Have you tried establishing wood mulched beds, swales for capturing rainfall on contour, or Hügelkultur beds? I’ve seen Geoff Lawton’s work establishing figs and other water loving vegetation in the desert. Fabricating your own rich topsoil layer with woodchips is a good first step. Also, building walls or structures to create micro-climates may help to reduce loss of moisture and provide areas for more sensitive stuff to grow. A less ideal climate might be just what is needed to keep some of these in check without extra effort.
For what it’s worth, I’ve stayed in Napa (it’s beautiful) and am very aware of the dry conditions out there most of the year. I imagine jujubes would thrive there.
That sounds like an opportunity to construct some lined rain gardens (with synthetic rubber liner or bring in clay). Fill the bottom with clean riprap, top off with organics like single shredded wood grindings (the ugly big chunky stuff) and devise a system to slowly wick the moisture to the preferred locations via capillary action, or make some in ground drip irrigation system on a timer based on rainfall. There are ways to adapt and overcome if enough effort is put into it!
I may have the opposite challenge with current plans to dig, possibly below the nearby stream elevation. I may need a sump pump on solar/battery OR to just build above grade and fill for my design. A little different trying to construct a walipini vs a rain garden, though.
have them in poor gravely soil near my autumn olives and only mulched them when planted. never watered them and they grow like crazy. out of 4 tubers planted 4 years ago the patch is now 6’ x 12’. as soon as this snow goes away ill send you a bunch. pm me your addy.
@steveb4, if you have an overwhelming desire to part ways with even more of those Jerusalem artichokes then I would love to add two more varieties to the one that my friends gifted to me last year.
Please tell us more about the amaranth you have grown. I’ve had a desire to grow it primarily as duck feed, though I will certainly try the greens and the grain for myself as well.
Jerusalem artichoke has similar nutritional profile as potatoes and as your bodies gut bacteria adjusts to them you will get over any gastric issues. ground nut is also calorie packed but not as productive as j. artichokes. what’s nice about these is they aren’t recognizable as food should someone raids your garden.
i grew the golden amaranth from seed i got from rareseeds.com . i killed a strip of grass on my lawn with herbicide then mounded soil and planted them into that. they sprouted and grew quickly. i then mulched the mounds with chic bedding. only watered until they spouted. they grew to 6ft by sept. once some seed started to come off when i touched them i harvested the seed heads into into old feed bags. i gave them a few days then shook off the seed in the bags then poured into sealed containers. i used recipes from online. was very tasty. i have a bunch of red amaranth seed id like to try growing this spring. there are even amaranth types that are grown just for the greens.
Oh, I don’t know that all that’s necessary. So long as I plant at grade, rather than in raised beds, and mulch heavily (a necessity anyway on account of the weeds), it’s fine. Just pointing out that raised beds can do more harm than good sometimes.
Amaranth grows very well here, it’s actually one of the main row crops weeds in the area, especially the round up resistant stuff. Grew some fancy varieties as a vegetable last year on account of that. I didn’t eat one leaf–flea beetles absolutely riddled them with holes and just about killed them. I guess there’s a really healthy population of flea beetles with a taste for amaranth on account of the huge amaranth population in neighboring fields. They like beans too, both the farmers soybeans and my garden beans…
Absolutely, raised beds are a tool in the toolbox. For someone with high rodent pressure or poor native soil, they can be game changers. Water wealth like I mentioned is good to have when needed though.
Agreed, they have their use. I grew up digging double deep beds in my parents garden. It built character if nothing else haha
I point it out mostly because certain techniques, like companion planting, high organic matter soil, deep beds, and mulching, are very rarely presented as tools with pros and cons. The cons are rarely mentioned, to the point where I suspect many aren’t even aware of them.
I harvested some of the “less bitter” variety of oak acorns from my property and made acorn flour with it. I’m going to be honest, it tasted terrible. I leeched tannins for several weeks. It wasn’t bitter but the flavor was just awful. They could get me through a famine but otherwise I will not eat them again.
