How do you drought-proof your permaculture project?

Hello, permies!

Here in Europe, drought has been a hot topic this summer. Rivers and lakes have dried up, crops have been destroyed, and there is talk of (worsening) desertification in some parts of Europe. Some say this will be the new normal, some say it will only get worse each year.

In the east of Transylvania / central Romania where I live, we haven’t suffered as badly as other parts of the country or other parts of Europe, but still many of us are experiencing this event as traumatic and very worrying.  So I’ll be jotting down some thoughts that this experience has elicited in me, hopefully leading to a discussion of strategies for dealing with severe drought on our permaculture homesteads / projects.

I’m hoping everyone will chime in and describe how they intend to prepare for events of this type that are bound to hit us again in the near future.

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In the 9 years since I started this permaculture project https://permies.com/t/162226/update-permaculture-project , we experienced occasional dry spells (e.g., no or very little rain between July and September), which at the time I thought were quite bad.  This year I got a taste of what bad really means.  

It started with a dry Spring – no rain in March, April, or May – and continued with a dry, hot Summer. We’re now in late August, and there is still no end in sight to this situation. Most of the abundant rains predicted by the weather forecast never materialised – on a dozen of occasions during these months, they predicted 10 inches, we got 10 drops. Around mid-August, we had a couple of rainy days, when we did actually receive a total of 15-20 inches or so, but it was too little, too late.

We’ve never experienced such a situation before; we’re in uncharted territory. For all we know, we may not receive any significant amount of precipitation for the rest of the year.  And next year – who knows? Will I have any water in my well / rainwater cistern when the new gardening season starts?

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As humans we are predisposed to self-deception – a water barrel under the downspout of your gutter will be of little help if the drought lasts for many months, and you have a large garden to irrigate.  So before we launch into what we’ve done or intend to do in the future to protect ourselves from the effects of drought, I think it’s useful to define from the start what exactly we think we’re dealing with, what results we wish to achieve with our actions, and what we think is possible to achieve.  

So as a minimum, we need to start by answering the following questions:

(1) What kind of drought event are you / should you be preparing for?  How severe? How persistent? 3 months? 6 months? 12 months?  Accompanied by what aggravating factors (intense heat, winds)?  

(2) What do you want / hope to achieve with your drought-proofing actions? Will you be happy if you can save, say 30 to 50% of your crop from getting destroyed by the drought?  Or do you aim for drought-proofing that allows your system (or parts of it) to thrive as it would in a normal year?  Is it your ambition to have your entire homestead look like a green oasis, or are you only focusing your resources on Zone 1? Are you going it alone, only planning to protect your own plot of land, or are you working with the community, for drought-proofing a much larger area?

(3) In your allocation of resources, do you prioritise certain elements of your system (certain fruit trees, vegetables, fish ponds, etc.) while de-emphasising others? Or do you instead want to ensure blanket protection to every vulnerable element in your permaculture project?

Having clarity on these aspects can help plan our actions.

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There are age-old methods that people have used to protect themselves and their crops and animals from the effects of drought.  So I’m not reinventing the wheel here, just pulling together a list of all the garden-scale / farm-scale methods I’m aware of – everyone should feel free to make additions if I left out anything important.

(1) Catch & store every drop of rain that falls on hard surfaces such as roofs and paved areas.  Maximise your RAINWATER STORAGE capacity. Build or install rainwater tanks, cisterns and reservoirs. Ensure you have plenty of redundancy in your water storage system.  In my opinion, there is no such thing as too much redundancy in water capture and storage – given that there is no limit to the challenges that we’ll be subjected to thanks to Climate Change.

(2) Build an IRRIGATION system for your drought-sensitive crops – this is the logical and natural continuation of Step (1) above.

Note 2.a  Crop irrigation should use rainwater stored in cisterns or reservoirs. NOT aquifer water. NOT water from rivers or streams.  We should remember that when rain finally arrives after months of drought, and we collect that water from roofs, our tanks / cisterns can quickly fill up to capacity even with only moderate amounts of rainfall – whereas in many cases, depleted aquifers and dried-up rivers may need weeks, months, or years (and adequate amounts of precipitation) to return to normal capacity (sometimes they never do…)

Note 2.b  The irrigation system has to be able to deliver water where it’s needed as smoothly as possible.  I’ve learned from my own experience (and I welcome everybody to chime in here) that if delivering water to various points of your garden / field is a hassle (because you need to move components like pipes, hoses, pumps etc. from one place to another) you are bound to irrigate at less-than optimal levels – in other words, all the goodness of your stored rainwater cannot be put to maximum use.

Note 2.c – related to 2.b above: irrigation has to be rendered easy by the spatial arrangement of your crop plantings.  Crops that need more water have to be conveniently placed for irrigating. Here’s my own negative experience to illustrate the above principle: I have created a ‘forest garden’ where fruit and nut trees with different water-use needs are interplanted with woodland species. In normal times, these crop trees grow very well and bear fruit without the need for watering. 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.

(3) Use grey water to water tree crops.

