Planting in Summer

I'm sure you've read in a million places that the best time to plant is in spring and fall.  That is pretty much true.  The reality of it though is that summer is often a time when many of us are tempted to indulge in all the pretty flowers and vegetables that we see in the stores.  Quite a few of them are on clearance too, a further temptation.  The good news is that there IS a way to get these last minute finds to live well and prosper.
I for one am no exception to the case.  I've spent the last month and a half redoing an entire garden bed, and my husband has yet to meet a pepper plant that he doesn't feel compelled to bring home.  While I'm no master gardener, I have some experience with this one now.  I believe that the key with summer plantings here in Texoma unsurprisingly is water.
What we need to remember here is that summers in Texoma run hot, real hot.  The temperatures have been up around 100 degrees every day for weeks now.  Most of Texoma is prairie land, so the afternoon sun burns down on our garden beds often with very little tree cover to shade it.  Finally the winds in early summer scour the moisture right out of the first inch or so of the soil in our garden beds.  Trouble is that's exactly where the roots of our newly planted darlings live.  They haven't had the months of spring to dig in and branch out.  The constant drying and scouring out of the first layer of topsoil can be a death sentence.  Even if you're watering every other day, the summer babies can bite it.
Keeping my new plants alive has required frequent watering to keep that topmost layer of soil  moist.  For me this has meant two waterings a day while it's so hot, once in the morning and again in the afternoon.    This is especially true for the many plants we have in pots, but only slightly less true for the things that we've stuck in the ground.  My husband and I work together to ensure that nothing dries out.  This has been the only way that we've been able to keep late plantings from dying off.  Once they've shown that they have established good roots, usually with a flush of new growth, we can ease off a bit.

Caveat One:  Don't bother with plants that aren't made for the summer sun.  Pansies for example will burn up on you out here, regardless of how much you soak them.  Begonias have no business in any of my gardens, where I can't offer them any shade.

Caveat Two:  Take care with all of this not to overwater your established plants.  I have a series of pots near the front door, a couple of which contain very established pentas and sedum.  I noticed that the once happy pots were looking a bit depressed, and realized that I was accidentally overwatering them along with their summer planted buddies.  Avoiding that pot is bringing them back to uprightedness.