This is essentially a story of a man, survivalist at heart, who moved his family from Michigan to a 5 acres homestead in Oregon in a lovely, grassy valley. To feed his family, he sets up raised beds and intensive (square foot) gardening, which had worked so well back east. He runs into an irrigation problem unlike anything he had anticipated and nearly looses the garden crops he was depending on which were sustained by watering all night, five or six nights a week, with a single, 2-1/2 gallon-per-minute sprinkler moved from place to place.
Eventually, realizing his vulnerability, he is forced to abandon the homestead and move. Yet he knows that the Indian peoples produced crops without irrigation and he sets out to find out how and to adapt it (if possible) to our current vegetables. He grew two gardens side-by-side: a large "dry" garden and another large one intensive style, on raised beds with lots of irrigation to feed his family and act as a control. Eventually, he discovered a method for growing a lush, productive vegetable garden on deep soil with little or no irrigation, in spite of 8 to 12 virtually dry weeks every summer by adapting Native Americans of the Southwest and the highlands of Peru grew remarkable desert gardens, with little or no water, in areas of only 8 to 12 inches of rainfall.
He found:
1. some types of vegetable could be grown with out irrigation at all
2. some needed irrigation to simply survive
3. some benefited from a few minimally metered-out applications of fertilizer enriched watering ("fertigation")
4. some showed no increase in yield with fertigation.
5. there is water already present in the soil and, by creatively using and conserving this moisture, gardeners can go through an entire summer without much, if any, irrigation
