Joy to You
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We live on Blue Planet that circles a ball of fire. Our Planet is circled by a Golden Moon that moves its oceans. Now tell me that you don’t believe in miracles....Unknown
This is exactly why humans invented agriculture in the first place! (theoretically at least) There was a bad drought, and humans figured out that intentionally planting some human-compatible plants would keep them from starving.Apricot, apple, and pear trees did well without watering even during the drought; others, like hazels, suffered really badly from the prolonged lack of moisture – and since I have about 80 hazel bushes scattered throughout the 2-acre ‘forest garden’, watering them would have been a monumental task – so I had to let them fend for themselves… Result: no hazelnuts this year.
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Jay Angler wrote:
... find better, low embodied energy ways of storing what is produced.
Ellen
Music, Farming, Community! How do I choose? Oh wait, I choose all three.....
Invasive plants are Earth's way of insisting we notice her medicines. Stephen Herrod Buhner
Everyone learns what works by learning what doesn't work. Stephen Herrod Buhner
In modern times is going the right way forward the only way to coming back to nature.
Angela Wilcox wrote:
I have had to hand water my garden this year with buckets from my pond due to a leak in my well system and it will be a year before the installer can return, which severely lessened the square footage of gardening I was able/willing to plant due to the extended physical labor and time required, as the pond is downhill from the garden. I am rethinking my garden placement for next year and engineering additional water catchment/storage above the highest garden areas. Thank you for your insight and I pray it rains for your area.
Abraham Palma wrote:I would add that, since the climate might be changing, it could be a good idea to have a start on a more arid and hot biome. More arid is less productive, but if you try to grow temperate plants in the desert climate, you get even fewer production. For example, sorghum is not great taste, but maize simply dies in our land without irrigation. Knowing that average rainfall might decrease, I should bet for more sorghum and less corn.
I didn't want to derail the thread, but I'll try to give you a list. Sooo... much depends on your ecosystem. With weather weirding, trees which produce a food crop, may only produce well every 2-4 years, rather than every year. So being able to store the bounty on good years to help you weather the poor years, may help you cope with drought.Alina Green wrote:
Jay Angler wrote:... find better, low embodied energy ways of storing what is produced.
What does this mean? Any examples?
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Ellen Schwindt wrote:
It was only in 2017 that I realized for sure that my old way of gardening was never going to work again at the top of this hill. That's when I began building hugelkulture beds. [...] It's still a lot of work to get that water from the barrels onto the hugels where it can do some good. And even though the ground holds water a lot, lot better than it used to, I still need to irrigate to get much yield in terms of human food.
Levente Andras wrote:BTW: In Bill Mollison's book there is a diagram / illustration where the pond is placed above the house & garden. I've mused about this and concluded that this may be a very desirable situation, provided that the orientation of the slope on which the pond is built is such that the water drains away from the house - otherwise the house, garden, etc. may be washed away in the event of a burst dam...
Invasive plants are Earth's way of insisting we notice her medicines. Stephen Herrod Buhner
Everyone learns what works by learning what doesn't work. Stephen Herrod Buhner
In my ecosystem, wood in the bottoms of my raised beds clearly holds moisture, but not necessarily enough to survive a year-long drought. I have not built a tall Hügelkultur, so I can't speak for them. I agree that the upper part of a hugel will dry out, and that deep rooted plants like kale are more likely to be able to reach down to moisture, but that even those might need to be planted on the side of the hugel.Theoretically, I could imagine that woody material buried under the earth mound could really hold moisture for a very long time. (BTW, has anyone tried to unearth the woody bits from under a Huegel during a drought, to see whether they are still moist? This could be a useful experiment.)
So they've replaced one mono-culture with another. I see no mention in the article of the concept of planting on contour, inter-planting with a drought-tolerant nitrogen fixer, or planting a forage crop and mob-grazing a la Allan Savory! Sepp Holzer clearly identified in one of his books that he will never depend on a single crop again. Mark Shepherd is big on mixed plantings with alley crops also - if one crop does poorly due to the weather, there's a chance others will do well enough or even exceed expectations.Yes. And I read this the other day:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/27/spainish-farmers-pistachio-nuts-olives-grapes-wheat-drought-resistant-crop
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If you have a good idea, starting a thread on permies and asking for ideas on how to make it work could get you more good approaches than you imagined were possible! We've got some good problem-solvers and all-round helpful people on this site, with all sorts of background experience!I second the comment that I'm limited by what one pushing-sixty woman can accomplish. I've done a lot this summer, but I need a good planner to collaborate with as I am good at floating and doing, and good at having visions, but not good at gauging all the small steps between seeing the vision as vision and realizing it "in the flesh."
