One project that I was able to start this year is a dry garden.
Dry gardening (or dry farming) is the practice of planting and growing without water. Technically in order to be considered “dry” farming, the area has to get less than 20 inches of rain per year and the farmer doesn’t use supplemental irrigation.
Many areas considered “dry farming” areas leverage mild winters to plant winter crops, such as wheat, then let the land sit during the dry summer. Others plant in the summer but use mulch (often dust mulch), wide spacing, alternate year planting and other procedures to get a crop where none would otherwise grow.
I decided that for the purpose of this test I would water no more than twice a month, so it’s not technically dry by definition, but considering that the main garden gets watered every other day (more or less) every two weeks is a huge improvement.
Tucked between our house and the neighbor’s fence is a strip of dirt about six feet wide and 20 feet long. Nothing grows there, it’s in shade after about 3, it has grapevines on one side and the house on the other. The water source is our 275 gallon water tanks that collect water from the roof. The soil is sand and rock.
Call it a personal idiot-cyncracy, but I don’t like seeing dirt (not soil in this case) going unused. Since in many areas grapes aren’t watered at all, I figured it was both a good test for them and a good place to put a dry garden.
It gets about seven hours of sun. Last summer I dug down into it sometime in July and it was bone dry at least a foot down. Last fall I mulched it deeply, and this spring I planted through the mulch.
The bugs had a heyday, and all but one of the seedlings perished.
I planted again on 6/11, this time under cover. Milk jugs are incredibly versatile.
That same day I also planted a single zucchini plant / butternut combination in an area with the same circumstances but in full sun. Deeply mulched, same soil. I gave each seed 2 gallons of water.
On the same day that the picture above was taken, one month after planting...
It had no additional water—the only difference was the sun. That’s a castle block in the bottom corner, about 11 inches wide.
The dry garden was replanted on 6/11. The sun version was watered on 7/1 but probably could have gone longer. The shade version was watered for the first time on 7/9. They were all watered on 7/24 because I decided (erroneously, I now believe) that I should stick to the same watering schedule for both.
So the sun version was watered on 8/8. Today, we have this.
And this...
And then we have all the other plants in the dry garden. At least the grapes are thriving.
The one in the middle is another zucchini, of the same variety as the other.
The sun made a much larger difference than I expected. The sun garden needs to be protected during the worst of the afternoon heat, but the butternut has male blossoms and the zucchini is bearing, so the little bit of extra work is worth it.
Watering every two weeks is probably too much if you have good soil. My soil is sand and rock but I could probably still stretch it to once a month if necessary. The true test will be next year, when I use the seeds I get this year and stretch the watering schedule to once a month.
I figure if they survive and fruit under these conditions they’ll be better adapted in the next generation. The ideal would be to find varieties that are already adapted to drought conditions (massive root systems, primarily) and start from there.
I never could do anything the easy way.
The first update
The second update
Original post on Dry Farming
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