This weed-like, drought-tolerant salad green is little known and underappreciated. In summer the leaves get tough and strong flavored; if other greens are available, sorrel will probably be unpicked. That's ok. During fall, winter, and spring, sorrel's lemony taste and delicate, tender texture balance tougher savoy cabbage and kale and turn those crude vegetables into very acceptable salads. Serious salad-eating families might want the production of 5 to 10 row-feet.
Sowing date:The first year you grow sorrel, sow mid-March to mid-April. The tiny seed must be placed shallowly, and it sprouts much more readily when the soil stays moist. Plant a single furrow centered in a row 4 feet wide.
Spacing:As the seedlings grow, thin gradually. When the leaves are about the size of ordinary spinach, individual plants should be about 6 inches apart.
Irrigation:Not necessary in summer—you won't eat it anyway. If production lags in fall, winter, or spring, side-dress the sorrel patch with a little compost or organic fertilizer.
Maintenance:Sorrel is perennial. If an unusually harsh winter freeze kills off the leaves it will probably come back from root crowns in early spring. You'll welcome it after losing the rest of your winter crops. In spring of the second and succeeding years sorrel will make seed. Seed making saps the plant's energy, and the seeds may naturalize into an unwanted weed around the garden. So, before any seed forms, cut all the leaves and seed stalks close to the ground; use the trimmings as a convenient mulch along the row. If you move the garden or want to relocate the patch, do not start sorrel again from seed. In any season dig up a few plants, divide the root masses, trim off most of the leaves to reduce transplanting shock, and transplant 1 foot apart. Occasional unique plants may be more reluctant to make seed stalks than most others. Since seed stalks produce few edible leaves and the leaves on them are very harsh flavored, making seed is an undesirable trait. So I propagate only seed-shy plants by root cuttings.
Spring spinach is remarkably more drought tolerant than it would appear from its delicate structure and the succulence of its leaves. A bolt-resistant, long-day variety bred for summer harvest sown in late April may still yield pickable leaves in late June or even early July without any watering at all, if thinned to 12 inches apart in rows 3 feet apart.
Sowing date:Having warm-enough soil is everything. At Elkton I first attempt squash about April 15. In the Willamette, May 1 is usual. Farther north, squash may not come up until June 1. Dry gardeners should not transplant squash; the taproot must not be broken.
Spacing:The amount of room to give each plant depends on the potential of a specific variety's maximum root development. Most vining winter squash can completely occupy a 10-foot-diameter circle. Sprawly heirloom summer squash varieties can desiccate an 8-or 9-foot-diameter circle. Thin each hill to one plant, not two or more as is recommended in the average garden book. There must be no competition for water.
Irrigation:With winter storage types, an unirrigated vine may yield 15 pounds of squash after occupying a 10-foot-diameter circle for an entire growing season. However, starting about July 1, if you support that vine by supplying liquid fertilizer every two to three weeks you may harvest 60 pounds of squash from the same area. The first fertigation may only need 2 gallons. Then mid-July give 4; about August 1, 8; August 15, feed 15 gallons. After that date, solar intensity and temperatures decline, growth rate slows, and water use also decreases. On September 1 I'd add about 8 gallons and about 5 more on September 15 if it hadn't yet rained significantly. Total water: 42 gallons. Total increase in yield: 45 pounds. I'd say that's a good return on water invested.
Varieties:For winter squash, all the vining winter varieties in the C. maxima or C. pepo family seem acceptably adapted to dry gardening. These include Buttercup, Hubbard, Delicious, Sweet Meat, Delicata, Spaghetti, and Acorn. I wouldn't trust any of the newer compact bush winter varieties so popular on raised beds. Despite their reputation for drought tolerance C. mixta varieties (or cushaw squash) were believed to be strictly hot desert or humid-tropical varieties, unable to mature in our cool climate. However, Pepita (PEA) is a mixta that is early enough and seems entirely unbothered by a complete lack of irrigation. The enormous vine sets numerous good keepers with mild-tasting, light yellow flesh.
