Desert Victory Gardens

Inspired by empty grocery shelves and too much free time from sheltering in place, people rushed off to Home Depot to empty the shelves of gardening supplies. Many started their own "victory gardens." 

For you young'uns out there…Victory Gardens were made popular during WWII when people planted vegetable gardens to supplement their meager rations. The government promoted victory gardens as a way to support the war effort. They even offered a booklet to help first time gardeners. 

A peek at that booklet might be helpful.

1. Don’t start what you can’t finish. Before you start a garden, count the work involved even before seedtime and through to harvest. Abandoned gardens are a waste of seed, fertilizer, tools, insecticides and labor. 

Great advice. Wait! No mention of water? The writers obviously weren’t living in the desert during a 20 year drought and record heat wave!

When I think of Victory Gardens I think of my nana’s garden with perfect rows of vegetables. But nana lived on a farm in the Midwest where there was plenty of water. The gardeners of that age weren’t concerned about pollinators going extinct due to insecticides. They were blissfully unaware of the impact of climate change or fertilizer made out of fossil fuels. 

Check out number 7. Don’t let the pole beans block out the beets. In fact, don’t let any of the tall crops shade short ones whatever they are. Growing things must get sun. 

What!? They obviously haven’t watched their veggies wither and die in the scorching June sun. But I’m afraid many first time desert gardeners might.

There are lessons to be learned in the desert all around us.

Baby saguaros survive the harsh summer by sheltering in the shade of native trees like a mesquite or palo verde. They don’t call these trees “nurse plants” for nothin’. Our garden is shaded by two palo verde trees. Veggies grown under mesquite and palo verde trees also benefit from the nitrogen those trees fix in the soil. As far as those pole beans go, the Tohono O'odham demonstrate how the three sisters (beans, squash and corn) benefit from being grown together. The beans climb the corn and fix nitrogen in the ground, and squash leaves cover the ground to protect the soil and keep down weeds. After soaking beans for dinner, I'll plant a few under my young fruit trees for a nitrogen boost.   

Unfortunately, the giant eucalyptus tree that used to shade our entire backyard died this year. Now our baby fig trees suffer from direct sunlight. Taking advice from experienced Tucson gardeners, I've concocted shade contraptions out of tomato cages and some recycled shade mesh. No need to shade or water our native trees. Our desert hackberry, acacia, mesquite, and palo verde are thriving this summer with no additional city water. Yeah! The lesson from this is to plant native trees or heritage fruit trees that can take the summer heat!

One of our most helpful low-water gardening methods was inspired by early inhabitants in tune with their desert surroundings.

Back when the Santa Cruz River flowed year around, the Tohono O’odham practiced ak chin irrigation. When the monsoon rains came, the river would overflow washing nourishing silt over the flood plain. The silt would retain the moisture and replenish the soil. It would nourish the durable native seed crops they would plant in the floodplain. In a similar fashion we keep fallen leaves and apply organic wood chip mulch to nourish the soil and retain moisture in our garden and desert landscape. This traditional T.O. method also inspired the rainwater harvesting earthworks method of slow, spread and sink.

During the hottest month of June, before the monsoon season starts, I take my old fashion watering can out early every morning before it gets too hot and saturate the mulch around my young fig trees. If water rolls off the top of the mulch, I mix the water into the mulch with my hand and then pour more water into it. Using the watering can helps me keep track of how much water I use. 

NOTE: It’s even better to water them after it cools off in the evening so the water won't evaporate in the heat of the day. 

Pioneers survived droughts by treating each drop of water as precious. You may have seen westerns where the whole family used the same bath water. Gross! But we can use the same water twice. Dan and I carry our kitchen rinse water out to our hummingbird trumpets. A friend has an outdoor shower that waters his landscape. We use the greywater from our washing machine to irrigate our heritage fruit trees. 

We gleaned a great water conservation method from the Mexicans who built Tucson. They buried round ollas (unglazed terra cotta clay pots) in the ground and planted veggies around them. Water is poured into the opening on the top. That water slowly seeps through the pot into the soil. The roots of the plants wrap around the olla taking just the amount of water they needed. This saves a lot of water!

Nourishing the soil with compost, covering it with a thin layer of mulch and watering it with rainwater are desert gardening basics. To save water and have a healthy plant or tree, it's important to know how much water they require. Likewise, it's important to sow the right plant in the right season. Another tried and true technique is to plant short-season crops after the monsoons and use added rainwater to grow fast-growing favorites.

Sadly, it’s been a while since it’s rained in our yard. And the rainwater we collected in our water barrels is long gone. So I’ve had to resort to using more city water than I want to this summer. To offset that extra water use, I look for other ways to conserve water. Instead of a full shower, I often take what nana called a “spit bath” or sponge bath and then pour that water onto plants!

Nana would be proud.