One thing I’d add to this list is Egyptian Walking Onions. I grow them and have them planted them throughout my property now. They are a very low maintenance onion with great flavor. I grow sunchokes and amaranth. Never had gastric issues with sun chokes.
One good point made here is survival crops need to be high in calories. I would add corn, potatoes, beans, and squash to that list although I know they are conventional.
I grew some red amaranth this past season as well. I just threw seeds on a bare patch of ground and raked it over. I did it pretty late, around May, but I still got a fall harvest in NJ. I did absolutely nothing to them or for them. The best seeds survived I guess.
Yes, mulch is a gardener’s best friend here. Everything gets 4+ inches of wood chips and cedar bark in my yard. I haven’t tried Hügelkultur, but I can imagine it’ll run into the same issues as a raised bed here unless I dig a deep pit to bury the wood in.
The problem with swales is that our rain comes nearly entirely between October and April, and we can go days on end without a break in the rain in wet years. So anything planted near a swale needs to be able to tolerate flooding in the winter and completely drying out in summer. We also get huge annual variations in rainfall; for example, we received 46 inches of rain the winter of 2016-17, while in 2020-2021, we only got 7.5 inches for the entire rainy season. In October of '21, we got in a single storm nearly the same amount of rain that fell in the previous 12 months. While our average total is around 26 inches, we rarely get an average year. I wish I had the room to build a cistern or install a tank for rainwater since all our water comes at a time we don’t really need to use it for irrigation.
Like many drought tolerant fruit trees, jujubes still need some summer water for a decent crop. Olives, pomegranates, almonds, grapes, even figs and walnuts will survive without irrigation but fruit quantity and quality suffer. Only in the wettest years or if the groundwater is close enough to the surface will they fruit well without any additional inputs.
This.
Going back to mulch, as good as mulching is for the soil, I don’t know if many gardeners here in California are aware of the fire risk a thick layer of straw poses when we get north winds that drop humidity levels down to single digits.
Companion planting can be great too, but if water is your limiting resource, every additional plant becomes a competitor for water.
Oh, I didn’t even think about the fire issue. Good point.
For me, the main issues are pest-related. Mulch provides a great home for a lot of pests, especially once the plants close canopy so the mulch stays moist longer. Melons grown on mulch get all kinds of damage from bugs in my experience, I generally only get acceptable melons by growing either on plastic or, for smaller ones, on a trellis. My passion fruit and several other plants get wrecked by slugs whenever there’s ample mulch for them to hide in. Flea beetles are worse on sweet potatoes on mulch rather than bare ground, same with beans. Fire ants loooooove a good mulch pile, and get spread all around when you use that mulch for your beds (fire ants usually have multiple queens, so spreading the mulch just creates a bunch of new mounds). Etc.
Plus, the mulch tends to make fungal diseases worse. I think it’s a combination of mulch helping to regulate humidity, which fungi like, and the fact that you can’t practice good sanitation without completely replacing the mulch layer ever time a few infected leaves fall onto it. Sure, for some fungi the mulch helps, especially stuff that’s purely soilborne. But compared with plastic, for example, mulch is pretty bad for increasing fungal disease. Yeah, I know, plastic is artificial and bad and stuff, so it can’t be the superior option ever. But once you drop the ideological thinking and just focus on the practical, there are very much times when plastic is actually the best tool.