(4) Increase the moisture-retaining capacity of the SOIL. Avoid tillage, especially during / right before dry spells. Increase organic matter content.  Use thick mulches wherever possible.  Use closed-canopy planting of crops wherever appropriate. Use alley cropping, shelterbelts, and other tree / shrub plantings to provide your garden / fields with shading against sun, and protective screens against dry winds.  

Caution regarding alley cropping, shelterbelts, etc.: in certain situations given by particular combinations of climate, soil, terrain, geology, and hydrology, tree plantings can have a negative impact on the availability of water – for instance, research shows that in some regions plantings of poplar or eucalyptus have led to lowering of the water table.

(5) Increase the water-retaining capacity of the TERRAIN, and speed up the recharge of AQUIFERS. Keyline design, contour swales, terraces, ponds, rain gardens, and many other types of earthworks designed to slow & sink water runoff during rain events or snow melt.  Maintain or restore wetlands. Maintain or restore meanders in rivers and streams.

(6) Plant drought-resistant crops.  Favour perennials over annuals.

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And finally, here's what my drought-proofing looks like at the moment:

I collect roof water from the house and most outbuildings. Between the underground cistern and several water tanks placed around the property, I'm able to store around 12 cubic metres of rainwater, which I could increase to perhaps 15 in the future. Thanks to these reserves, we were able to keep our vegetable gardens productive during the drought, and I was able to regularly water the young trees that I had planted this Spring .

A small pond collects the rainwater that comes out of the underground cistern's overflow and the French drain around the house. Not of great practical use to us, since the pond is placed at the bottom of the plot, but it's good for wildlife and a good sink for surplus water before it leaves the property.  

I have an 11-meter deep, hand-dug well, served by a photovoltaic pump. The well doesn't have a very high yield during dry spells - at one go, I can draw 7-8 cubic metres of water - so I try to use it very sparingly.

In the house I have separate plumbing for grey water, which is directed to a group of trees in front of the house.

My plot is crossed by 4 contour swales, which help to stop & sink runoff, and feed the aquifer.  Along the swales I planted fruit trees, hazels, and woodland tree species.

In my vegetable garden I use deep mulches (mainly half-composted hay) wherever possible.

Finally, I try to prioritise water use the best I can... By the beginning of August, my small pond dried up completely, and I had to remove all the fish; I could have topped up the pond from the rainwater cistern, but I decided that the stored water was too precious.  (Now some water has returned into the pond, thanks to a recent couple of rainy days, and there are already tadpoles in it...)

Levente, your post is timely and resonates with many people who are experiencing drought. I agree, redundancies in water catchment and storage are valuable.  

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.

All I can say is STORAGE. If you can't dig a pond, buy a big tank. If you can't afford a tank, buy a cheap swimming pool.

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 a pond that is several acres and is at least 20 ft deep.   I have seen it shrunk in half in bad years.  My best guess is that the best I can hope for is 2 years of water from it.  On one hand, this is great, but it does demonstrate the limitations. Of course, the biggest source of the shrinkage is evaporation.  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.

As with others, I have opted to use multiple means of water storage ....pond ...in ground cistern ...above ground storage tanks.  John Daley has made posts that have expanded my thinking.   I already had calculated specific storage for humans, livestock, and gardening.   His posts have gotten me to consider fire control needs as well.

Levente Andras wrote:

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.

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.

This is why I've tried to accept that some of my trees produce better some years than others, and process the results accordingly. It's the equivalent of "mast years" when the nut trees produce far greater quantities than regular years in the hopes the squirrels won't eat every one. The bigger danger is if I have several severe drought years in a row. So yes - planning for a small number of critical crops to be where they can be managed under the worst possible situation is good advice. If we ever build a serious building (beyond a shed), gray water recycling will need to be an option.  I already do some of that based just on buckets, but it's too time consuming and heavy for more than a token amount supporting plants close to the house.

There's lots of planning to do related to which plants and how many of them go where. I've got a couple of baby mulberry bushes and I'm realizing they *need* more regular water than much of my land gets. If I can get duck paddocks organized, they'd be a good choice for shade there, and can recycle the dirty duck water, for example.

I will also propose that the other side of this coin is for people to find better, low embodied energy ways of storing what is produced. It's very much on my wish list and creeping higher, but figuring out how to do it effectively in my ecosystem with a single "woman power" to build it, has me still in the planning stage.

Jay Angler wrote:

... find better, low embodied energy ways of storing what is produced.  

What does this mean?  Any examples?

Levante, thank you for this thoughtful post. I'm in the foothills of the White Mountains in New Hampshire and I live on the top of a hill that has been cleared for at least 90 years, probably a lot more than that. Though we get a lot more rain than you report in normal and even in drought years, we still fall far short of what I would need to irrigate my gardening.

This is a big change from the circumstances when I moved here twenty years ago. 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. My hugels might not even deserve the name because they are low to the ground and really, I grow stuff in front of them, and try to add to their composition each year through mulch and brush piling and the like.

