Section
Crops, drought and climate
Particular crops and the weather they grow in: onions, grapes, fall vegetables and plants for dry gardens, and the droughts and El Niño years that make a season dry or wet.
Watering is always a reply to the weather, and this section looks at the weather on a longer scale. Drought has several causes, from high pressure that parks over a region and turns storms aside to a winter with too little snow to feed the rivers in spring, and one piece takes them in turn. El Niño and La Niña, the opposite swings of the tropical Pacific between warm and cool, shift the odds of a wet or dry season over large parts of North America, and the piece on them explains what each phase has tended to mean for growers.
The crop pieces are practical. Onions respond to day length as much as to water and feeding, which decides which varieties suit a given latitude. California’s table grapes and raisins show how a dry-summer crop is watered when rain is out of the question for months. Fall vegetables, sown in late summer, need steady moisture while the soil is still warm.
The last piece is about choosing plants that need little water at all, and how to find a regional list of them instead of trusting a label written for somewhere else. For the work of watering itself, the neighboring section is Watering.
