 Hi guys, this is Matt the Stoned Ape Farmer coming to you from Farm For All, and I just wanted to talk to you a bit about gardening without irrigation. I don't know if you can see all this lovely corn behind me, but it's been grown without any irrigation other than rainfall. And I want to talk to you a bit about some of the techniques I used here and throughout the garden to reduce or eliminate my need to irrigate. Let's go check it out. So, here's a close-up of my corn. It's part of my three sisters' bed, and the corn's finally tall enough that I just planted my beans the other day, and I haven't popped up yet. One of the things you might notice that's a little interesting is that this corn is planted in a little depression, and in fact all of the corn is planted in little depressions. And in the in-between depressions, it's filled with wood chips, and you can see a little squash popping up right there. What these depressions do is capture any rainwater that falls and forces them, forces that rainwater towards the plants. You see, water follows the basic rules of physics. If you put it on a high mound, it's going to roll off. But if you capture it in a basin, it'll stay there and slowly sink in. And because our summers are typically three to four months of drought, during the rainy season I want as much water as possible to penetrate the ground right here where I'm growing the corn. Now the reason I have wood chips in-between all these little pockets of corn is because those are placeholders where I'm going to be planting my winter squash. And the wood chips do a couple of things. First of all, they provide weed suppression since there's nothing growing right there now to block out weeds, to shade them out. The wood chips do that for me. I have a few little weeds. Got this guy right here, couple of these guys right here, which I can pull real quick. But for the most part, I haven't really had weeds coming up in this. Weeded really well before I planted the corn, and I put the wood chips in to prevent weeds coming up in-between the corn. But the other thing that the wood chips do is they stop evaporation. Come down here and open this up and see just how wet that is. Mind you, this isn't good soil. This is mostly clay. So the wood chips are also going to break down and help make this soil a little bit nicer than it is right now. Now mulch and weed suppression are both great because on the one hand, you're preventing evaporation and on the other hand, you're preventing transpiration. Transpiration is actually, according to Steve Solomon, who has done the most work in dry farming, at least in contemporary times. According to Steve Solomon, most of the water loss is actually through transpiration. And that's the water evaporating off of the leaves of the plants. So wherever you can eliminate weeds, you're going to conserve a lot of your water. One of the other things that's important for gardening without irrigation is plant spacing. Now, most people are under the impression that the wide spacing between rows that's recommended on packets of seeds has to do with farm equipment and being able to get machinery between rows of plants. This is actually the other way around. Before there was plumbing and pumped water, people didn't irrigate their crops. And the machinery was designed to work with those spacings in mind. You see, if you leave more spacing between the plants, they can put out larger root systems without having to compete with each other. And then they can mine their own nutrients and water without having to have them provided nonstop. As you might be able to see here, if the corn isn't shading my measuring tape, my corn plants are about 18 inches apart. And that's up from the 8 to 12 inches that's usually recommended. Only you want about 50% more spacing than the packets recommend in order to go without irrigating your crops. And this is with pretty minimal rainfall. Like I said, we get three to four months of drought throughout our main growing season here and these corn plants will not need to be irrigated at all, even with all of the drought. You may have noticed all of this rotting firewood in the background. This was all from my landlady who had a bunch of rotten firewood because of a leak in her shed. And she was just going to toss it down a bank. Well I went and recovered all of it, saved her the work of moving it. And this will be another part of my water saving strategy. Let's go check that out. Now if you'll take a look at this hot mess, on the other side of my kale plants, you can see that my kale plants are doing fine without irrigation. We've gotten regular temperatures into the 90s, although it's been a weird year and we've been fluctuating between cool temps and hot temps. These are doing fine because I've kept the wide spacing so that they don't have to compete for water. But the idea here is that I'll dig out all these paths and I'll fill them with that rotted wood that you saw. Basically, I'm creating hugel paths. And many of you are probably familiar with the idea of hugel culture at this point. The idea that you dig a trench or just lay wood on the soil, cover it with more soil and that becomes your garden bed. Now as the wood breaks down, it acts like a sponge and soaks up any excess rainwater and during periods of drought it will release it into your bed. One of the things that hugel culture is intended to do is to, because it's a mound, it'll shed excess water. Like if it's way