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Greenhouse Gardening
With rain volumes still at half their norms, water officials are uneasily looking at depleted reservoirs and warning that rationing may be imposed by summer. If you're a residential user worried about curtailing showers and keeping your parched landscape alive, how could you possibly think about growing a vegetable garden?
It's a painful dilemma coming at a time when more and more people -- whether interested in better eating, more socially conscious consumption or simply cutting down their grocery bill during a deep recession -- are interested in growing their own food.
Greenhouse Gardening experts, however, say you don't have to give up on your kitchen gardens, even if spring fails to deliver enough rain to ward off water shortages and voluntary or even forced rationing. There are many shortcuts and tricks, folk wisdom and trade-offs so you don't have to live entirely without your fresh garden goodies this season.
"Now is the time to be thinking about dry Greenhouse Gardening. Even though we've had relatively scant rainfall, a home gardener can still capture the rainfall we are having, just like a farmer would," said Stephen Albert, author of "The Kitchen Garden Grower's Guide" (available at Amazon) and editor of the garden blog HarvestToTable.com.
"If you can harvest just some of that rain, you can reuse it later in the season. People that do think about that are really going to be just steps ahead of other people."
Gardeners can draw on some of the principles of "dry farming," which has been practiced for millennia by native peoples. It doesn't mean farming without water completely, Albert said, but rather using water more efficiently. Many of the farms and vineyards of the Napa and Sonoma Valley were dry farmed as late as the 1960s, when irrigation was introduced, he added.
Water is always at a premium in summer when the rain dries up. But there are sure to be rainy days over the next few months. Why not plant a vegetable garden that won't need irrigation? At this time of year you can be growing broccoli, lettuce, chard, snow and sugar snap peas, spinach, chard, arugula and other leafy greens and let Nature take care of the watering for you. If the rainfall over the next few months is normal, you should need no additional irrigation.
For more information about organic plants and gardening seeds, click on http://www.gardeningandplanting.com/
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