Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway | Page 4

shrunk to below 1 gallon per minute, as I soon discovered many of my neighbors were cursed with. Three gallons per minute won't supply a fan nozzle or even a common impulse sprinkler, but I could still sustain my big raised-bed garden by watering all night, five or six nights a week, with a single, 2-1/2 gallon-per-minute sprinkler that I moved from place to place.
I had repeatedly read that gardening in raised beds was the most productive vegetable growing method, required the least work, and was the most water-efficient system ever known. So, without adequate irrigation, I would have concluded that food self-sufficiency on my homestead was not possible. In late September of that first year, I could still run that single sprinkler. What a relief not to have invested every last cent in land that couldn't feed us.
For many succeeding years at Lorane, I raised lots of organically grown food on densely planted raised beds, but the realities of being a country gardener continued to remind me of how tenuous my irrigation supply actually was. We country folks have to be self-reliant: I am my own sanitation department, I maintain my own 800-foot-long driveway, the septic system puts me in the sewage business. A long, long response time to my 911 call means I'm my own self-defense force. And I'm my own water department.
Without regular and heavy watering during high summer, dense stands of vegetables become stunted in a matter of days. Pump failure has brought my raised-bed garden close to that several times. Before my frantic efforts got the water flowing again, I could feel the stressed-out garden screaming like a hungry baby.
As I came to understand our climate, I began to wonder about complete food self-sufficiency. How did the early pioneers irrigate their vegetables? There probably aren't more than a thousand homestead sites in the entire martitime Northwest with gravity water. Hand pumping into hand-carried buckets is impractical and extremely tedious. Wind-powered pumps are expensive and have severe limits.
The combination of dependably rainless summers, the realities of self-sufficient living, and my homestead's poor well turned out to be an opportunity. For I continued wondering about gardens and water, and discovered a method for growing a lush, productive vegetable garden on deep soil with little or no irrigation, in a climate that reliably provides 8 to 12 virtually dry weeks every summer.
Gardening with Less Irrigation
Being a garden writer, I was on the receiving end of quite a bit of local lore. I had heard of someone growing unirrigated carrots on sandy soil in southern Oregon by sowing early and spacing the roots 1 foot apart in rows 4 feet apart. The carrots were reputed to grow to enormous sizes, and the overall yield in pounds per square foot occupied by the crop was not as low as one might think. I read that Native Americans in the Southwest grew remarkable desert gardens with little or no water. And that Native South Americans in the highlands of Peru and Bolivia grow food crops in a land with 8 to 12 inches of rainfall. So I had to wonder what our own pioneers did.
In 1987, we moved 50 miles south, to a much better homestead with more acreage and an abundant well. Ironically, only then did I grow my first summertime vegetable without irrigation. Being a low-key survivalist at heart, I was working at growing my own seeds. The main danger to attaining good germination is in repeatedly moistening developing seed. So, in early March 1988, I moved six winter-surviving savoy cabbage plants far beyond the irrigated soil of my raised-bed vegetable garden. I transplanted them 4 feet apart because blooming brassicas make huge sprays of flower stalks. I did not plan to water these plants at all, since cabbage seed forms during May and dries down during June as the soil naturally dries out.
That is just what happened. Except that one plant did something a little unusual, though not unheard of. Instead of completely going into bloom and then dying after setting a massive load of seed, this plant also threw a vegetative bud that grew a whole new cabbage among the seed stalks.
With increasing excitement I watched 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