Susan,

It is more complicated than you think because it depends on when the drought began, and it depends on whether we're only abnormally dry at planting time or if we're in worse condition....like maybe in extreme drought. I have to try to "guess" which crops will be worth irrigating if the drough conditions continue on throughout the growing season.

If the drought begins in the fall and already is pretty serious by spring (which seems likly to be what we have occurring now), I try to choose short-season varieties of veggies that will mature more quickly than the varieties I'd choose in a year with more normal rainfall. If winter rainfall has been good and I feel like summer drought is inevitable but still months away, I'll plant our favorite varieties in spring, but won't plan on any succession plantings. Normally, I am constantly succession planting....as soon as one variety of bush bean slows down for example, I'm yanking it out and replacing it with something else....but not in a drought year.

I'll use corn as an example of the kind of choice I make when facing drought. Usually, I'll plant Early Sunglow for a very early crop. If I plant it the last week in March, I can harvest before Memorial Day weekend. But, I'll also plant either Country Gentleman shoepeg corn or Texas Honey June corn (very earworm resistant) sometime in mid-April thru late-April and will be harvesting that in July. However, if we are already months into what seems to be an ongoing drought, I'll only plant Early Sunglow and not plant a succession crop of corn to follow it. Sometimes, in a mild spring with lovely rainfall and prospects of much more (like 2004 and 2007), I'll plant Early Sunglow in late April, Country Gentleman about 3 weeks later and then Texas Honey June about three weeks after that, but that's only if I expect the pretty good rainfall to continue.

With tomatoes, if I expect drought I'll go with more early-season types and more determinates or compact indeterminates. I'll plant a lot more in containers and a lot fewer in the ground. Any variety with heavy PL or rugose foliage is more likely to make the Grow List if I'm expecting drought because the foliage provides better cover for the fruit on the intensely hot summer days.

With other veggies, I try to select varieties that mature as early as possible in case I have to turn off the water faucet in July and walk away from the garden. There's just a limit to how much we'll spend on irrigation because, as one of our neighbors always reminds me, there's a point where the cost of the water exceeds the value of what you're growing and you start losing money.

I also tend to go with bush varieties of veggies in a drought year instead of vining varieties, so I might pick 'Raven' zucchini instead of Cocozelle or Costata Romanesco. I also only plant the smallest melons in drought years---say going with Blacktail Mountain, Yellow Doll and Sugar Baby instead of Black Diamond Yellow Belly, Orange Tendersweet and other larger melons.

Fall tomatoes probably are out of the question in a drought year if the drought has not broken by June because it will take too much water to get them from seedling size in late June to the ripening stage in Sept. or Oct. Or, I might plant a few for fall, but only in containers. The tomatoes that have performed best for me in drought are the Livingston tomatoes. They produced in 2005 and 2006 with no irrigation at all after July, even though everything else except eggplant (they are remarkably heat- and drought-tolerant) and okra died after I stopped watering.

There are some specific varieties of each vegetable that seem more heat-tolerant and drought-tolerant than others, and it is those varieties I'll turn to during drought periods.

Instead of succession planting bean plants all summer long, I'll plant a lot of beans in spring and try to fill up the freezer with them and then not plant a succession crop of beans to follow them. Instead I'll plant a lot of southern peas, probably Knuckle Six-Week Purple Hull and Purple Hull Pink Eye because heat doesn't bother them. Okra is the same way....heat and drought don't stop it at all, although the heat might slow down production a tiny bit during the worst part of the drought.

The big area where I make a lot more cuts is with the flowers, though. If I am expecting drought, only the toughest, hardiest, most heat-tolerant and drought-tolerant types get planted. Even zinnias will wilt, brown and die without irrigation in the worst droughts, but portulaca, gomphrena and verbena bonariensis usually won't.

In a bad drought year, the only pumpkin I'll grow is Seminole because it laughs at drought, and I never plant big pumpkins in drought years because big pumpkins guzzle water.

Some things that I grow "for fun" like ornamental gourds might not get planted in a drought year because I'll need to be using the water for stuff that really matters.