Last year we bought 8 45-gallon barrels and I plumbed 3 of them as an irrigation system. 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.

I've canted toward perrenials, but I'm so at the beginning of this learning curve that I don't necessarily get a lot of food from them. And then there's the labor-intensive quality to that harvesting. This summer, I've learned to cook and enjoy amaranth greens nearly every day. That is not a perennial crop, but it reseeds easily and I expect to always have amaranth. Of course the Hopi's might tell me I better plan more for water if I want that to be true.

My main "field crop" this year was flax, which I'm growing to try to supply my daughter with fiber. She is a weaver and a spinner. That crop did well this year in terms of fiber, but it produced almost no seed. I counted only one visible seed in 10 bolls I surveyed when it was time to pull the flax for fiber processing. I planted wheat after some of the flax and will plant more fall-planted grains and cover crops in the coming weeks.  

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 guaging all the small steps between seeing the vision as vision and realizing it "in the flesh."

I too, planted a lot of hazels and have yet to see them thrive and give a yield. I'm not sure they were really the right thing for my land....Gooseberries, on the other hand seemed to thrive with little or no attention.

"Embodied Energy" I might like to use that phrase as a title for a musical composition! Maybe you mean the real (but not necessarily measurable) amount of energy a piece of land needs to thrive in all its living detail.

just maybe.

Thanks for this great conversation. I will ponder as I wander around trying to save water and make my paradise even more paradisical.
-Ellen

Alina,

While I can't say what Jay was referring to, this thread offers ways to help plants during drought with zai holes, air wells, wicking beds, clay pots or ollas:

https://permies.com/t/138768/Water-Plants-Trees-Drought-Conditions

It's literally a hot topic and as single its hard to do.

First of all your permaculture is what is needed.
7 (8) Layers is just the basic.

These layers wont help if you are not create them natural.
Deep roots and shallow roots working hand in hand to raise the water table and this can be done even on a relatively small footprint. (a couple of acres at least).

I have been in a lot of places in the world and I have seen that some spots (proper set up permaculture and natural forests)
were lush and green while right beside were huge fields of many acres of corn and other crops suffering drought.
As important as that above soil layers are also the below soil layers by meaning roots.

Then you have to maintain the surface soil by using animals the way Allan Savory explains in his Holistic Resource Management and proved it with his projects.
If you let things grow it will choke the regrowth and the drought expands.
If animals graze is they fertilize and give room for the regrowth after the first drip of rain.

The beloved recent King of Thailand Bhumibol Adulyadej started it in his country with a guideline and the farmers now follow his advises.
Don't start as a Tiger...
30% of your land should be a Water body...
Don't rely on one crop alone, have more crops...
Introduce Vetiver Grass as barrier against erosion...
...there is so much more from a great man with great inspirations, too much to post in a single forum post ...  

and there are many more out there from Percival Alfred Yeomans who died 1984 to Geoff Lawton who fought and fights drought.
Many good examples are available and off cause also here in permies you find answers..  
Lakes, Swales, or simple Keylines... All can protect you from drought.

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.

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.

Ponds in the lower parts of the property are often easier to plan, build, and keep full of water.  In my situation, the shape of the slope of the upper half of the plot was totally unsuitable for a pond, although in rainy periods / during snow melt there would have been enough runoff to fill one. So I had to settle for a small pond right at the bottom of the property, which is of no use whatsoever as far as irrigation is concerned.

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...

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.

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

Alina Green wrote:

Jay Angler wrote:... find better, low embodied energy ways of storing what is produced.  

What does this mean?  Any examples?

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.
1. Solar food dryer - once it's built, it takes time to fill it but no electricity. Needs lots of glass jars for long term storage.
2. Cold cellar - not for every climate and climate dictates how to build an appropriate one. Up front costs for time and material, but if well built can last decades if not generations with minimal extra inputs.
3. Canning - water bath or pressure. There are people who have good enough equipment to do this on a wood stove/rocket stove of some sort, but most of us rely on gas or electricity which is an on going expense every time you do the job. At least the results are shelf-stable for several years once canned.
4. Freezing - often uses a lot of power to blanche the veggies, and then requires reliable electricity to keep them frozen.  Freezers have a limited lifespan as well.
5. Dry freezing - expensive equipment, but would be a great "cooperative" resource. The results are shelf-stable and good quality. However, it takes energy to run the machine, but I have not experience with them, so I'm not sure how much.

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.

In my experience, all variations of raised beds - including Huegelkultur, keyhole beds, and so on - have not been very helpful in times of drought.  Yes, I know that the opposite has been argued on this forum, especially with regard to Huegelkultur - it is claimed that the woody organic matter that is buried under the earthen mound will act like a sponge and help retain moisture.

This is true for organic matter in general, when added to the soil, and you did suggest that Huegels have improved moisture retention in your garden.  