Obviously, the compact bush summer squash varieties so popular these days are not good candidates for withstanding long periods without irrigation. The old heirlooms like Black Zucchini (ABL) (not Black Beauty!) and warty Yellow Crookneck grow enormous, high-yielding plants whose extent nearly rivals that of the largest winter squash. They also grow a dense leaf cover, making the fruit a little harder to find. These are the only American heirlooms still readily available. Black Zucchini has become very raggedy; anyone growing it should be prepared to plant several vines and accept that at least one-third of them will throw rather off-type fruit. It needs the work of a skilled plant breeder. Yellow Crookneck is still a fairly "clean" variety offering good uniformity. Both have more flavor and are less watery than the modern summer squash varieties. Yellow Crookneck is especially rich, probably due to its thick, oily skin; most gardeners who once grow the old Crookneck never again grow any other kind. Another useful drought-tolerant variety is Gem, sometimes called Rolet (TSC). It grows an extensive winter-squash-like vine yielding grapefruit-size, excellent eating summer squash.
Both Yellow Crookneck and Black Zucchini begin yielding several weeks later than the modern hybrids. However, as the summer goes on they will produce quite a bit more squash than new hybrid types. I now grow five or six fully irrigated early hybrid plants like Seneca Zucchini too. As soon as my picking bucket is being filled with later-to-yield Crooknecks, I pull out the Senecas and use the now empty irrigated space for fall crops.
There's no point in elaborate methods—trellising, pruning, or training—with dry-gardened tomato vines. Their root systems must be allowed to control all the space they can without competition, so allow the vines to sprawl as well. And pruning the leaf area of indeterminates is counterproductive: to grow hugely, the roots need food from a full complement of leaves.
Sowing date:Set out transplants at the usual time. They might also be jump started under cloches two to three weeks before the last frost, to make better use of natural soil moisture.
Spacing:Depends greatly on variety. The root system can occupy as much space as the vines will cover and then some.
Irrigation:Especially on determinate varieties, periodic fertigation will greatly increase yield and size of fruit. The old indeterminate sprawlers will produce through an entire summer without any supplemental moisture, but yield even more in response to irrigation.
Variety:With or without irrigation or anywhere in between, when growing tomatoes west of the Cascades, nothing is more important than choosing the right variety. Not only does it have to be early and able to set and ripen fruit when nights are cool, but to grow through months without watering the plant must be highly indeterminate. This makes a built-in conflict: most of the sprawly, huge, old heirloom varieties are rather late to mature. But cherry tomatoes are always far earlier than big slicers.
If I had to choose only one variety it would be the old heirloom [Large] Red Cherry. A single plant is capable of covering a 9- to 10-foot-diameter circle if fertigated from mid-July through August. The enormous yield of a single fertigated vine is overwhelming.
Red Cherry is a little acid and tart. Non-acid, indeterminate cherry types like Sweetie, Sweet 100, and Sweet Millions are also workable but not as aggressive as Red Cherry. I wouldn't depend on most bush cherry tomato varieties. But our earliest cherry variety of all, OSU's Gold Nugget, must grow a lot more root than top, for, with or without supplemental water, Gold Nugget sets heavily and ripens enormously until mid-August, when it peters out from overbearing (not from moisture stress). Gold Nugget quits just about when the later cherry or slicing tomatoes start ripening heavily.
Other well-adapted early determinates such as Oregon Spring and Santiam may disappoint you. Unless fertigated, they'll set and ripen some fruit but may become stunted in midsummer. However, a single indeterminate Fantastic Hybrid will cover a 6-to 7-foot-diameter circle, and grow and ripen tomatoes until frost with only a minimum of water. I think Stupice (ABL, TSC) and Early Cascade are also quite workable (and earlier than Fantastic in Washington).
This chapter illustrates and explains my own dry garden. Any garden plan is a product of compromises and preferences; mine is not intended to become yours. But, all modesty aside, this plan results from 20 continuous years of serious vegetable gardening and some small degree of regional wisdom.
My wife and I are what I dub "vegetablitarians." Not vegetarians, or lacto-ovo vegetarians because we're not ideologues and eat meat on rare, usually festive occasions in other peoples' houses. But over 80 percent of our calories are from vegetable, fruit, or cereal sources and the remaining percentage is from fats or dairy foods. The purpose of my garden is to provide at least half the actual calories we eat year-round; most of the rest comes from home-baked bread made with freshly ground whole grains. I put at least one very large bowl of salad on the table every day, winter and summer. I keep us in potatoes nine months a year and produce a year's supply of onions or leeks. To break the dietary monotony of November to April, I grow as wide an assortment of winter vegetables as possible and put most produce departments to shame from June through September, when the summer vegies are "on."
