Chickpeas (garbanzo beans)
Amaranth for foliage and seed
Lambsquarters for foliage and seed (high in oxalates)

Garlic
Onions
Chives

I know that some tomatoes and pumpkins are hardy with some rainfall because they survived me last year. :D I had a nine foot Amaranth last year. Me no water it. Same for 6 foot high lambsquarters.

Had a prepper blog suggest taking our vegetables and planting them in dappled shade and surrendering them to their fate. See which ones survive. If they did and produce 'decent', be certain to save that seed. Repeat the following year and try again, he wrote. Seemed legit. Kinda what I did last year with some things. And the Heavy Hitter Okra with its puny little leaves produced abundantly. Dunno about any other varieties, tho.

I read about California. I gotta get those hugels going.

*I'm doing the chick pea thang this year. I should let some of them fend for themselves and see what happens.

Bon,
I will be using corn to shade my Kentucky Wonder and Blue Lake pole beans. It will be interesting to see what they do in the heat of the summer.

I have some Moringa tree seeds to try this year. They are cheap online. I bought 100. The trees make A LOT of seeds. I may buy a blender to see how they taste in a smoothie.

Have you discovered a good recipe for Lambsquarters?

Many plants will survive on less water but it requires much further spacing, so you get less yield per square foot or, in Johnny's case, less yield per acre. : ) In the horrific year of 2011, I had Piricicaba broccoli survive the whole summer, including 6 weeks in which I never watered it because we were at wildfires day and night and night and day and I quit caring about the garden because I was just focusing on sleeping in between fires. That broccoli produced until a really hard freeze got it sometime in December. My summer and winter squash and actual pumpkins also survived and produced all summer, although they lost a lot of foliage when I stopped watering. The summer squash eventually died but it was August by then, and the winter squash just kept on going. As soon as rain returned in late Aug/early September, they put out new leaves and produced bumper crops. It was terribly hot (up to 115 and 116) and very dry (around 11" for the whole year from Jan-mid-August when rain returned) but most of my garden still performed well enough. I didn't do any canning, but that was more because my time was being spent at fires and partly because the yields were lower. I had watered the garden a lot until July though, when I gave up and surrendered to the drought/wildfires/increasingly high water bills.

Moth beans (aka mat beans) survive on less water. In my garden, southern peas of all kinds (PEPH, zipper, cream, lady, black-eyed, etc.) also do well with minimal water, and so does okra.

Soil building is even more important with dryland type farming because it will hold on to more of the precious little rain that falls.

Steve Solomon's book's "Gardening When It Counts" covers this topic pretty well, though some readers feel it implies you cannot garden when it counts unless you're starting out with perfect soil. I haven't read it yet, and it has been out for a few years, for that reason, but it is on my list to read whenever I get around to it.

California is in a lot of trouble, water-wise, and I'm planning to raise summer lettuce indoors under lights. It is hard to keep lettuce alive outdoors past June here even in partial shade, though it is easier in cool, wet years. I'll have the summer lettuce indoors to start harvesting and using whenever the lettuce outdoors gives out.

I think hugelkultur piles make a huge difference. Folks in Texas have had great results with them in drought years, and that's one reason I built the combination haybed/hugelkultur piles behind the barn even though I knew they snakes would drive me crazy. It also is the reason I'm using hugelkultur to fill in the former lily pond. I am working hard to create growing areas that will be more resilient in drought years because, increasingly, having enough water in those years seems like it will be a continually worsening issue. It can be hard to create a lot of hugelkultur piles, though, if you don't have access to a woodland with lots of deadfall to supply you with wood for them.

I'm planting malabar spinach this year for a summer spinach substitute. I like it more in salads than cooked. The cooking makes it slimey like boiled okra. Purslane (I grow golden purslane) thrives in heat and makes a great addition to salads. I've never developed a taste for lambsquarters although my dad loved them. It is too bad I can't make myself eat them because they grow like mad here. Amaranth also is incredibly drought-tolerant. It grew like gangbusters for me in 2003, with less than 19" of rainfall during the year and also in 2005 with around 23 or 24" of rainfall. I did water it some, but not until the leaves were wilting and staying wilted after sunset.

Dawn,
Do you have good recipes for Amaranth and lambsquarters?

I plan to start on our hugelkulture ditches when we finish planting potatoes. I'll be putting in a 200' row of Moringa trees at the same time. I think we will be able to sell Moringa leaves at the Edmond Farmers Market. There are many folks there into fresh nutrient dense foods.

I plan to use the Moringa leaves and the molokhia shoots in smoothies. Who knows, maybe I'll live to see the next stock market crash. (;-)

We are planting our Kennebec (late season) potatoes with 48" row separation and 15" in row separation to mitigate the drought effects. Just another measure to live with what God gives us.

When did you start the Moringa seeds?

Bon,
I have not started them. I'll plant them according to some info I found on the web. Just another annual row crop for me.

I assume you know moringa isn't hardy here. I have some seeds, but I think I got like 10 seeds. Where did you get yours? I have a friend who has one in a pot he takes inside in winter. I googled moringa in Oklahoma looking for HIS friend, who has posted on facebook about growing them, but couldn't find him. It did turn up nurseries in OKC and Norman though. I wonder how long it takes for them to make seeds, do you know? They are supposed to be a miracle plant. When I am rich I will have a tropical greenhouse and grow coconuts and bananas and moringa...