I also start irrigating much earlier in a year when ongoing drought is present at planting time. In 2003 and 2005 I kept waiting for the rain to start falling and didn't water much at all. That was a poor strategy because the rains never came. What I have done in more recent drought years is to water very well in spring if it is droughty, hoping that with good irrigation the plants will produce a good crop before the temperatures skyrocket .

Finally, in some cases, it isn't that I choose to plant something else or to water earlier, it is that I'll plant peppers, for example, in containers instead of in the ground so it will be easier to keep them evenly moist, or I'll plant them on the westernmost edge of the garden where the pecan tree will shade them in the afternoon.

I also will sneak more veggies into the mixed tree/shrub/perennial borders around the house because they will be watered no matter what, so any veggies planted there likely will produce better than those in the garden whose water gets cut off in July.

When we first moved here, there was a wonderful gentleman a couple of miles from us who planted his garden April 1st and stopped watering July 1st. It drove me nuts that he arbitrarily just stopped watering July 1st, but after going through several southern Oklahoma droughts since moving here, I see the method in his madness. As time goes on, I'm becoming more and more like him, except I don't necessarily have an arbitrary cut-off date when I stop watering. Instead, I look at how dry it is, how much water would be reguired and look at the long-term forecast to see if I can maybe baby the garden through a hot spell and expect relief soon. That's what happened last year. I was about to give up on keeping the garden watered in July and then we had a big rainy spell that lasted a few days. Then, I watered some in August in the hope a tropical storm would send rain our way.....and in September Hermine gave us 9" in a couple of days, which kept the garden going a bit longer.

At a certain point, if we are in extreme or exceptional drought, I am so busy with the VFD that it doesn't even matter what my garden is doing because I won't even be at home long enough to harvest whatever is producing. It was that way in July of 2006. We had as many as five fires a day and most of them lasted at least a couple of hours, if not days. If I wasn't at fires, I was rushing to the store to buy groceries and Gatorade or busy cooking at home so I could take meals to the firefighters. When drought is that bad, the garden becomes irrelevant and you can imagine that I don't like abandoning my garden at a time like that, but it is necessary.

Hope this helps a little,

Dawn

We have been in a 3 year drought here at my house. As most on this forum know not too far away got rain this summer. So not sure I will notice or will make any changes. It will end sometime. Jay

Very nice, and thanks, Dawn. I guess since most of my veggies will be in containers, I won't worry about it too much. Depending on how spring goes, though, I may decide not to have as many containers as originally planned. I may also try to figure out some kind of irrigation system for them. Just have to take it month by month for now.

Susan

Jay,

You've had drought for so long that you may have trouble adjusting if your drought ever ends.

I had two rainy years in a row, 2009 and 2010, and that may be the first time that's happened since we moved here. (Some people here in my county would argue that 2010 wasn't even a rainy year, but I live in a narrow "slice" of the county that received 9" of rain from Hermine, so for me it was. Other parts of our county had much less rain from Hermine and probably consider 2010 a dry year, because of course, that 9" made a big difference to those of us who received it.) I think our county will officially end 2010 with barely-average rainfall since nothing has fallen in recent weeks and nothing much at all is expected in December.

Since two rainy years in a row are rare here, there's no reason to think or expect that 2011 will be rainy, giving us three rainy years in a row, so I'm expecting horrid drought conditions here in Love County for 2011. (I won't be mad if I am wrong about that though.)

Susan,

Drip irrigation is a wonderful way to water containers. You can control how much water any given container receives by using more emitters, or less emitters, and also by the type of emitter you use. Setting up drip irrigation sounds much harder than it is. If you put your dripline system on a timer, your garden will be watered regularly with little effort on your part---other than keeping an eye on the plants so you can adjust the timing or frequency of watering to match current weather conditions.

The first drip irrigation system we installed was from a kit bought at Home Depot or Lowe's that we used to irrigate the 12 hanging baskets on our wraparound porch. It probably took us all of 30 minutes to open the box, take out all the pieces, read the instructions, and set up the system to water the plants. It was wonderful to discover I could have lovely hanging baskets on the front portch and not have to walk around on the porch with a hose or watering can.

Dawn