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 by growing smaller, quick-maturing plants in high-density spacings.  Most modern vegetables have been bred to suit this method.  Many new varieties can’t forage and have become smaller, more determinate, and faster to mature.  Actually, the larger, more sprawling heirloom varieties of the past were not a great deal less productive overall, but only a little later to begin yielding.

Fortunately, enough of the old sorts still exist that a selective and varietally aware home gardener can make do.  Since I’ve become water-wiser, I’m interested in finding and conserving heirlooms that once supported large numbers of healthy Americans in relative self-sufficiency.  My earlier book, being a guide to what passes for ordinary vegetable gardening these days, assumed the availability of plenty of water.  The varieties I recommended in [i]Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades[i] were largely modern ones, and the seed companies I praised most highly focused on top-quality commercial varieties.  But, looking at gardening through the filter of limited irrigation, other, less modern varieties are often far better adapted and other seed companies sometimes more likely sources.

Seed Company Directory*

Abundant Life See Foundation:  P.O.  Box 772, Port Townsend, WA 98368 (ABL) Johnny’s Selected Seeds:  Foss Hill Road, Albion, Maine 04910 (JSS) Peace Seeds:  2345 SE Thompson Street, Corvallis, OR 97333 (PEA) Ronninger’s Seed Potatoes:  P.O.  Box 1838, Orting, WA 98360 (RSP) Stokes Seeds Inc.  Box 548, Buffalo, NY 14240 (STK) Territorial Seed Company:  P.O.  Box 20, Cottage Grove, OR 97424 (TSC)

Throughout the growing directions that follow in this chapter, the reader will be referred to a specific company only for varieties that are not widely available.

I have again come to appreciate the older style of vegetable—­ sprawling, large framed, later maturing, longer yielding, vigorously rooting.  However, many of these old-timers have not seen the attentions of a professional plant breeder for many years and throw a fair percentage of bizarre, misshapen, nonproductive plants.  These “off types” can be compensated for by growing a somewhat larger garden and allowing for some waste.  Dr. Alan Kapuler, who runs Peace Seeds, has brilliantly pointed out to me why heirloom varieties are likely to be more nutritious.  Propagated by centuries of isolated homesteaders, heirlooms that survived did so because these superior varieties helped the gardeners’ better-nourished babies pass through the gauntlet of childhood illnesses.

Plant Spacing:  The Key to Water-Wise Gardening