ime
I'm in the garden, it takes no special effort to rotate through them
all more or less every three weeks.

To make a drip bucket, drill a 3/16-inch hole through the side of a
4-to-6-gallon plastic bucket about 1/4-inch up from the bottom, or
in the bottom at the edge. The empty bucket is placed so that the
fertilized water drains out close to the stem of a plant. It is then
filled with liquid fertilizer solution. It takes 5 to 10 minutes for
5 gallons to pass through a small opening, and because of the slow
flow rate, water penetrates deeply into the subsoil without wetting
much of the surface. Each fertigation makes the plant grow very
rapidly for two to three weeks, more I suspect as a result of
improved nutrition than from added moisture. Exactly how and when to
fertigate each species is explained in Chapter 5.

Organic gardeners may fertigate with combinations of fish emulsion
and seaweed at the same dilution used for foliar spraying, or with
compost/manure tea. Determining the correct strength to make compost
tea is a matter of trial and error. I usually rely on weak Rapid-Gro
mixed at half the recommended dilution. The strength of the
fertilizer you need depends on how much and deeply you placed
nutrition in the subsoil.

Chapter 4

Water-Wise Gardening Year-Round

Early Spring: The Easiest Unwatered Garden

West of the Cascades, most crops started in February and March
require no special handling when irrigation is scarce. These include
peas, early lettuce, radishes, kohlrabi, early broccoli, and so
forth. However, some of these vegetables are harvested as late as
June, so to reduce their need for irrigation, space them wider than
usual. Spring vegetables also will exhaust most of the moisture from
the soil before maturing, making succession planting impossible
without first irrigating heavily. Early spring plantings are best
allocated one of two places in the garden plan: either in that part
of the garden that will be fully irrigated all summer or in a part
of a big garden that can affordably remain bare during the summer
and be used in October for receiving transplants of overwintering
crops. The garden plan and discussion in Chapter 6 illustrate these
ideas in detail.

Later in Spring: Sprouting Seeds Without Watering

For the first years that I experimented with dry gardening I went
overboard and attempted to grow food as though I had no running
water at all. The greatest difficulty c