Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway | Page 5

this head grow steadily larger
through the hottest and driest summer I had ever experienced. Realizing
I was witnessing revelation, I gave the plant absolutely no water,
though I did hoe out the weeds around it after I cut the seed stalks. I

harvested the unexpected lesson at the end of September. The cabbage
weighed in at 6 or 7 pounds and was sweet and tender.
Up to that time, all my gardening had been on thoroughly and
uniformly watered raised beds. Now I saw that elbow room might be
the key to gardening with little or no irrigating, so I began looking for
more information about dry gardening and soil/water physics. In spring
1989, I tilled four widely separated, unirrigated experimental rows in
which I tested an assortment of vegetable species spaced far apart in the
row. Out of curiosity I decided to use absolutely no water at all, not
even to sprinkle the seeds to get them germinating.
I sowed a bit of kale, savoy cabbage, Purple Sprouting broccoli, carrots,
beets, parsnips, parsley, endive, dry beans, potatoes, French sorrel, and
a couple of field cornstalks. I also tested one compactbush (determinate)
and one sprawling (indeterminate) tomato plant. Many of these
vegetables grew surprisingly well. I ate unwatered tomatoes July
through September; kale, cabbages, parsley, and root crops fed us
during the winter. The Purple Sprouting broccoli bloomed abundantly
the next March.
In terms of quality, all the harvest was acceptable. The root vegetables
were far larger but only a little bit tougher and quite a bit sweeter than
usual. The potatoes yielded less than I'd been used to and had thicker
than usual skin, but also had a better flavor and kept well through the
winter.
The following year I grew two parallel gardens. One, my "insurance
garden," was thoroughly irrigated, guaranteeing we would have plenty
to eat. Another experimental garden of equal size was entirely
unirrigated. There I tested larger plots of species that I hoped could
grow through a rainless summer.
By July, growth on some species had slowed to a crawl and they looked
a little gnarly. Wondering if a hidden cause of what appeared to be
moisture stress might actually be nutrient deficiencies, I tried spraying
liquid fertilizer directly on these gnarly leaves, a practice called foliar
feeding. It helped greatly because, I reasoned, most fertility is located
in the topsoil, and when it gets dry the plants draw on subsoil moisture,
so surface nutrients, though still present in the dry soil, become
unobtainable. That being so, I reasoned that some of these species
might do even better if they had just a little fertilized water. So I

improvised a simple drip system and metered out 4 or 5 gallons of
liquid fertilizer to some of the plants in late July and four gallons more
in August. To some species, extra fertilized water (what I call
"fertigation") hardly made any difference at all. But unirrigated winter
squash vines, which were small and scraggly and yielded about 15
pounds of food, grew more lushly when given a few 5-gallon,
fertilizer-fortified assists and yielded 50 pounds. Thirty-five pounds of
squash for 25 extra gallons of water and a bit of extra nutrition is a
pretty good exchange in my book.
The next year I integrated all this new information into just one garden.
Water-loving species like lettuce and celery were grown through the
summer on a large, thoroughly irrigated raised bed. The rest of the
garden was given no irrigation at all or minimally metered-out
fertigations. Some unirrigated crops were foliar fed weekly.
Everything worked in 1991! And I found still other species that I could
grow surprisingly well on surprisingly small amounts of water[--]or
none at all. So, the next year, 1992, I set up a sprinkler system to water
the intensive raised bed and used the overspray to support species that
grew better with some moisture supplementation; I continued using my
improvised drip system to help still others, while keeping a large
section of the garden entirely unwatered. And at the end of that summer
I wrote this book.
What follows is not mere theory, not something I read about or saw
others do. These techniques are tested and workable. The next-to-last
chapter of this book contains a complete plan of my 1992 garden with
explanations and discussion of the reasoning behind it.
In _Water-Wise Vegetables _I assume that my readers already are
growing food (probably on raised beds), already know how to adjust
their gardening to this region's climate, and know how to garden with
irrigation. If you don't have this background I suggest you read my
other garden book, _Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades,_
(Sasquatch Books, 1989).
Steve Solomon

Chapter 1
Predictably Rainless Summers

In the eastern United States, summertime rainfall can support