The garden plan may seem unusually large, but in accordance with Solomon's First Law of Abundance, there's a great deal of intentional waste. My garden produces two to three times the amount of food needed during the year so moochers, poachers, guests, adult daughters accompanied by partners, husbands, and children, mistakes, poor yields, and failures of individual vegetables are inconsequential. Besides, gardening is fun.
My garden is laid out in 125-foot-long rows and one equally long raised bed. Each row grows only one or two types of vegetables. The central focus of my water-wise garden is its irrigation system. Two lines of low-angle sprinklers, only 4 feet apart, straddle an intensively irrigated raised bed running down the center of the garden. The sprinklers I use are Naans, a unique Israeli design that emits very little water and throws at a very low angle (available from TSC and some garden centers). Their maximum reach is about 18 feet; each sprinkler is about 12 feet from its neighbor. On the garden plan, the sprinklers are indicated by a circle surrounding an "X." Readers unfamiliar with sprinkler system design are advised to study the irrigation chapter in Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades.
On the far left side of the garden plan is a graphic representation of the uneven application of water put down by this sprinkler system. The 4-foot-wide raised bed gets lots of water, uniformly distributed. Farther away, the amount applied decreases rapidly. About half as much irrigation lands only 6 feet from the edge of the raised bed as on the bed itself. Beyond that the amount tapers off to insignificance. During summer's heat the farthest 6 feet is barely moistened on top, but no water effectively penetrates the dry surface. Crops are positioned according to their need for or ability to benefit from supplementation. For convenient description I've numbered those rows.
Crops demanding the most water are grown on the raised bed. These include a succession of lettuce plantings designed to fill the summer salad bowl, summer spinach, spring kohlrabi, my celery patch, scallions, Chinese cabbages, radishes, and various nursery beds that start overwintered crops for transplanting later. Perhaps the bed seems too large just for salad greens. But one entire meal every day consists largely of fresh, raw, high-protein green leaves; during summer, looseleaf or semiheading lettuce is our salad item of choice. And our individual salad bowls are larger than most families of six might consider adequate to serve all of them together.
If water were severely rationed I could irrigate the raised bed with hose and nozzle and dry garden the rest, but as it is, rows 1, 2, 7, and 8 do get significant but lesser amounts from the sprinklers. Most of the rows hold a single plant family needing similar fertilization and handling or, for convenience, that are sown at the same time.
The row's center is about 3 feet from the edge of the raised bed. In March I sow my very first salad greens down half this row—mostly assorted leaf lettuce plus some spinach—and six closely spaced early Seneca Hybrid zucchini plants. The greens are all cut by mid-June; by mid-July my better-quality Yellow Crookneck squash come on, so I pull the zucchini. Then I till that entire row, refertilize, and sow half to rutabagas. The nursery bed of leek seedlings has gotten large enough to transplant at this time, too. These go into a trench dug into the other half of the row. The leeks and rutabagas could be reasonably productive located farther from the sprinklers, but no vegetables benefit more from abundant water or are more important to a self-sufficient kitchen. Rutabagas break the winter monotony of potatoes; leeks vitally improve winter salads, and leeky soups are a household staple from November through March.
Row 2 gets about half the irrigation of row 1 and about one-third as much as the raised bed, and so is wider, to give the roots more room. One-third of the row grows savoy cabbage, the rest, Brussels sprouts. These brassicas are spaced 4 feet apart and by summer's end the lusty sprouts form a solid hedge 4 feet tall.
Row 3 grows 125 feet of various kales sown in April. There's just enough overspray to keep the plants from getting gnarly. I prefer kale to not get very stunted, if only for aesthetics: on my soil, one vanity fertigation about mid-July keeps this row looking impressive all summer. Other gardens with poorer soil might need more support. This much kale may seem an enormous oversupply, but between salads and steaming greens with potatoes we manage to eat almost all the tender small leaves it grows during winter.
Mostly carrots, a few beets. No irrigation, no fertigation, none needed. One hundred carrots weighing in at around 5 pounds each and 20-some beets of equal magnitude make our year's supply for salads, soups, and a little juicing.