But my experience tells me that a mound-shaped bed (i.e., a Huegel) is bound to shed water - and the taller & steeper & mound-like you build your raised bed, the faster it will do so. Which is very unhelpful during severe drought, when irrigation becomes unavoidable - basically, water that is meant for the roots of your lettuce or bean plants will quickly run towards the bottom of the Huegel, so only a small fraction of it will reach the plant roots where it's needed.  Furthermore, even when water (e.g., from abundant rain) does penetrate the earth of the Huegel, the increased porosity at the bottom of the mound would mean faster drainage - hence, again, less water retention.

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.) Having said that, I wonder if the plants growing on the Huegel have deep enough roots to be able to mine the moisture in the woody material.

It's been suggested that in regions where precipitation is scarce, instead of raised beds, one could experiment with sunken beds, or plant the plants (individually or in groups) into indentations dug into the ground - like these Zai holes, for example:

https://www.google.com/search?q=zai+holes&client=safari&hl=en-GB&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiC1dnGh-_5AhXxN-wKHeKwBb0Q_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1152&bih=669&dpr=1  

I only produce plants, I water them all the time in the evening the most, but now I have no drought so far

We've had droughty years here that had me concerned - in fact, it's become a regular thing to watch the radar as storms heading right for us divide themselves in half, one part passing north of us and the other part south.

Other years, however, it's as if the rain will never end.

Many of the techniques for buffering drought conditions help with buffering the flood conditions, and I'd recommend those are the ones that should be focused on first for areas where drought wasn't thought to be such an issue historically. This "climate change" thing, wherever you land in your beliefs on the subject, from the CO2 thing through weather-warfare, through solar system wide changes stemming from the sun or the galactic core, has truly proven itself to be more rightfully named "climate weirding".

For example, what would normally be the "hot" time of year becomes exceedingly hot and dry in one year, then non-existent in another. Winter snowfall events have become unpredictable and uneven. Monsoons and tropical storm seasons are completely unreliable, resulting in serious "feast or famine" precipitation events (see the current Pakistan floods, for example). The 100 year rainfall events are happening every 5 years it seems, and 100 year droughts are also happening every 5 years.

In trying to mitigate these "disasters", we really do have to plan for both.

A sunken bed might be a great place to grow crops, but in some years, those crops might include rice and fish  Huglekulture mounds are definitely prone to drying out near the tops even in a mild and "normal" year, but that's actually part of the design - the bottom of the mound is almost always still full of water until the worst of the worst has hit (like now in late August with not a drop of rain all season in Levente's case).

One year of weather doesn't make a climate - even 5 or 10 years of "off weather" is not a sure bet that we've been tipped into a new class of biome. What we need to seek to do is *buffer* the weather extremes, and our buffering techniques need to be scaled, to the best of our ability. It's the best we can do with a weird situation.

So, bet on flooding as much as you bet on drought, is my advice. Too often, one will follow the other in subsequent years. In fact, it seems to be a pattern these days.

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:

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.)

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.

However, increasing the organic matter in *all* your soil through minimal tillage, keeping soil covered, planting polycultures and encouraging mycorrhizae, will all help to hold more water. Hügelkultur is just one technique for doing so. The link about Zai holes is another technique. I've seen a documentary showing use of those in an area of India to both help with crops and recharge ground water at the same time. I'm sure there's a thread on permies showing the use of the same principle in the USA. However, the ones I saw in India were being done on a community basis - some of these techniques won't be as effective on a small, isolated plot. I've done a mix of that concept and in-ground composting - I did a hole beside a plant that needs more water and I dump veggie scraps and rinse water into the hole every week or so. This only works for isolated trees/shrubs - not for a whole food forest!

Levente Andras wrote:

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

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.

Speaking of Sepp Holzer, he seemed to have a good sense about how to infiltrate water into soil on slopes without risking land slide/mud slides during atypically wet weather. Tristan Vitali's point about looking far out and planning for when the drought turns to a deluge is very important. Deep rooted plants and the ability to direct water along safe paths shouldn't be ignored just because the next 5 years are likely to be drought years!

Ellen Schwindt wrote:

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."

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!

Jay Angler:  regarding freeze dryers, we have a medium size Harvest Right, and my husband figured it uses about $2 worth of electricity (from the grid in mid-Michigan) for an average full batch of four trays.  I thought it would use more, and was pleasantly surprised.  Mine plugs into a 110 outlet, as does the small model, while the large size needs a 220 outlet.  That's why I chose the medium, so in a grid down situation, we could still hopefully use our freeze dryer with solar battery power.  And rotating stores is not as critical as with regular canning, since the food lasts many years when done properly (we vacuum seal most of what we freeze dry.)  We can buy at the local farmers market in bulk as well to put up produce that we don't grow ourselves.  

We are located in the Prairie land  of Saskatchewan,  Canada, Weather patterns have changed over the past few years and this year is no exception.  We received about 2 inches of rain in late June/early July, followed by 6 weeks (thus far) of +30 C with no rain in sight. Local waterholes are drying up, and crop yields are poor to non-existent. They are predicting the same or worse next year. We are grateful to have a well on our small (3 acre) property,  but this weather has my thoughts turning to a plan B in case we lose the well.

