Drought Gardening

It feels like England right now.  Outside, it's cool and breezy, not to get above 75 degrees for the day.  It rained a bit yesterday and the day before, and the weatherman tells me that it will rain in the upcoming days as well.  Rain, rain, rain.  I love it.  The more soft gentle rains we get the more the groundwater will be replenished.  We are managing to get the garden planted in spite of all this rain.  The one thing the rain makes difficult is the continuation of our drought gardening practices.

"Why" you might ask "are you bothering with drought gardening when you are getting all this rain?"  Well, I'll tell you.

Gimme a Break!

A cane break that is.  Cane breaks received mention throughout Tennessee and Kentucky’s history.   As far back as four to five thousand years ago, Late Archaic and Early Woodland Indians were binding clusters of cane together to light their way through caves in the karst region (I heard that from a Mammoth Cave guide I know).   They also used it to weave baskets, and when burying children, they would wrap the body “in a matting woven from the outer bark of the cane”.[1]  They would choose to live in the river bottoms where cane grew in abundance “thirty feet tall and three inches thick”.[2]

For explorers and settlers it was, simply put, everlastingly present as either a help or a hindrance.  Soldiers could hide in it during battle, and cattle would feed on the young shoots, but where traveling through was concerned . . .