This row holds a few crowns of French sorrel, a few feet of parsley. Over a dozen giant kohlrabi are spring sown, but over half the row grows endive. I give this row absolutely no water. Again, when contemplating the amount of space it takes, keep in mind that this endive and kohlrabi must help fill our salad bowls from October through March.
Half the row grows early bush peas. Without overhead irrigation to bother them, unpicked pods form seed that sprouts excellently the next year. This half of the row is rotary tilled and fertilized again after the pea vines come out. Then it stays bare through July while capillarity somewhat recharges the soil. About August 1, I wet the row's surface down with hose and fan nozzle and sow overwintered cauliflower seed. To keep the cauliflower from stunting I must lightly hand sprinkle the row's center twice weekly through late September. Were water more restricted I could start my cauliflower seedlings in a nursery bed and transplant them here in October.
The other half is home to the Solanaceae: tomato, pepper, and eggplant. I give this row a little extra width because pea vines run, and I fertigate my Solanaceae, preferring sprawly tomato varieties that may cover an 8-foot-diameter circle. There's also a couple of extra bare feet along the outside because the neighboring grasses will deplete soil moisture along the edge of the garden.
Moving away from irrigation on the other side of the raised bed, I grow a succession of hybrid broccoli varieties and late fall cauliflower. The broccoli is sown several times, 20 row-feet each sowing, done about April 15, June 1, and July 15. The late cauliflower goes in about July 1. If necessary I could use much of this row for quick crops that would be harvested before I wanted to sow broccoli or cauliflower, but I don't need more room. The first sowings of broccoli are pulled out early enough to permit succession sowings of arugula or other late salad greens.
Here I erect a 125-foot-long, 6-foot-tall net trellis for gourmet delicacies like pole peas and pole beans. The bean vines block almost all water that would to on beyond it and so this row gets more irrigation than it otherwise might. The peas are harvested early enough to permit a succession sowing of Purple Sprouting broccoli in mid-July. Purple Sprouting needs a bit of sprinkling to germinate in the heat of midsummer, but, being as vigorous as kale, once up, it grows adequately on the overspray from the raised bed. The beans would be overwhelmingly abundant if all were sown at one time, so I plant them in two stages about three weeks apart. Still, a great many beans go unpicked. These are allowed to form seed, are harvested before they quite dry, and crisp under cover away from the sprinklers. We get enough seed from this row for planting next year, plus all the dry beans we care to eat during winter. Dry beans are hard to digest and as we age we eat fewer and fewer of them. In previous years I've grown entire rows of dry legume seeds at the garden's edge.
This row is so wide because here are grown all the spreading cucurbits. The pole beans in row 8 tend to prevent overspray; this dryness is especially beneficial to humidity-sensitive melons, serendipitously reducing their susceptability to powdery mildew diseases. All cucurbits are fertigated every three weeks. The squash will have fallen apart by the end of September, melons are pulled out by mid-September. The area is then tilled and fertilized, making space to transplant overwintered spring cabbages, other overwintered brassicas, and winter scallions in October. These transplants are dug from nurseries on the irrigated raised bed. I could also set cold frames here and force tender salad greens all winter.
This single long row satisfies a potato-loving household all winter. The quality of these dry-gardened tubers is so high that my wife complains if she must buy a few new potatoes from the supermarket after our supplies have become so sprouty and/or shriveled that they're not tasty any longer.
I am an unusually fortunate gardener. After seven years of struggling on one of the poorest growing sites in this region we now live on 16 acres of mostly excellent, deep soil, on the floor of a beautiful, coastal Oregon valley. My house and gardens are perched safely above the 100-year flood line, there's a big, reliable well, and if I ever want more than 20 gallons per minute in midsummer, there's the virtually unlimited Umpqua River to draw from. Much like a master skeet shooter who uses a .410 to make the sport more interesting, I have chosen to dry garden.
Few are this lucky. These days the majority of North Americans live an urban struggle. Their houses are as often perched on steep, thinly soiled hills or gooey, difficult clay as on a tiny fragment of what was once prime farmland. And never does the municipal gardener have one vital liberty I do: to choose which one-sixth of an acre in his 14-acre "back yard" he'll garden on this year.
I was a suburban backyard gardener for five years before deciding to homestead. I've frequently recalled this experience while learning to dry garden. What follows in this chapter are some strategies to guide the urban in becoming more water-wise.