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John F Dean wrote:
I have come to face that there may not be drought proofing. ...in the most rigid sense. The key factor, in my mind, is the length of the drought. [...] I have come to define drought proofing in terms of specific periods of time with water being used for specific functions in that time frame.
Jay Angler wrote:
Levente Andras wrote:So they've replaced one mono-culture with another. I see no mention in the article of the concept of planting on contour, inter-planting with a drought-tolerant nitrogen fixer, or planting a forage crop and mob-grazing a la Allan Savory!Yes. And I read this the other day:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/27/spainish-farmers-pistachio-nuts-olives-grapes-wheat-drought-resistant-crop
Anne Miller wrote:
Levente Andras wrote:BTW: In Bill Mollison's book there is a diagram / illustration where the pond is placed above the house & garden. I've mused about this and concluded that this may be a very desirable situation, provided that the orientation of the slope on which the pond is built is such that the water drains away from the house - otherwise the house, garden, etc. may be washed away in the event of a burst dam...
I certainly can see that that would be very beneficial to have a pons above the garden. As water naturally permeates through the ground that water would eventually reach the level of the garden.
And I agree that there would need to be are large berm to protect the house.
Levente Andras wrote:
BTW, according to the article, even though they're drought tolerant, pistachio trees still need plenty of water during the nut-forming stage. This explains why in drought conditions, yields dropped by as much as 45% in some key pistachio-producing regions.
Jan White wrote:
I think if you want hugelculture to work in hot, dry conditions, you need snowy winters. Spring melt is when they seem to charge up with water. Mine work well, at least the ones I constructed carefully anyway. My hugel tomatoes were fine all through the heat dome last year when we were consistently in the high 30s celsius, over 40C for at least a week, no rain for weeks.
Jan White wrote:
It's interesting that a couple people have had trouble growing hazelnuts without irrigation. They grow like weeds here, in sandy, rocky soil, with no water. They're wild ones with small nuts, though.
Gemma Boyd
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itsmesrd
itsmesrd
I think step one is to improve your soil through any system/s that seems to work for you ( compost ditches, mulching, biochar, wood-chips, polycultures, chop and drop etc). I dug in punky wood in a trench up slope of a small pear tree, then planted comfrey a couple of years later, and chopped and dropped the weeds around it several times, and slowly it's gone from needing water weekly to once every 4-6 weeks if the drought and heat are severe. Maybe I shouldn't have planted it in the first place, but I happen to like Nashi pears!Sid Deshotel wrote:When we water our plants do you just run an open ended hose at the base of the plant? Do you use sprinklers, or do you flood irrigate?
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Levente Andras wrote:Perhaps the answer is in the soil. Mine is heavy clay, and even though this type of soil retains moisture for a long time (February snow melt was enough to keep the soil moist until late June, with no precipitation in between), it's probably less inviting to tree roots. I suspect that in heavy clay soil, hazel roots expand very slowly, and perhaps don't go deep enough, hence they are less able to deal with the effects of drought. In fact, between May and June there was a lot of new growth on the hazel bushes, everything looked promising, then in July the growth stopped, and there appeared significant signs of stress, such as yellowing / falling leaves.
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Jay wrote I think step one is to improve your soil through any system/s that seems to work for you ( compost ditches, mulching, biochar, wood-chips, polycultures, chop and drop etc).
itsmesrd
For me, Step 2 was learning that if I'm going to water, to do so deeply, rather than a short sprinkle which does little but evaporate.
itsmesrd
Step 3 is to follow Jan White's example - teach your plants to produce through tough weather by creating land-race - seeds adapted to your environment.
itsmesrd
Levente Andras wrote:
Jan White wrote:
I think if you want hugelculture to work in hot, dry conditions, you need snowy winters. Spring melt is when they seem to charge up with water. Mine work well, at least the ones I constructed carefully anyway. My hugel tomatoes were fine all through the heat dome last year when we were consistently in the high 30s celsius, over 40C for at least a week, no rain for weeks.
The question is: once your Huegel bed has properly 'recharged', how long will the moisture last? What if drought lasts from, say, March to October, with very high (>35 C) Summer temperatures? And even while there still is some moisture, will it be available for the roots of young plants / seedlings? And given the slope of the mound - and hence the increased exposure to Sun on the southern / western side - will that moisture be enough to compensate for the more intense transpiration?
Living a life that requires no vacation.
He puts the "turd" in "saturday". Speaking of which, have you smelled this tiny ad?
The Permaculture Playing Cards are a great gift for a gardener
https://gardener-gift.com
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