Companion planting is similar. Sometimes it causes issues because of direct competition. More often, for me in my climate anyway, it causes issues by increasing pest pressure. Funny that you should pluck off the lower leaves of tomatoes, figs, etc so they get better air circulation and don’t trap moisture and humidity, but it’s a-ok to grow a bunch of dense, ground-covering annuals because they’re companion plants who just help the bigger plant grow better because synergy and stuff… I find it equally ironic that many plants that are supposed to reduce pest pressure actually host a lot of bugs themselves. Marigolds are one of the worst offenders, they get thrips so bad my wife has actually banned me from picking marigolds and bringing them inside for floral arraignments because of how many thrips crawl out of them and start covering the table and counter. Marigold, the companion plant that’s supposed to deter insects…
Again, none of this is to say mulch is bad or companion planting is bad or that plastic is good. I reckon that I actually use more mulch than almost anyone else on this forum who isn’t commercial (tens of thousands of pounds of mulch annually, limited more by manpower than need). I’m just saying that there’s a very strong tendency to white-wash, or green-wash I guess, certain techniques and tools because they are feel-goody and natural.
But anyway, getting back to the original topic, one thing I’d love to see more discussion of is boosting demand for arguably neglected minor crops. The best case in point I have is quinoa up until a few years ago. Quinoa is of course very good for you, and tends to do best outside of the traditional grain belts. The huge increase in the popularity and commercial availability of quinoa in recent years has been a real win-win for nutrition and for food security and diversity. The fact that I can now get quinoa for dirt cheap in places like Walmart is really, really good news, especially for those concerned about the health and food security of the poor, not just those lucky enough to have land and time and energy and smarts enough to grow food on it.
There are plenty of other minor crops that could provide similar wins. Crops that are outside the mainstream, but that are quite healthful and also could be grown commercially provided there was sufficient demand. So I don’t mean impractical stuff like sunchokes (great for gardeners in certain climates, but terrible for commercial use), or stuff that’s just another mostly empty carbs like cassava and a lot of other tubers. I’m thinking stuff that can be effectively grown commercially that is also healthful but that just isn’t much in demand.
Buckwheat comes to mind for me. It’s sort of similar to quinoa in terms of nutrition. It has a good amount of protein and fiber compared to carbs, and a good dose of vitamins and minerals. That better balance of protein, carbs, and fiber is probably where most people would benefit most from eating more of it. And the stuff is already domesticated, already grown commercially, just not at scale enough for it to be cheap. In the US anyway, in eastern Europe buckwheat is one of the staples, and it is dirt cheap there. It’s also very simple to prepare. Roasted buckwheat groats are incredibly easy to cook, and taste good without any heavy doctoring, unlike most whole grains which are usually bitter (e.g. wheat).
So I’d love to see buckwheat get the same kind of bourgeoisie hype as a health food that quinoa got a few years ago. That hype usually spreads around, so while if at first only Whole Paycheck carries something, eventually places like Walmart will start carrying it, and at realistic prices so real, normal, average people can start buying it and benefiting.
Hemp seed.
“
Hemp seeds have long been prized as a high-quality source of plant-based protein and omega fatty acids. A single serving of hemp seeds, about two heaping tablespoons, provides 10 grams of protein and 10 grams of omegas. Hemp also packs in all nine essential amino acids, which we need to get through diet since our bodies don’t produce them naturally. Hemp seed oil, which is the oil derived from pressed hemp seeds, contains the most essential fatty acids of any nut or seed oil. Of the three main hemp products on the market—seeds, oil, and protein powder—hemp seeds will provide the broadest spectrum of nutritional benefits per serving.”
Surprised no one has mentioned wild potato vine/ Ipomoea pandurata yet, they’re native all across the midwest and grow in poor soils. They are in the morning glory family like sweet potatoes with giant blooms for the pollinators.
Does anyone know why oaks weren’t domesticated? By this I mean why was there never a process of human selection, whether intentional or incidental, that reduced tannin content to a low enough level that the nuts could be eaten without preparation such as leeching? There could also have been selection for flavor and sweetness. Are low tannin acorns more susceptible to insects?
What are the practical obstacles to trying to develop a low-tannin white oak? I’m imagining (1) identifying healthy oak trees with relatively low-tannin acorns, (2) crossing such trees, (3) gathering acorns produced by such crosses, (4) growing the seedlings, and so on. Obviously it would take time. But what else?