After it rains or after sprinkler irrigation, water evaporates from the surface until a desiccated earth mulch develops. Frequent light watering increases this type of loss. Where lettuce, radishes, and other shallow-rooting vegetables are growing, perhaps it is best to accept this loss or spread a thin mulch to reduce it. But most vegetables can feed deeper, so if wetting the surface can be avoided, a lot of water can be saved. Even sprinkling longer and less frequently helps accomplish that. Half the reason that drip systems are more efficient is that the surface isn't dampened and virtually all water goes deep into the earth. The other half is that they avoiding evaporation that occurs while water sprays through the air between the nozzle and the soil. Sprinkling at night or early in the morning, when there is little or no wind, prevents almost all of this type of loss.
To use drip irrigation it is not necessary to invest in pipes, emitters, filters, pressure regulators, and so forth. I've already explained how recycled plastic buckets or other large containers can be improvised into very effective drip emitters. Besides, drip tube systems are not trouble free: having the beds covered with fragile pipes makes hoeing dicey, while every emitter must be periodically checked against blockage.
When using any type of drip system it is especially important to relate the amount of water applied to the depth of the soil to the crops, root development. There's no sense adding more water than the earth can hold. Calculating the optimum amount of water to apply from a drip system requires applying substantial, practical intelligence to evaluating the following factors: soil water-holding capacity and accessible depth; how deep the root systems have developed; how broadly the water spreads out below each emitter (dispersion); rate of loss due to transpiration. All but one of these factors—dispersion—are adequately discussed elsewhere inGardening Without Irrigation.
A drip emitter on sandy soil moistens the earth nearly straight down with little lateral dispersion; 1 foot below the surface the wet area might only be 1 foot in diameter. Conversely, when you drip moisture into a clay soil, though the surface may seem dry, 18 inches away from the emitter and just 3 inches down the earth may become saturated with water, while a few inches deeper, significant dispersion may reach out nearly 24 inches. On sandy soil, emitters on 12-inch centers are hardly close enough together, while on clay, 30-or even 36-inch centers are sufficient.
Another important bit of data to enter into your arithmetic: 1 cubic foot of water equals about 5 gallons. A 12-inch-diameter circle equals 0.75 square feet (A = Pi x Radius squared), so 1 cubic foot of water (5 gallons) dispersed from a single emitter will add roughly 16 inches of moisture to sandy soil, greatly overwatering a medium that can hold only an inch or so of available water per foot. On heavy clay, a single emitter may wet a 4-foot-diameter circle, on loams, anywhere in between, 5 gallons will cover a 4-foot-diameter circle about 1 inch deep. So on deep, clay soil, 10 or even 15 gallons per application may be in order. What is the texture of your soil, its water-holding capacity, and the dispersion of a drip into it? Probably, it is somewhere in between sand and clay.
I can't specify what is optimum in any particular situation. Each gardener must consider his own unique factors and make his own estimation. All I can do is stress again that the essence of water-wise gardening is water conservation.
Intensive gardening is a strategy holding that yield per square foot is the supreme goal; it succeeds by optimizing as many growth factors as possible. So a raised bed is loosened very deeply without concern for the amount of labor, while fertility and moisture are supplied virtually without limit. Intensive gardening makes sense when land is very costly and the worth of the food grown is judged against organic produce at retail—and when water and nutrients are inexpensive and/or available in unlimited amounts.
When water use is reduced, yield inevitably drops proportionately. The backyard water-wise gardener, then, must logically ask which vegetable species will give him enough food or more economic value with limited space and water. Taking maritime Northwest rainfall patterns into consideration, here's my best estimation:
(in terms of backyard usage of space and moisture)
EFFICIENT ENOUGH
Early spring-sown crops: peas, broccoli, lettuce, radishes, savoy cabbage, kohlrabi
Overwintered crops: onions, broccoli cauliflower, cabbage, favas beans
Endive Kale
Garden sorrel
Indeterminate tomatoes
Giant kohlrabi
Parsley—leaf and root
heirloom summer squash (sprawly)
Pole beans
Herbs: marjoram, thyme, dill, cilantro, fennel, oregano
Root crops: carrots, beets, parsnips
MARGINAL
Brussels sprouts (late)
Potatoes
Determinate tomatoes
Rutabagas
Eggplant
Leeks
Leeks
Savoy cabbage (late)
Peppers, small fruited
INEFFICIENT
Beans, bush snap
Peppers, bell
Broccoli, summer
Radishes
Cauliflower
Scallions, bulb onions
Celery
Sweet corn
Lettuce
Turnips
Have fun planning your own water-wise garden!