too much, it'll shed that water to keep your bed from becoming waterlogged. Well, I don't want that because that is designed for areas where the rain is pretty constant throughout the year. That is not the case here. We get three to four months of drought during the main growing season when I really need a lot of water. So the idea is I'll dig out all of the paths between the rose and the main kitchen garden and I'll fill them with that rotted wood and I'll cover it back over with the soil you see there that I've dug out that I'll leave a very slight depression over the path and that's where the water will settle during the rainy season. Well that'll seep in, soak into the wood and then when we get around to our droughty season it can kind of release back into the beds on either side. Of course I'll cover the paths with wood chips so they don't become a muddy mess but then what I'm doing is I'm actually storing all of that water that would just run off with traditional hugal culture and I'm saving it up for our dry season. You can see that my kale plants are a good two feet apart in the row and about three feet apart between the rows and I'm hoping that once these hugal paths are good and established that what will happen is I'll be able to plant things much closer together and cram more stuff in the same amount of space. I still want to maintain white spacing it's easier to weed, it's easier to harvest and it still gives you that protection from drought but by adding this extra redundancy into my water saving I will be able to get a little bit more production out while still maintaining a complete lack of irrigation. Now I've already talked about mulch, at least wood mulch, but a lot of people get hung up on what mulch they're using, it really isn't important what you use as long as you're keeping the soil covered. So here's this beautiful cabbage starting to get some size on it finally and you'll notice that here I don't use wood chips. I could, it wouldn't be my first choice and I can't get enough of them to use in my garden beds, but I don't need them. I have lots of space here that's just growing grass and weeds and I can go through and clear it out and get this nice straw that I can put down and if I pull it back you can see that this soil is nice and moist here and again this isn't good soil, this is terrible clay. There's a little bit of organic matter in it, but it's mostly just garbage. These plants don't care, as long as they've got a little bit of mulch, a little bit of organic matter so that the microbes in the soil can start doing their thing and as long as they're getting the moisture, which they are because that mulch is keeping the soil covered and protected, they don't care. Just whatever, weeds, grass clippings, wood chips, heck I've seen some people use rocks. I'd really hate to have rocks in my garden, but if it's a perennial planting then sure maybe. Of course the one downside with something like rock is that you're not getting the organic matter, which is why I would go for really anything, hell there's a random stick here. Everything that's growing and gets cut back can go in the garden. Just put it on top, don't mix it in because that'll tie up nitrogen, but if you leave it on top, worms and microbes and everything will slowly break it down and add new nutrients to your soil while holding in the moisture. So like I said you can use literally anything as a mulch and one of the problems I'm having right now is that the weed eaters broke and I don't have access to all of that fresh straw or hay from chopping down all the grass and weeds growing around the property. But you can use anything. One of the other things that Steve Solomon teaches is to use dust mulch. He's actually very opposed to using deep mulch in the gardens, which I don't agree with, but one of the great things that he teaches if you don't have enough organic matter to mulch the garden with is to use a dust mulch. It still protects the soil even if it doesn't add in organic matter and helps hold in moisture. So here's another row of Scorsonera and I'm surprised this many came up because it was old seed, but what you might notice in between the rows is that there is no mulch. Now you probably see all this cracking right around the plants. That's what clay soil does when it rains really hard and then it dries out. The surface dries out faster than the lower soil and it cracks as it loses the moisture and contracts. So because I haven't been able to get enough mulch to mulch this, what I do is after a hard rain I come through with a hoe and I just break up this top layer. And although it doesn't add organic matter into the soil, it does act like a mulch in the sense that it prevents evaporation. If I dig down here a little bit and then get in to this terrible clay and see that it's still nice and wet. This clay, but it's nice and wet because it's protected under this dust mulch. And that's one of the things that Steve Solomon teaches about dry gardening is that, well, he's opposed to mulch in general, except for the dust mulch, but a dust mulch is just as good if you can't get actual organic matter to mulch your gardens with. It won't add nutrients in like organic matter will when it breaks down. It won't feed soil organisms like mulch will when it breaks down. But from a water conservation standpoint, it's just as good as organic matter. Now one other thing that I don't really want to show because plants haven't popped up