 I have calculated that 2 inches of rain, collected from the metal roof of each of our buildings (roof size x .95 x .623 x inches of rain = gallons) would yield in total approx 4046 gallons of water. Our house alone would collect almost 1600 gallons.  So I have just purchased 6 used IBC totes ( non-toxic previous content) for $40 each, to catch the rain from the house next spring... and I will buy more as I can afford them until I have enough to collect from each of our outbuildings.

We plan to make rain 'gutters' out of used seeder hoses, which the local farmers change on their equipment and discard every year.  These hoses are thick walled, about 20 feet long, 2 1/2 inches in diameter. We will cut a slit down the length of this semi-flexible hose  and slip it onto the edge of the tin roof to catch the rain and direct it to the IBC tanks, which will be plumbed in a cascade formation.  If this works, it will save us a fortune in gutters and repurpose hose that is otherwise thrown away. If it doesn't work,  the hose was free and it will have been be worth a good try and I'll invest in 'real' gutters  :)

We have almost finished building a greenhouse for growing many of our vegetables. It is 12 ft x 32 ft and built from used windows and wood rescued from some old granary bases that the farmer was going to burn. Thus far, the greenhouse has cost us about $300, mostly for nails and screws. The greenhouse is intended to drastically reduce the amount of water required for our veggies. Side benefits will include keeping the herbicides off our garden that the surrounding farmers spray every spring,  protection from the endless drying wind, extending our growing season... and we can collect 454 gallons off the north metal roof.  The latest reason for the greenhouse is keeping the darn grasshoppers from eating everything.

With the increase in heat and dry weather,  the grasshopper population has increased dramatically and they have stripped everything in sight, including all our shelter trees and berry bushes. Might be time to get some guinea hens, too 🤔

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.

That's a thought I've had myself, but was afraid of expressing it.  It's a very distressing thought, if you take it to its natural conclusion.  Nowadays it seems there are practically no limits to the disasters that Nature can throw at us; we think we're experiencing severe drought now, but there may be a lot worse just around the corner - will we be able to drought-proof against that?

And here we're only talking about drought-proofing our homesteads, gardens, and fields - but what about the thousands of square miles of landscape (forests, lakes, rivers) around us that's equally under stress from drought? Who's drought-proofing that?  When the larger landscape is dying because of drought, and all the ecological services that the landscape has been providing stop working, how long can we keep going, even with all the clever drought-proofing and tinkering-around-the-edges that we are doing on our farms and gardens?

Jay Angler wrote:
Levente Andras wrote:

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

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!

You are right, but I think you're expecting too much. Mine was simply an example of adapting the choice of crops to grow to the new climate conditions. Teaching the farmers all those drought-mitigating methods could have been part of their adaptation, but I suspect that the un-learning of old habits would have been a big shock to the system for many of them.

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.  So... pistachio-growing Spanish farmers may need to adapt again in a decade or two... perhaps switch to date palms?

We have no running water on our property, so I don't water any of my plants, apart from chucking dishwater out the door onto an ornamental bed. We have hot, dry summers, usually two months with little to no rain, sometimes three. We've had a little more rain this year, but even right after a thunderstorm, if you dig into the ground it's only wet a centimeter down at most. Once the ground is dry, that's it until consistent rains in the fall.

One of my main strategies is to torture my plants and save seeds from the ones that can handle it. I've written elsewhere on here about my squash. First year, I babied them and hauled buckets and buckets of water. Now, I don't water them  at all and they far outperform those babied plants my first year.

If something can't grow here without a lot of help from me, I don't grow it at all. For example, my "soil" is low nutrient sand, so I don't grow corn. It would need too many inputs. I also found that rain in the spring is just too unreliable to plant grain then. We never know year to year if it'll be a dry spring or a wet, and if I don't get rain early enough to beat the robins, they'll eat any grain I try to plant later. So now I only plant grain in the fall when the robins are gone and the rain is more reliable.

Another thing I'm trying to do is plant seeds in the fall, so they'll come up on their own in the spring when moisture and temperature levels are right. This year, all my squash were planted last fall. My best potato plants were from potatoes left in the ground over winter. I've been planting peas in the fall for years. Some grow and overwinter, some come up in the spring.

I'm also trying to incorporate more perennials and self seeding biennials. I bought I don't remember how many varieties of carrot and sowed a small area last fall to see what would come up this spring. Results were promising, so this fall I'll make a permanent carrot bed and hopefully I can get those going as a self seeding biennial like my parsley.

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.

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.

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.

You may not need a berm - I think the ideal situation would be when your house & garden are on a ridgeline, but still below the level of your pond - so that any overflow from the pond (or a flood from a burst dam) would naturally drain away from the house, while the level difference will allow you to have a gravity-fed irrigation system using pond water.

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.  

