a minimum of irrigation. In the otherwise well-watered East, one
could routinely expect several consecutive weeks every summer
without rain. In some drought years a hot, rainless month or longer
could go by. So vegetable varieties were bred to grow through dry
spells without loss, and traditional American vegetable gardens were
designed to help them do so.

I began gardening in the early 1970s, just as the raised-bed method
was being popularized. The latest books and magazine articles all
agreed that raising vegetables in widely separated single rows was a
foolish imitation of commercial farming, that commercial vegetables
were arranged that way for ease of mechanical cultivation. Closely
planted raised beds requiring hand cultivation were alleged to be
far more productive and far more efficient users of irrigation
because water wasn't evaporating from bare soil.

I think this is more likely to be the truth: Old-fashioned gardens
used low plant densities to survive inevitable spells of
rainlessness. Looked at this way, widely separated vegetables in
widely separated rows may be considered the more efficient users of
water because they consume soil moisture that nature freely puts
there. Only after, and if, these reserves are significantly depleted
does the gardener have to irrigate. The end result is surprisingly
more abundant than a modern gardener educated on intensive,
raised-bed propaganda would think.

Finding varieties still adapted to water-wise gardening is becoming
difficult. Most American vegetables are now bred for
irrigation-dependent California. Like raised-bed gardeners,
vegetable farmers have discovered that they can make a bigger profit