The one book written about our summer

West of the Cascades we go into the summer growing season certain we must water regularly.

Thirty-odd years on this is still the one fact that separates growing here from growing almost anywhere else in the country, and still the fact that general gardening advice is written as though were not true. Everything else in the book follows from it.

Defined scientifically, drought is not lack of rain. It is a dry soil condition in which plant growth slows or stops and plant survival may be threatened.

The distinction does real work. It means the question is not how much rain fell but how much water your particular soil is holding and how fast your particular planting is drawing it down — which is why the same July kills one garden and not the one next door.

Old-fashioned gardens used low plant densities to survive inevitable spells of rainlessness. Looked at this way, widely separated vegetables in widely separated rows may be considered the more efficient users of water because they consume soil moisture that nature freely puts there.

This is the book's central heresy and it is aimed squarely at the intensive-bed orthodoxy that Solomon himself had been teaching. It holds where irrigation is genuinely scarce. It is not an argument that close spacing is wrong in general — if you have water, a tight bed still yields more per square foot, and Solomon keeps one for summer lettuce for exactly that reason.

Inland gardeners farther south or in the Willamette Valley may want to spread their plants out a little farther.

Solomon is writing from Elkton, which he notes is twenty-five miles inland and several degrees cooler in summer than the Willamette Valley. Eugene is the valley he means. It is the rare case of a book telling this brand's own city, by name, to do something differently from the author.

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.

The breeding pressure he describes is real and has not reversed. What has changed since he wrote is the supply side: the seed-saving and regional-breeding networks that barely existed in the early nineties now make the sprawling, deep-rooting older varieties he wanted far easier to find than they were for him.

You may be surprised to learn that kale produces more complete protein per area occupied per time involved than any legume, including alfalfa.

Flagged rather than repeated. Kale is genuinely protein-dense for a leaf crop and its amino acid profile is unusually complete, but Solomon gives no source for the comparison against alfalfa and we have not found one. Treat it as the strongest version of a defensible point, not as a figure to quote onward.

Territorial Seed Company: P.O. Box 20, Cottage Grove, OR 97424

Solomon founded Territorial and then sold it, and the directory of seed houses is the part of the book that has aged hardest — post-office boxes, no web addresses, and several of the companies gone. Check any variety recommendation against a current catalogue. The spacing and soil chapters need no such caution.

Spring-sown lettuce will go to large sizes, remaining sweet and tender without irrigation if spaced 1 foot apart in a single row with 2 feet of elbow room on each side.

Worth reading against our own sowing calendar, which gives lettuce eight inches in the row and fourteen between rows. Both are right for their assumptions. Ours assumes you will water; this one assumes you will not, and buys that with roughly four times the ground per plant.