I think this is one of those things we're just going to have to adapt to. Orchards will maybe need to be spread out more. Maybe we'll pay more attention to breeding for drought tolerance. I think plants that have been grown in irrigated conditions will just always so worse under drought than plants that were dry farmed from the beginning. My parents don't water their lawn anymore, but they used to. When they first stopped watering their lawn, their walnut trees had some lean years. The walnut trees that grow wild around here (spread around by squirrels and crows) are pretty consistent year to year.

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?

Speaking of which: I've been puzzled by some experiments involving keyhole beds - a variant of Huegekultur - used in the arid parts of Africa. I just can't imagine how they can work in that setting without regular watering...

As for tomatoes: they are heat- and sun-loving, drought-tolerant plants.  I grow them without any watering, and they did particularly well this year, despite the severe drought.

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.

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.

Hi Levente, Thank you very much for your very useful post and for acknowledging how traumatic experiencing this drought and extreme heat has been. I’m based in England and have experienced nothing like it in my nearly 47 years. I have two organic allotments and a large garden to keep hydrated. On one of my allotments I created a mandala permaculture design of beds formed around a central circle. The individual small beds are a lot easier to manage psychologically, at least, than a whole allotment. During the winter I covered all beds in manure and my homemade compost and intercropped flowers / veg / fruit and herbs. The marigolds protected young asparagus from the sun, for example, and everything has done well after a slow start. I store as much water as I can and use grey water in the garden (using washing up liquid made from natural products). My lemon trees love it! Unfortunately I lost a few plants I missed while watering (which is physically exhausting every day). My fruit trees did well with little water and I left the majority of my figs for birds because they probably needed the food and water too. My biggest struggle has been physically not coping with the extreme heat (swollen legs, nausea, overwhelm). I just can’t move around in it, which isn’t ideal when there’s so much to do outside. It’s terrifying but being a oart of this conversation has helped, so thanks. One thing that makes my blood boil is young street trees being neglected: Here the council plant trees outside peoples’ homes but it’s like nobody on my street can be bothered to or care enough to water them. I truly believe everyone must play an active part in protecting the environment nowadays, if any of us are going to be here in the near future…

It was Jay I think that posted about less energy intensive ways of drought proofing our gardens.
First thing is I'm not sure that there is such a thing as 'drought proof'. I live in a climate that 'usually' has ~60 inches of rain per year. Yes we are blessed. Having said that there were times in the past 4 or 5 years that I've had to water using city water, I use the term city water loosely, maybe a public water system is a better name. It is ground water and of very good quality.
The best way of using a low power or low embodiment energy to me seems to mean rainwater harvesting. Out property is small less than 2 acers. Basically a east west facing rectangle. The house is on the highest portion of the lot, southeast, and the lot slopes almost 5 feet to the northwest.
So a home built "cistern" a semi submerged fiberglass ditch culvert 6 feet diameter and 10 feet long  is sunk 5 feet deep on the southwest corner of the house and a rain gutter collects water from half the roof. Somewhere around 800 square feet of area. This could and will be doubled in the near future as money comes available.
A second semi submerged cistern was put inground at the far northwest corner of the property. This one is 8 feet in diameter and 10 feet long. With there being at least 4 feet in height difference in the tops of the cisterns means that the bigger will hold any over flow of the house end. And I can arrange the piping to make it syphon to the back tank when I know that it is low and there is a rain event coming.
I'll admit that this was not a low energy input to get installed.
This was done by myself so labor costs were on me, the culverts came at a VERY reasonable price from a cousin, sack cement to seal the bottoms, a few hundred feet of pipe to connect the two  and a borrowed backhoe. I've got about $500 invested in the storage part. Add $500 for a 100 watt PV panel and battery a Harbor Freight inverter, shallow well pump and a used air compressor tank for storage of pressurized water and I can get water to most any point on the property.  
I've also placed 5 swales on the back 1/3 acer of the property where I can't catch and store the water in tanks I'll slow it and sink it on site.
I know that this will not prevent me from suffering from a drought but I do believe that it will help me to keep on going for a while.

Still stuck on how to drought proof my garden.
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?
The setup that I'm working on is low pressure drip irrigation. It puts the water exactly where you want it and doesn't waste it.
It seems to me that water is wasted more often than not.
At least that's been what I seen myself doing.
I've used all of the afore mentioned methods of watering my garden and the most effective and efficient one is low pressure drip at the base of the plant. I can put two gallons at the base of a tomato plant over a one hour period or get the same result using five gallons flowing out of the hose in two minutes. A quick comparison of the two shows that I can water that plant at the two gallon rate each day for 50 days if I have 100 gallons to work with or 20 days if I use the hose.
The low pressure drip setup take a little money and time to set up but quickly pays for itself in water savings.

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?

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!

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. So if a tree is setting fruit, I'll put a drip on it *all night* so I know the water gets down deep.  I sometimes use homemade olla pots, or sometimes containers with holes in the bottom which I fill up - the water leaks out *under* the surface where the roots are.

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.  If you've only got one limiting factor - water - that's a little simpler than what I'm dealing with, as sunshine and inconsistent heat are big factors in my climate.

