The Good Table At Home: Our Collective Dry Spell

by Kelly Knight, Marketing Manager for The Good Table

Spiritual Touchstone

As the drought in the west continues, it’s hard not to feel a lot like the land: dry, cracked, discouraged. The wildfires make it all worse: less trees, less shade, less ground cover. It’s all just feeling very parched out there, and internally too, as the pandemic goes on and on.

After the call went out to conserve water, I started researching dry farming as a way to understand how to keep my garden going and what I might need to do to strengthen it against more frequent droughts.

Dry farming is “a low-input, place-based approach to producing crops within the constraints of your climate. As we define it, a dry-farmed crop is irrigated once or not at all.”

Basically, you let the rain do the work, and don’t water through the rest of the season. How do you do that? “Dry farmers try to select a site with deep soil and good water-holding characteristics and then utilize a suite of practices to conserve soil moisture for crop growth. Some of the practices that support dry farming include: early soil prep and planting; selecting drought tolerant, resistant or early-maturing cultivars; lower planting density; cultivation or surface protection to prevent crusting and cracking of soil surface; diligent weed control; and improving soil health and water-holding capacity with practices such as cover cropping, rotation, and minimizing soil disturbance.”

This week, I yanked out the last of my tomato and cucumber plants that were pretty much done, and soon will be planting my cover crops for the vegetable beds. As I wrestled with the overgrown tomato vines, I was thinking about how we can sow our own resilience to better make it through the lean times.

“Just like dry farmers put in a lot of work so their crops can survive the dry, hot season, we can prepare our minds, hearts, and souls to get through our difficult seasons as well. ”

We can yank out the weeds: the old stories, the not-great habits, and the old coping mechanisms that no longer serve us. We can sow cover crops that help us retain moisture in the fertile soil of our hearts: creativity, meditation, friendships, community, and service to causes we care about. We can cultivate the garden of ourselves to be tolerant, resilient, and able to not only survive, but thrive in this season of our lives.

And if we can’t do that, we can ask for help. What needs pruning or weeding in your life? Where do you need help cultivating? What are you going to sow this week?