29 Vegetables That Thrive in Heat While Everyone Else’s Garden Dies

My tomato plant is taller than me and has one whole tomato on it.

That was last summer. I’ve spent a lot of money on this hobby and haven’t gotten a lot out of it. Last year I put in like $40 in tomatoes and it was so hot all the plants died before I got a single fruit. It only rained a couple of times all summer and the heat was ridiculous.

Here’s what nobody tells you at the garden center: most “summer vegetables” secretly hate summer. But there’s a whole other roster from Africa, India, Mexico, and Southeast Asia, places where an American heat wave is just called weather. Your June isn’t a threat to these plants. It’s a homecoming.

This list works from Minnesota to Phoenix, and I’ll flag the spots where timing matters. Here are 29 vegetables that want your worst weather.

1. Okra

In the July and August heat, everything dies except okra. A few peppers sometimes manage to limp along.

I haven’t found anything that is easier to grow through 100 plus degree summers than okra. Easy, mostly pest resistant, cranks out spears like they were going out of style and just laughs off the sun without even wilting. It’s amazing.

The one problem I’ve hit was ants. I used a mix of borax and powdered sugar on my okra garden and now all the ants are gone. They were eating it all.

Someone once told me that when they got in trouble as a kid, they weren’t spanked, they were sent out to pick okra without gloves. Brutal, and also useful intel. Grow Clemson Spineless 80 and skip the suffering. Stewart’s Zeebest gets huge and the okra doesn’t get woody as fast, and the burgundy type stays tender even at six inches.

Harvest often and small, and roast the pods instead of boiling them, which is what makes the slime.

2. Sweet Potatoes

They don’t tolerate 90 degree weather. They prefer it.

Plant slips once your soil hits 65 degrees and ignore them for four months. They’re drought-resistant, and you don’t even need ground. I’ve seen real harvests pulled out of 10 gallon grow bags on an apartment balcony.

Don’t throw away the leaves either. Stir fry sweet potato leaves, the young ones. Bloody gorgeous.

3. Malabar Spinach

A friend gave me some Malabar spinach seed a few years back and it took off like wildfire. I had it growing until the first freeze, and it seemed like the hotter it got the more it produced. Love that stuff. It climbs, so give it a trellis, or let it run up your okra stalks.

Honest notes: it’s not good in salads because it is slimy. Cooking works. I chop it, wash and squeeze it three times, then sauté it with garlic. And be patient. My first season it produced very little, but by the second and third season, much better.

4. Yardlong Beans

In the South, where heat and humidity are the problem and nighttime temps don’t drop below 80 until at least September, the things that really thrive are peppers, eggplants, certain squashes (spaghetti squash grows like a weed), sweet potatoes, okra, pole beans, red noodle beans, and cowpeas.

If you live in a particularly hot and humid place, I especially recommend noodle beans. I put mine on an 8 foot tall bamboo tipi trellis and they swallowed it. We had more beans than we knew what to do with! They produced 18 inch long pencil thin purple pods for three solid months! We even ended up freezing a couple gallon bags full of cut beans for later.

Pick them at pencil thickness. Let them fatten and they go fibrous.

5. Black-Eyed Peas

And their cousins. Pink eyed purple hull peas are AMAZING and they love heat! I can get 3 to 4 harvests off one planting. Just fertilize them again after each flush and watch them go again. You can shell them fresh or leave them in the pods, let them dry out and shell them later when you need them.

I plant my okra between 2 rows of cowpeas. They both love the heat and do fantastic. I’m on my 2nd planting of peas already. As legumes they also fix nitrogen, so they’re improving your soil while feeding you.

6. Tepary Beans

Native to the Sonoran Desert, which should tell you everything. They tolerate sandy, alkaline soil and actually prefer drying out between waterings.

Indigenous farmers grew these in Arizona for centuries before irrigation existed. The most drought-adapted bean in North America.

7. Amaranth

Grow it for the leaves. Amaranth and Egyptian spinach are a good spinach substitute for greens in the summer, Everglades tomato does well in the heat, and tromboncino squash and cucuzzi squash are more vine borer resistant. I grow pumpkins almost all year because we can, and eat those like young squash.

Look for Edible Red Leaf, and if you let a few plants go to seed, the seeds are richer in protein than most grains.