I'm sure people can add more steps to this - however I have demonstrated on my land that trees can adapt with help. The former owner watered the apple trees constantly (along with everything else). It took several years of reducing the frequency of watering, and making sure I watered deeply when I did water, but I no longer water those trees at all. I'm working on a plum tree I planted but I know the soil is really crappy in that whole area, so it is a multi-year project! I have faith it will get there!

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.

A friend brought me an apple tree which her friend had rooted. The friend had since died, so my friend *really* wanted the tree to live. I planted it, and then I dug  a 2 ft deep hole about 5 feet away from the tree and put punky wood, a couple of dead chickens, some duck-shit inoculated wood chips, in layers with the clay soil I'd dug out (minus the huge rock - my land grows rocks *really* well). This gave the roots someplace nice to grow towards. Ideally, I'd have done this in 3 spots 5 feet from the tree trunk, but the big rock slowed me down and I ran out of time. I have found this helps in clay soil - the water will infiltrate faster and deeper when the rain comes. This concept is pictured in books using a narrow 3 ft deep holes spread around a lawn and filled with compost to attract/multiply worms to help drought-proof lawns, so it's not a new idea - it's just really hard to implement in heavy clay soil with a lot of rocks!

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).

I absolutely agree. We bought this place 5 or 6 years ago and it has several patches of really nice soil, and a whole lot that is not so much so. Part of the main garden area that I've settled on is on a piece of land that has been dug through for a pipe line many, many years ago. And as such has some heavy clay mixed with sand, very little top  soil at all, while the opposite end is fairly nice, but still lots of clay. I had this area worked up by a neighbor the first year and have been adding mulch, grass clippings, compost, and whatever will grow that can be chopped and dropped.
Another blessing that we have is a parish sanitary land fill makes tons and tons of ground up tree waste 'mulch not wood chip' and many tons of good compost form green garbage waste. Show up with the local address drivers license and get all you want. So there is a good layer covering most of the problem areas.
The main reason I'm even trying to use this area is that it is closest to the house, zone 1?, the best soil is probably zone 3 or 4, to far away from the house. This is the area that I've put swales in and have started planting fruit trees. I'm not having much luck with fruit trees, of course I don't baby them either. They get watered and weeded the first year, then if you make it, good, if not then we'll try something else in that spot.
We had a huge pecan tree and 5 pines taken out on the south side of the house last year and are slowly working on building kitchen garden beds for the wife's likes. Really nice soil, 90+ years of pecan leaves and pine needles. You can see the first one of these beds in my comments on raised beds for the handicapped. I'm in my late 6o's and the ole back bone don't do like it used to.

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.

It didn't take me long to realize that the soil in the main garden needed to be watered very slowly and very deeply.
The way it was first set up was in 4 beds 60 inches wide that ran along the slope of the land. Spray water on the east end and it runs out the west end. This will never work. At least that's what I first said. Then I put in a swale across the west end to stop the water and started mulching and covering to slow evaporation.
One of these beds is 60 feet long and has 10 elderberry cuttings that were placed this spring. We had a very dry spring compared to last year. So I had to water them. I didn't have a drip tape to keep them watered with so I used 3 joints of 1/2" pcv pipe with a small hole drilled at each plant. I made flow controllers for each hole by heating a length of the same pipe and forcing it over another piece. This gave me essentially a 4 inch long coupling, I cut out a 60 degree section long ways through each of these. they snap onto the pipe an will spin for adjusting the flow rate at each hole/plant.
I watered them 30 minutes at a time once a week for a month.
These plants are going on 7 months old are about 5 feet tall and are producing berries for me already.

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.

See my note earlier on not babying a fruit tree. I have 7 figs, 5 Chinese chestnuts,  6 local unnamed plum trees and 18 muscadine plants that have all made it on their own after the first year.
The fig trees could be in a more protected area and have been killed to the ground by frost 3 of the 5 years they have been in the ground. Once they get 3 or 4 years without freezing they will be able to make it without worry about the temps we get here. These were all started from cuttings of two trees a friend gave me.
The chestnuts are from seed that I collected as well as are the plums. The chestnut seem like the will make a hand full of nut this year, the plums bloomed for the first time this year.
The muscadines are loaded and ripe right now. I got these at a local big box late in the fall one year for 35 cents each, they were clearance items and I got a VA discount as well.

If you are going to drill a well or have the money, drill into rock. There are oceans of water far below the aquifer. It is under pressure and comes up thru vertical rock fissures. Once tapped it doesn't stop, unless rarely an earthquake might alter water path thru the rock. It has been drilled for since the 1920's but it's hardly mentioned since water control is power and unlimited water is not wanted. Search, primary water.

Since antiquity, the source of water generated deep within the Earth, clearly defying the conventional scientific hydrologic cycle explanation, has been a mystery. How does one explain sources of water throughout the world that produce impressive quantities of fresh water, often in dry areas with little rainfall or at high altitudes?  Besides numerous oases in Sahara, Arabic Peninsula, Middle East and the driest deserts elsewhere, and countless springs at mountain tops worldwide, there are clear examples of this phenomenon which stand out, like the Ain Figeh spring near Damascus, the Montezuma Well in the Sonora Desert in Arizona or the Zamzam well in Mecca."