Agricultural books, especially older ones, are not usually available at local libraries. But most municipal libraries and all universities offer access to an on-line database listing the holdings of other cooperating libraries throughout the United States. Almost any book published in this century will be promptly mailed to the requesting library. Anyone who is serious about learning by reading should discover how easy and inexpensive (or free) it is to use the Interlibrary Loan Service.
Carter, Vernon Gill, and Tom, Dale.Topsoil and Civilization.
Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974.
The history of civilization's destruction of one ecosystem after another by plowing and deforestation, and its grave implications for our country's long-term survival.
Cleveland, David A., and Daniela Soleri.Food from Dryland Gardens: An Ecological, Nutritional and Social Approach to Small-Scale Household Food Production.Tucson: Center for People, Food and Environment, 1991.
World-conscious survey of low-tech food production in semiarid regions.
Faulkner, Edward H.Plowman's Folly.Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1943.
This book created quite a controversy in the 1940s. Faulkner stresses the vital importance of capillarity. He explains how conventional plowing stops this moisture flow.
Foth, Henry D.Fundamentals of Soil Science.Eighth Edition. New York: John Wylie & Sons, 1990.
A thorough yet readable basic soil science text at a level comfortable for university non-science majors.
Hamaker, John. D.The Survival of Civilization.Annotated by Donald A. Weaver. Michigan/California: Hamaker-Weaver Publishers, 1982.
Hamaker contradicts our current preoccupation with global warming and makes a believable case that a new epoch of planetary glaciation is coming, caused by an increase in greenhouse gas. The book is also a guide to soil enrichment with rock powders.
Nabhan, Gary.The Desert Smells like Rain: A Naturalist in Papago Indian Country.San Francisco: North Point Press, 1962.
Describes regionally useful Native American dry-gardening techniques
Russell, Sir E. John.Soil Conditions and Plant Growth.Eighth Edition. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1950.
Probably the finest, most human soil science text ever written. Russell avoids unnecessary mathematics and obscure terminology. I do not recommend the recent in-print edition, revised and enlarged by a committee.
Smith, J. Russell. Tree Crops: a Permanent Agriculture. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929.
Smith's visionary solution to upland erosion is growing unirrigated tree crops that produce cereal-like foods and nuts. Should sit on the "family bible shelf" of every permaculturalist.
Solomon, Stephen J.Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades.Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 1989.
The complete regional gardening textbook.
————————————-.Backyard Composting.Portland, Ore.: George van Patten Publishing, 1992.
Especially useful for its unique discussion of the overuse of compost and a nonideological approach to raising the most nutritious food possible.
Stout, Ruth.Gardening Without Work for the Aging, the Busy and the Indolent.Old Greenwich, Conn.: Devin-Adair, 1961.
Stout presents the original thesis of permanent mulching.
Turner, Frank Newman.Fertility, Pastures and Cover Crops Based on Nature's Own Balanced Organic Pasture Feeds.San Diego: Rateaver, 1975. Reprinted from the 1955 Faber and Faber, edition.
Organic farming using long rotations, including deeply rooted green manures developed to a high art. Turner maintained a productive organic dairy farm using subsoiling and long rotations involving tilled crops and semipermanent grass/herb mixtures.
ven der Leeden, Frits, Fred L. Troise, and David K. Todd.The Water Encyclopedia, Second Edition.Chelsea, Mich.: Lewis Publishers, 1990.
Reference data concerning every possible aspect of water.
Weaver, John E., and William E. Bruner.Root Development of Vegetable Crops.New York: McGraw-Hill, 1927.
Contains very interesting drawings showing the amazing depth and extent that vegetable roots are capable of in favorable soil.
Widtsoe, John A.Dry Farming: A System of Agriculture for Countries Under Low Rainfall.New York: The Macmillan Company, 1920.
The best single review ever made of the possibilities of dry farming and dry gardening, sagely discussing the scientific basis behind the techniques. The quality of Widtsoe's understanding proves that newer is not necessarily better.