8. New Zealand Spinach

Not a true spinach, which is exactly why it works. Real spinach dies very quickly in heat.

This one comes from the coasts of Australia and New Zealand, handles drought on top of heat, and once it’s cooked you honestly can’t tell the difference.

9. Purslane

The weed you’ve been pulling all these years is a vegetable that thrives above 100 degrees.

Succulent leaves, a lemony crunch, and it grows from Chicago to Phoenix without asking permission. Mexican cooks have been turning it into verdolagas forever.

One rule: grow it from seed or forage your own yard. Don’t eat the sidewalk stuff, you have no idea what’s been sprayed on it.

10. Eggplant

Of all the nightshades, eggplant loves heat the most, and the long skinny Japanese types handle it even better than the big Italian globes.

I have grown Japanese eggplants, string beans, bell peppers, Armenian cucumbers, snake gourd, and bitter gourd for several years without any issues.

Wait until nights stay above 60 before transplanting. If a real scorcher pushes past 95 and the flowers start dropping, a cheap piece of shade cloth fixes it.

11. Hot Peppers

While half my garden struggles, my peppers are living their best life. Jalapeños, serranos, shishitos, habaneros, they all keep producing when it’s brutal out.

A suggestion for really hot climates: water the peppers, or any plant really, early in the morning. It gives them time to soak up the water before the heat sets in and it decreases the likelihood of cooking your plants.

Peppers generally do okay up to 100 degrees but can sag a little if temps go over that. Some bell peppers can become sunburned, so a little shade will help. West facing walls are my friend. Getting that 3 to 4pm shade saves them.

12. Sweet Peppers

Bells are fussier than hot peppers, but ‘Sweet Banana’, ‘Cubanelle’, and ‘Giant Marconi’ take heat far better than the blocky supermarket types.

Two more pepper notes while we’re here. Topping peppers makes the plant bush out more, but also increases the time to harvest, so don’t top at all if you’re in zone 8 or colder. And peppers are secretly perennials. In a mild winter climate, mulch them well and the same plant comes back bigger next year.

Friends of mine in DFW use a shade cover over the entire garden from June to September. This year they have strong rosemary, pepper, and jalapeño growth even in the summer heat.

13. Tomatillos

Tomatillos are very easy to grow and go crazy in the Texas heat. Great for salsa.

They’re more productive than tomatoes, less blight-prone, and they have one quirk: plant at least two, because a lone tomatillo refuses to pollinate itself. When the papery husk splits, that’s your harvest signal.

14. Cherry Tomatoes

Big tomatoes drop their flowers when nights stay hot. The last couple years have been terrible for mine, so hot I had to buy shades to hang over the raised beds. I used to have a lot of produce and gave a lot away. The last two years, very little production.

Cherries keep setting anyway. It rained last week, and the temperature the next day was 89 with a real feel of 114. I grew some Candyland tomatoes for the first time, and holy crap they are still THRIVING in full sun even on the hot days. I have one that has been in the raised beds since April, and it’s absolutely massive and still producing an insane amount of tiny, super sweet tomatoes.

‘Sun Gold’ is the other workhorse, and the tiny Everglades tomato fruits straight through a Florida summer, which is the hardest test a tomato can pass.

15. Ground Cherries

A tomatillo relative wrapped in a paper husk, with a flavor weirdly close to pineapple.

Serious heat tolerance, and the fruit drops to the ground when ripe so there’s no guessing.

16. Summer Squash

Zucchini and yellow squash take off in heat and are drought-tolerant once established. In zones 3 through 8, a June planting means squash by August.

Check daily once they start producing. A zucchini goes from dinner-sized to baseball bat overnight, and nobody wants the baseball bat. You will have too much either way. That’s the deal you’re making.

17. Winter Squash

The name lies. “Winter” refers to storage, not growing season.

A gardener I know in the Mojave Desert, where the temperature reaches up to 115 in the shade, has grown summer squash and has had great success growing butternut squash, which was especially abundant in her extremely hot and dry climate. And Seminole pumpkin was shaped by Florida heat and humidity, so nothing your backyard throws at it will register.

18. Corn

It descended from a tropical grass and can take 110 degrees for short stretches. Growth slows above 95, but it doesn’t die, it waits.