The preacher man says it’s the end of time
And the Mississippi River she’s a goin’ dry

Amy,
I will grow them as annuals. My goal is to harvest the leaves. I want to try them in smoothies and other ways too.

I may start some indoors next winter, just to get ahead of the game.

My interest is based on low water need, grows in poor soil, loves heat and is nutrient dense. Also, I think folks at Edmond farmers market will be interested. If so, I may grow a lot more next year to supplement our (Vision Farms, Inc.) seed and harvest help budget. Nonprofit corporations have expenses too.

Johnny, I got mine at Bountiful Gardens. Later we can compare notes. Yours was a better deal, but I bought other things there so shipping was negligible. moringa

I am growing pigeon peas this year, they are supposed to tolerate poor soil and little water. I will let you know what I think of them.http://www.tropicalpermaculture.com/pigeon-pea.html

Would dearly love for ya'll to provide updates on the Moringa. I'd like to grow some. I've too much on my plate this year. I read the entire plant is edible.

osuengineer, let us hope the Mississippi River doesn't run backwards as it has before. But that was probably the River settling in, I'm sure.

Johnny: I and my grandmother would gather wild lambsquarters in SW Kansas. She would cook it in a bit of water with bacon and drippings, salt and pepper - yum!

I probably am going to regret this but bought a flat of broccoli at home depot yesterday and got it in the ground today. May need to put a cold frame over it.

I've got romaine and red leaf lettuce going wild in the cold frame. Planted it at the first of February and can't believe it made it through the snows. I'd run out and throw blankets over everything and it would sit for days under the snow but it survived and doing well - hooray! We may actually be eating it in another week if the weather holds.

I so believe that the weather is changing and we've overused most of our water resources. Everything I do outside is now going to be done using hugelkultur or other water conservation methods. My grandkids are going to live in a much different world than I have.

This company is dedicated to seeds suitable for dry climates, they have many choices of vegetable seeds for traditional and indigenous Southwestern crops. Its an interesting site. I've ordered native wildflowers from them.

http://shop.nativeseeds.org/pages/seeds

texasranger2,

Thanks a lot. I'll be referring back to this for some time. I need to buy about 20 pounds of corn seed to use as trellis for our pole beans.

Shaer,
Thanks for the recipe. I'll be trying that soon.

Amy,
I look forward to reading your treatise on pigeon peas.

Johnny, My dad cooked lambs quarters the same way Shaer described, and I've tried it and still don't like eating lambs quarters. I always thought that I could eat anything cooked with salt, pepper and bacon drippings, but lambs quarters changed my mind about that. just feed the lambsquarters plants to my compost pile. I pulled up dozens of tiny lambsquarters seedlings from my onion bed yesterday, and by tiny, I mean that they were so small that the were barely tall enough to grasp and pull.

Are you looking for recipes for using amaranth leaves or for cooking the grain produced by the seed heads?

Dawn

Dawn,

Yes to both questions. I am very new at gathering or cooking "wild food"

However, I do know how to cook poke salat. It grows in my fence line.

I have (so far) failed to cultivate purslane. I wonder if the seeds were old.

Sry, I failed to answer your question. I slice some garlic and throw it into some hot olive oil for a few seconds. Then, I add the lambsquarters and cook until just wilted. Serve with rice and I prefer a touch of real lemon juice.

I also do the same procedure adding a bit more garlic with multiple cups of leaves and adding to a broth to make a stew with either chicken or beef. Lambsquarters is not as good in stew as spinach. I serve that over rice, too, usually allowing the broth to seep into the rice. I sometimes use caramelized onions rather than garlic.

For my taste, the key is not to overcook although it is not advised to eat too much in this manner because of the oxalic issue.

Bon,
Thanks. That is my recipe for kale. Somehow you got me to thinking about mixing various greens then canning them. Could be a whole new hobby.

We picked lambs quarters one spring from a neighbor's parents farm, I don't even remember how it was cooked, but it was good. Later I picked some in the yard, cooked the same way and It was awful. I suspect early spring leaves are better, and maybe the soil they are grown on makes a difference.

Amy,

Had the yard been treated with fertilizer or other chemicals?

No, I usually avoid chemicals, even then or maybe especially then, when my kids were little.

Amy, my rabbits would agree with the age of the lambsquarters.

Johnny, how are your moringa doing? I planted 6, 4 sprouted (one turned out to be a tomato (!) And I am down to one plant, which didn't like it outside and is still waiting for decent weather to return to the out doors. The pigeon peas didn't even sprout. I think I had 2 things in all the many seeds I started that didn't bother to come up, so I don't think it was me. We uncovered 2 beds today (had plastic over them to keep them dry) and I may try direct seeding pigeon peas.

AmyinOwasso,

It is too cool and wet here for Moringa. I will start them soon.

My Molokhia is doing well in a large pan. My goal, for this year, is to create many more seed. I want to grow a lot of them to give away at the food bank.