves aren't great but the plants will make new ones higher up, so I'm not worried about them. They've got plenty of fruit on and if they don't make more, it wouldn't be the end of the world. The ones that bother me most are the limp ones. Fortunately not many like that, but both Montserrats are in that category.
The pepper plants in front of the toms have fared better, but lots if not all of the burgeoning peppers need to be removed.
The Charlotte plants that weren't doing well have given up the ghost, but they were going to do that anyway.
Surprisingly, the melon and squash plants are not significantly worse than they were before. Leeks have frazzled leaf tips but otherwise doing OK. Other brassicas apart from the sprout plants mentioned above all OK. So good news there.
On the wildlife front, no idea how birds will have fared. They were struggling in the wind yesterday afternoon. But my impression is that a few are going for yet another clutch of young. Plenty carrying off insects this morning. No idea where they're finding them, as the wasps are doing a brilliant job in my veg patch. I have a new-found respect for wasps after these last couple of days. My fence posts are lengths of rebar with beer cans on top to stop people poking their eyes out on them. A couple of weeks back, Mr Snoop warned me to watch out because there are wasps nesting inside the cans. And indeed they are. How they have survived, I do not know. A tin can must get amazingly hot in the sun. But there they are, still. Guard wasps on duty, so they must have larvae. There are dozens of wasps drinking from the barrels and the lids I've put down and filled with water for them and the birds.
Arachnophobe warning: skip next paragraph.
While inspecting the tomato plants, I had a check on the spiders' webs. Some abandoned and torn, which I put down to the wind. Until I spotted a small spider making advances on a big fat orb weaver. Who had what I initially thought was a sloughed skin in her web, but which might have been a previous suitor... Didn't fancy the small one's chances if that was the case. Once I'd spotted that one, I started to see other webs containing smaller dead spiders in them. So the spider population has plummeted, but the ladies will get fatter as a result (if I'm right) and their webs will get bigger, so overall probably the same anti-moth outcome. But far more intimidating for picking tomatoes...
As for the tomatoes, shade might have been useful, but I have nothing suitable. Also, it wasn't so much the heat as the wind combined with the heat. It was blowing stuff about and anything I use as shade cover might itself do damage in a high wind. We've had very hot weather and very windy weather, but never the two so bad together. The tomato plants are quite close (45-50 cm) and very dense, so the soil itself (mulched with compost) is in shade from the plants themselves and doesn't get very hot. But I do need to think of a solution if this is going to be a regular occurrence with climate change.
Your point about soil getting hot is a good one, though, and I've decided not to use muck as a surface mulch. Straw would be better as it's much paler. Worse for slugs and snails, though.