VICTORY GARDEN RESOURCES:

Planting calendar for Tucson

Building Healthy Soil Using Cover Crops

Companion planting

Desert Composting

Worm Composting

Backyard Chickens 

Resources for Soil Amendments, Compost, and Fertilizers

Wildlife gardening

Rainwater Harvesting

ARIZONA VEGETABLE PLANTING GUIDE: A VISUAL GUIDE FOR LOW DESERT VEGETABLES

Get free seeds from Seed Library

Save on your water bill while gardening

Footprints in the Dirt

photo by Jamie L. Manser/JamieManser.com.

Prehistoric footprints of ancient people including a child and a domesticated canine were recently uncovered in an irrigated field excavated in Tucson, Arizona. Just as incredible are the remains of their irrigation system (dating back 2500-3000 years) with two field cells and parallel channels to redirect water from the Rillito River.

4000 years ago, the first people settled in Tucson for the abundant river water that flowed year round. The Hokokam captured rainwater with rock dams. The Tohono O'odham crafted earthen dams and brush weirs to divert water from washes for crops. They lived in harmony with the desert, gathering its fruits in the proper seasons. They were experts on desert farming, having developed sophisticated techniques to grow sturdy native plants like the three sisters: beans, maize, and squash. Happily, the Tohono O’odham have brought back those traditional techniques by growing heritage crops at the San Xavier coop and by assisting with The Mission Garden at the base of “A” mountain. There is much we can learn from them about sustainability and how things grow in the desert dirt.

The Mission Garden

In my last blog on Sustainable Living Tucson, I commented on how some people see only dirt when they look at our desert, but it is actually brimming with life.  That got me musing about it.  Imagine my delight in watching my friend Elaine Romero’s play, “Dirt!”  Her play beautifully elaborated on that theme by including Tucson’s first settlers and the lost barrio. Her lyrical descriptions conjured up the following images for me.

After the Native Americans, came the Mexicans who built Tucson. Like the mesquite, their roots were deeply embedded in the dirt. Their homes and neighborhoods were built out of dirt and water. Their roads or calle were formed by paths worn in the dirt for generations - paths that connected family and friends in their tight knit barrio community. But their footprints have long been covered over with cement in the name of progress.  Out of the cement grew a big, ugly, lonely concrete monument to both urban renewal and their once vibrant community – the Tucson Convention Center. Dry fountains lined with misplaced boulders are sad reminders of our dry river beds (another causality of progress.) Nothing could grow out of the layers of concrete.

Until… Borderlands Theater reclaimed the dirt under that cement with “Barrio Stories.” The descendants of the neighborhood returned to La Calle to retrace the steps of their displaced ancestors.

Playwright Elaine Romero and Jana 

The company was looking for a way to get Tucson’s Mexican-Americans to return to the theater. They came up with the idea of doing a play that the whole community could get involved in.  Inspired by the book, “La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City,” by Lydia Otero, they gathered oral histories of the people who had memories of Barrio Viejo before the devastating demolition. Playwrights Virginia Grise, Martin Zimmerman and Elaine Romero were tasked with adapting it into theatrical pieces.

When Borderlands producing director Mark David Pinate visited the Tucson Convention Center, he knew he could put his theater education into practice by staging the plays throughout the grounds as a site specific work.  Dispersed around that area were vignettes of life in the old barrio.  Appropriately placed by the dried up, cement fountain was Elaine Romero’s short play, “Dirt”.

If you missed the Borderland Theater’s “Barrio Stories,” it is my honor to share this patch of “Dirt” with you.

DIRT: First, there was me, Dirt, the dirt and the cactus, and the geckos, and the Saguaro, and the locals didn’t bother naming their paths, their streets. Pottery shards at the foot of “A” Mountain, Sentinel Peak, and the Tumamoc Hill date back 4,000 years before any of this mierda started. Before the cement came and laid itself on top of me and tried to make me inconsequential.

First, we looked like nothing fancy. Some adobe bricks. Maybe you know what I’m talking about. Buildings made from the earth, from the ground. And it included everybody. The Hohokam, the Tohono O’odham, and the Mexican Period.

 I remember the day when the demolition crews came. They took something and they turned it into nothing. Some people say it looked like the surface of the moon, or an atomic bomb had come and hit downtown Tucson. And even when they finished, the people didn’t want to walk there. The people didn’t want to go there. The people felt a big hurt, a big hole, in their hearts. Bigger than anyone ever imagined. And sometimes when you’re the dirt, you have the privilege of capturing the people’s tears in your earth. I’ve had that privilege here in Tucson.

--------

Throughout our history people have left footprints in the dirt. There is much they can teach us about living in harmony with the earth and water. We can learn from our city's mistakes on urban renewal and bad water management - and not repeat them. 

“Barrio Stories” was more than oral histories or bearing witness to a close knit community torn apart. This was a joyous celebration of a community kicking up some dust and reclaiming the ground that was Barrio La Calle.  

For more information on rainwater harvesting check out:  http://www.sustainablelivingtucson.org/