Back in the eighties, in Sydney, I had the luck of renting an apartment on a rooftop. In fact the bricked space outside the quaint 2-bedroom was twice the size of our living quarters, and had 2 solid pergolas which could sit a party of 10 comfortably under both. The view wasn't bad either, the Opera House & and the (coat-hanger) bridge loomed in the distance. At the time I was running perhaps my most successful eatery and came into buying a fair amount of Bordeaux and Burgundy wines encased in sturdy pine boxes. Being a hundred feet or so closer to the sun gave me the idea of growing my own vegetables and herbs, and give my toddling son something to watch and amuse him.
So, with the help of a couple of friends, we trekked up some hundred or so boxes, soil (a good potting mix) and lots of old newspapers, and a bale of straw. Newspapers? Straw? Yes: an old friend of mine, an organic gardener who supplied some restaurants, had told me to intersperse sheets of papers with the soil, creating sub-layers (I think, IIRC, 4 to 5 layers per box, which was a foot high) thus saving a reasonable amount of water in the process. Straw was also a good idea to put into the soil with the paper. It worked. Daily watering, once in the morning and sparsely in the evening, using an old fashioned watering can, gave way to fresh organic vegetables from right outside my door within weeks. My little boy, who was beginning to talk non stop, was seen singing to the various plants one afternoon....pity I didn't have a video recorder in those days!
Recent climate predictions by the National Center for Atmospheric Research indicate that the Western hemisphere will experience severe droughts unlike any others in modern history. Areas ranging from the Western United States to Latin America will experience water shortages that affect drinking water supplies, agricultural crops and put wildlife and vegetation at risk. As regions become drier, everyone from hobby gardeners to large-scale farmers will need to learn to grow crops with less water. Otherwise known as xeriscaping, gardening within a dry climate means embracing vegetable and landscaping plants that use less water and are more acclimated to your area.
Next, I visited my friend, the organic grower, and purchased a wide variety of seedlings: fruiting crops such as tomatoes, chillies and peppers which need three to four hours of strong direct sunlight per day to produce a good crop, leafy greens such as spinach, chard, broccoli, cabbage and kale (which, btw, will do well even in shaded areas as long as there is some kind of reflective light, of course) and a range of root vegs like potato, carrot, beetroot, onions, garlic and much more. Later that month, I planted raspberries, gooseberries and currants which cope well and the latter two can be trained on trellises (or sticks in my case) and provided much fun at harvest time.
I found that vegetables were easier to manage in containers, easy to prune, harvest and went straight to the table, so to speak. Another imparted "secret" from my gardener friend was that after planting, water your seedlings in with a diluted liquid seaweed fertilizer. Another friend who supplied restaurants with gorgeous fruits he grew on his farm, had told me that he frequently used a mix of ground chicken and fish bones to maximize his crops. Since I had a commercial kitchen, once a month I would pulverize a bunch of fish & chicken bones and add seaweed to it and this gave my crops a potent boost. I have to say that not all boxes gave me satisfaction, some 10 % were devastated by snails and slugs (who knew that these bugs could be sneaking up over a hundred feet up from the street?) and I quickly learned the hard way: spread chili flakes and most would disappear. I still do this here in Eire, but that's for my menagerie of 4 canines and 6 felines who tend to walk right through patches of vegs and herbs (this Spring, the menagerie will find it harder to spoil our travails as a large plastic tunnel will be introduced, animal free. unless supervised, and serious growing will occur).
According to quite a few growers/gardeners, the top five easiest vegetables to grow are lettuce, radishes, beetroot, chard and rosemary, though the latter is just wonderful as seasoning. I live and learn. Do you grow anything? Seed exchange?
And finally, what good it is if you don't save your own vegetable seeds? Here is a wonderful site run by Colleen Vanderlinden who knows a thing or two about harvesting your own seeds. For those of you who have a garden and are worried about consuming too much precious water, Ms Vanderlinden suggests here how to replace water-guzzling plants & flowers with drought-resistant ones. Happy planting!