A spring in Oregon flows at 690 million gallons a day, a spring in Missouri flows at 800 million gallons a day called Big Springs, MO., and a series of springs along the Snake River in Idaho flow at 3.5 billion gallons a day." all primary water

In the 1950's, flooding impeded construction of the Tecolote Tunnel through the Santa Ynez Mountains.  By its composition and the depth at which it was encountered, the thirteen million gallons a day was not rainwater.  Some of the water was hot, as much as 117 degrees Fahrenheit, and mineralized, some was cool and exceedingly pure.  The flows were stopped so construction of the six-mile long tunnel to connect Santa Barbara to the Cachuma Reservoir could continue."  

Stephan Riess, spent decades himself in quest of primary water, and is an early pioneer in the field, as described in the book,"New Water for a Thirsty World" by Michael Salzman. In 1958, Israel's Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion asked Stephan to find primary water to supply a new city, and port on the Red Sea, under construction.   In May 29,1959, the Jerusalem Post announced that the Riess-located wells were sufficient to supply a city of more than 100,000 people, enough to supply the city of Eilat, and outlying villages. — Link

"One cubic kilometer of granite, under the right conditions, will yield one billion gallons of primary water." — Stephan Riess

"Primary water wells are not a new phenomenon.  Stephan Riess was drilling wells all over California and in the Middle East as far back as the early 1930s.  Pal has traveled to Africa numerous times, drilled six wells in Kenya and Tanzania, producing over 3,000 gallons per minute in an arid land with less than 10 inches of rainfall per year."

The Science of Water  
NEW SCIENTIST: Planet Earth makes its own water
WATER Journal - Information about water
Earth's Deep Water Cycle - ISBN978-0-87590-433-7
USA Today - Hydrogen & Oxygen trapped inside the Earth's Mantle Rock
Are there oceans hiding inside the Earth? BBC

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?

I've never had absolutely no rain for that long, but last year was very dry right from early spring. I think it
was something like 35-40% of normal rainfall March through June. We would have had snowmelt still for part of March, though. Average rainfall here for those four months according to Environment Canada's climate normals is typically 265mm. End of June and beginning of July was the heat dome, then July and August stayed hot. July was >35C almost every day. August had quite few days at those temperatures, but more only >30C. In September and October, things cooled off and, I don't remember, but we might get a frost or two at night in the second half of September. By mid October, I've usually let the frost take my tender plants. There's enough rain in October to plant grain, sometimes not until nearer the end of the month, though. Self seeding perennials and biennials will come up at some point in October.

Overall, last year was dry enough that the rain we did get would not have penetrated into my hugels. Sometime in October they probably started to take on water again. I plant as early as I can in the spring and that's it. It's too dry to plant seedlings later on in the year, so I don't. The grasshoppers would eat them anyway. For just about everything planted in the spring or already established, the hugel was fine. I had walking onions, tomatoes, squash, mustard greens, parsley, wild broccoli raab, potatoes, perennial kale, and strawberries, along with a few other flowers and herbs in smaller quantities on my main big hugel. A couple strawberries on the long east south east side of the hugel, which gets the hottest, died. I think that's it. I planted bush beans and some came up on the cooler west north west side, but the other ones dried out too early to get established. The "soil" on the hugel is mostly silt, some sand, almost devoid of organic material. There are pockets of compost here and there, along with the wood, of course. I mulch it with leaves and grass clippings, but the mulch gets chucked around by robins, so it doesn't always stay where it's supposed to. I think that's what killed the strawberries.

Jan - I think that's the point. For many of us, a late spring to mid-fall lack of rainfall is normal. Where I live it varies, this year we had a wet, cold spring. That proved worse for my garden than the previous year's heat dome. The immense pest pressure was way worse than the previous year's heat. Although we had just as bad heat this year as last, it was just later in the year.

Personally, on my land, I take a multi-faceted approach. Everything from rainwater harvesting, greywater systems, drip irrigation and hugelkultur. Ponds are generally not allowed  but I do have a few.

Pretty much, almost nothing is going to grow here without irrigation. Plants left to their own devices have a reproduction rate of 1/10,000. That's unrealistic for me.

The areas I cultivate I do so intensively. But other areas are well suited to livestock, so that's my solution.

My partner has recently presented “Building Drought Resilience in Low Rainfall Environments” at the National Landcare 2022 Conference, held in Sydney, last week. Though Buckleboo Station is a large sheep station in outback Australia, with a 12” annual rainfall, the principles still apply. His 25 minute presentation is on YouTube on the Landcare channel. (He doesn’t mention the many large tanks that capture every drop of rain from the homestead and outbuildings in the home paddock, for our personal use).
During the recent 3 year drought we had water trucked in (several times a week) at huge cost.
His presentation outlines how this can be avoided in future droughts.