Someone here asked me the other day, "why bother trying to garden in the desert?" It hadn’t occurred to me to ask myself that question.
I want to write more about how to garden in the desert, but I guess first it might be helpful to address this question. More prologue!
Okay, here’s some reasons.
First, everybody needs to eat, and people are probably going to keep living in the desert, or trying to, especially if we keep winding up with more and more desert. Where I live it isn’t even really that bad, at least it hasn’t been – we usually get a summer monsoon, and that’s a handy time to get some rain, because when we don’t, it starts getting up over 110oF, and then it’s really time to ask yourself that bothersome question.
But people garden and even farm in deserts much more extreme than this one, as long as they can get their hands on some water. Irrigation techniques can get quite time consuming and finicky; people carry water by bucket, they use drip systems that continuously drip just enough water to keep the soil around the plant roots moist.
If people are going to live in the desert, it makes more sense to try to grow food than to insist it all be grown elsewhere and shipped in, if one can do it in some sort of manner that does not consume a lot of other people’s resources, which can be read to mean any resources. If you live in the desert and there’s a great big river flowing down from the mountains through your desert, it may make a heck of a lot of sense to farm in the desert, as long as your water diversion doesn’t dead end, and that’s one of the biggest problems with desert agriculture historically; the soil salts up because there isn’t enough flushing out to the waterways and hence into the sea, where all good irrigation water should wind up, because otherwise sooner or later your agriculture is going to die, and be extremely hard to reestablish, especially if you don’t have a handy summer monsoon, or some kind of rainy season that comes around at least once every several years or so and washes away all those nasty salts hard and fast enough that they get to some kind of waterway and out.
Of course, they can always just sink down into the groundwater, but you generally don’t want that if your groundwater isn’t somehow draining, because otherwise you wind up with your agriculture afloat on a saline sea that keeps getting higher until it reaches the surface and starts evaporating, which makes a nice white crusty layer that will grow little if anything.
Some people do stuff like run pipes underground to drain the fields, but ultimately you have to deal with the fact that water likes to run downhill, and if you don’t have any downhill for it to run into, you’re going to salt up, and that’s going to be it.
So, metarule #1 of farming in the desert is: Make sure there is some way for water to drain out of the area into the sea, if you’re going to try to grow stuff that needs substantially more water than the vegetation that is native to the area..
Metarule #2 is probably "make sure you’ve got some source of water in the first place." This is always a tricky bit of business, because only too frequently it tends to mean taking it from somewhere that may well suffer environmentally from your little diversion system. Who owns the groundwater? is often a difficult question, seeing as that groundwater mapping is a complex business and the folks who do it, good though they might be at their work, may not always work out the whole picture, changeable as it is. Many lawyers have made a good living arbitrating this question, especially in the American Southwest. For that matter, even arbitrating the question of who gets how much of the flow of any given river garners similar results, even with the water in question so much more visible.
This leads to metarule #3, which is "Figure out every possible way you can to keep the water from evaporating." As pointed out by a commenter on a recent diary of mine, this means thinking about inventing microclimates (good point, commenter!)
Now, back to why you would want to bother doing any of this at all, presuming you don’t find it necessary to live somewhere where you can grow your own food, or maybe you don’t even want to grow food at all. I respect that choice; we are an advanced species and not everyone should feel obliged to grow food. Nevertheless, it is always good to know how to do things you don’t want to do, especially if it means keeping from going hungry. Whether it’s knowing how to grow food, or knowing what you can eat that’s already growing around you, I think it important that this discussion be kept going. And, the desert is always waiting.
Another reason to learn how to grow food in the desert, in a reasonably elegant, water-thrifty, sustainable manner, is that it is such a challenge. Challenges are good for the brain, and there are reasons to believe we may have our brains challenged more than usual in the coming century. What better place to start than figuring out low-tech sustainable ways to grow good food in difficult environments?
And also - Americans are used to thinking of themselves as world leaders, and this perception has been sorely challenged for many of us of late. One thing we can do to re-establish this role, before the oil runs out, is to join in with what is a worldwide effort to reinvent agriculture, and to do so in a way that takes the good out of the old ways, and adds to them new techniques, ways to get it to work and to let it work, instead of focusing so much on ways to MAKE it work. Because we try to make it work far too hard, and in doing so, I think we miss a lot of the potential of growing our food, and also how it can be an experience that reinvents us too, every day.