Last summer the one plant that seemed to love the sun was my corn. It was standing like a soldier and my waterings helped it through the brutal heat. Plantable through June in zones 3 to 10, and if sweet corn feels played out, popping corn grows beautifully in the same heat.

19. Armenian Cucumber

Plot twist: it’s not a cucumber. It’s a melon that happens to taste like one, and that’s why it keeps producing in heat that shuts real cucumbers down.

Never bitter, climbs anything, and quietly beloved by gardeners in California’s Central Valley and Texas.

20. Cucumbers

Real cucumbers can handle weather up to about 90 if the soil never dries out. The whole game is moisture and shade.

Don’t trust the seed packet on this one. My summer months can have several weeks of high 90s to mid 100 degrees with high humidity. Last summer I had an area of my garden with “full sun” listed as needed, but the plants in it got fried alive even with daily watering.

Deep morning water, three inches of mulch, afternoon shade. Or skip the drama and grow the Armenian type above instead.

21. Cantaloupe

Melons need two to three months of steady heat to get sweet, and they like it dry while ripening. A brutal summer is literally the recipe.

Keep the water coming while the vines grow, then ease off as the fruit ripens. A ripe cantaloupe slips off the vine with barely a tug and smells like sugar from three feet away.

22. Watermelon

Same logic, bigger payoff. The long hot summer everyone complains about is exactly what a watermelon is for. Short-season gardeners up north should grab a small icebox type, which ripens weeks faster than the picnic monsters.

23. Luffa

I had really good luck with luffa last year. When they’re young, they’re like zucchini, and when they’re dried, they’re great to use as sponges. A few years ago when we had 6 weeks of 100 degrees, it was my only veggie garden plant that was not just happy, but grew like crazy!

It needs 110 plus frost-free days, so northern gardeners should start it indoors.

24. Swiss Chard

Equally happy in cold and heat. It wilts dramatically at noon and bounces back by dinner, like it’s doing it for attention.

Its cousin perpetual spinach is the sleeper pick of this whole list. Mine laughed at a 110 degree summer and an 18 degree cold snap this winter (covered). It’s delicious and versatile and completely idiot proof. I planted mine in early summer. It’s now mid spring and that plant is HUGE.

25. Collard Greens

A southern staple precisely because they grow through the heat, spring to frost, without interruption.

Everyone plants kale instead because the internet told them to, then July happens. A farmer once told me about his summer kale crop: “Yup, it grew great. Man is that stuff nasty. My goat, horses and cow wouldn’t eat it either.” Collards don’t pull that. They just keep being collards.

26. Mizuna

After most of my veggies died in the 115 degree summer heat last year, I started trying less traditional things I’ve never eaten or grown before. Two kinds of amaranth, red orach leaves, a long cucumber from Japan, Chinese white celery and mizuna.

Mizuna is the keeper. Mild, a little peppery, and it won’t bolt the second the thermometer climbs. Cut it young for salads or let it mature for stir fries.

27. Arugula

Young plants bolt, but mature arugula withstands surprisingly high temperatures for a leafy green. Sow it in waves and give June seedlings a bit of shade cloth. The heat cranks up the peppery bite, which is either a perk or a warning depending on how you feel about arugula.

28. Broccoli (Yes, Really)

Standard broccoli bolts the moment summer shows up. The hybrids ‘Sun King’ and ‘Lieutenant’ were bred not to. They stay sweet through weather that turns regular broccoli bitter, which still feels vaguely illegal to me.

29. Butterhead Lettuce

The most heat-tolerant, bolt-resistant lettuce class there is.

Water deep, mulch heavy, pick the outer leaves instead of cutting the whole head, and you’ll be eating salad in August while your neighbors explain what happened to theirs.

The Plants Were Never the Problem

Confession: I have no will to garden in July or August. But my basil, marigolds, purple hulls, grapes and peppers have thrived with me doing absolutely nothing for 2 months. I haven’t even watered beyond rain. I’m sure they would be doing even better had I done something, but I ain’t been interested in nothing but air conditioning for the last 2 months.

That’s the whole secret. My neighbor’s garden looks like a drought documentary every August because he’s growing plants that wish they lived somewhere else. Mine survives on neglect because I’m not.

The sun was never the problem. The seed catalog was.