yet, but this is one of the ways that Native Americans taught settlers to garden when they first got here is to garden in hills. Now a hill doesn't necessarily mean that you have a pile of soil that's raised up above ground level. It just refers to planting in clumps with space in between them rather than in rows. So the idea here is that even on completely virgin ground, overgrown with weeds, hasn't been worked at all, you can still start a garden. Clear out of space, it's about 18 inches, plant your seeds there. Go over four feet, do another one. Four feet, do another one. Four feet, do another one. Four feet, do another one. What you accomplish with this is that you have your plants and in this case, just like with a corn, I made a little depression so that it would capture water, plant seed in the middle. Because I'm leaving four feet of spacing between, they won't have to compete with each other for water. I still need to go through and clear some weeds out, but they're pretty sparse to begin with and I'll be able to drop all of these weeds down in between the plants and any others that come up and they'll be my mulch in between the plants. This is really the way to go if you need to get a lot of plants in the ground and you don't have a clear spot to put them. You don't need nice and neat little rows. You don't need to rototill, you don't need to come clear a bunch of weeds and stuff. Literally, get a hoe, I like this big grub hoe here. Clear a little spot, put your seeds in the ground, move to the next spot, put them in. Which is exactly why these ended up here. This was not my plan at the beginning of the season, but I had issues with my cucumber seeds not germinating when I put them in the ground. I think this year was a weird year and it's been way wetter than it usually is and a lot of my seeds just ended up rotting in the ground because it was cold and wet. So I pre germinated some on paper towel and ended up with way more than I need. Well I didn't want them to go to waste so I ended up making these little hills at the edge of the garden to put them in and they might end up just being sacrificial plants for the deer and that'll be okay if it keeps them out of the main garden. One more thing that I didn't mention or mentioned only briefly with the cucumbers in the hills is that if I'm not expecting rain for a while and I need to plant something, I soak or pre germinate my seeds. Now that's what I did with my beans, I need to plant them in around my corn in the Three Sisters bed but we aren't expecting rain for a while so I went ahead and soaked my beans overnight. I didn't chit them or pre germinate them like I did with the cucumbers but I did soak them ahead of time so that they would have plenty of moisture to germinate. That's one of the things you can do if you're not expecting any rain for a while to get things to germinate outside of the rainy season. I'll go ahead and show you some okra seeds that I have started to show you what it looks like if you take them all the way to the pre germination stage since I haven't gotten those in the ground yet. Now okra doesn't grow here quite famously because our nights are too cold and it just doesn't like that but I got this variety from a local seed supplier and it's supposed to tolerate our cool weather and start producing relatively fast. So I thought I would give it a try and you can see that what I've done here is go ahead and roll them up in a wet paper towel and leave them in an open Ziploc bag overnight. It's actually been a couple of nights now but they started sprouting last night and I just left that bag in a sunny window. Check on them every once in a while to see when these little roots are starting to form and that's when they're ready to go on the ground. I actually could have done it last night because they already go then and the roots wouldn't have been so long and fragile but it was hot last night and I didn't want to go out. Now this is one way that you can eliminate watering when you're trying to get things to germinate. Just wrap them up in a moist paper towel or even soak them overnight and let them absorb all the water they need to germinate before you ever even put them in the ground. That way you don't have to irrigate while they're out there. They don't have the soil constantly being cooled down because you're watering it and they'll take off a lot better. Alright guys that's it for this video. Hope some of these tips help you out with your gardening so that you don't have to irrigate as much or you can go without irrigating at all. Again use depressions when you can to help capture extra rainfall. Plant your things further apart about 50% more than the package recommends. Use mulch wherever you can if you can't get enough mulch then use a dust mulch just after heavy rain come through with a hoe and just kind of scratch the top inch or so of the soil. I mean I don't like doing that but given my lack of mulch this year that's the best way to do it. Incorporate organic matter. I already talked about that with the mulch but compost is another great way to do that. It'll hold in extra moisture and you know if you can do a little bit of hugel culture to really soak up some of that water then go ahead and give that a try. There are some other tips that I have that I'll share you know as I get around to it as I get good examples of them going but those are the big things for now and I hope it's helpful and you guys have a good one.