Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway
Solomon, Steve
English
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Below is a summary of Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway
Created by: Steve Solomon ssolomon@soilandhealth.org
Cascadia Gardening Series
Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway
Steve Solomon
Introduction
Starting a New Gardening Era
First, you should know why a maritime Northwest raised-bed gardener
named Steve Solomon became worried about his dependence on
irrigation.
I'm from Michigan. I moved to Lorane, Oregon, in April 1978 and
homesteaded on 5 acres in what I thought at the time was a cool,
showery green valley of liquid sunshine and rainbows. I intended to
put in a big garden and grow as much of my own food as possible.
Two months later, in June, just as my garden began needing water, my
so-called 15-gallon-per-minute well began to falter, yielding less
and less with each passing week. By August it delivered about 3
gallons per minute. Fortunately, I wasn't faced with a completely
dry well or one that had 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
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