# How did they water gardens way back when?



## Rosemary Tea (Nov 17, 2021)

Working on a story where the characters, who live in a town, have a kitchen garden, which is the primary source of food for them. It occurred to me that they'd have to water the garden, at least during the dry season, but how would they do that at a pre-industrial level of technology?

Every garden I've ever watered had irrigation lines in the beds, or, at the very least, a hose and spigot. These characters wouldn't have any of that. I imagine their main water source would be a well, and perhaps a rain barrel. Not ruling out a more sophisticated irrigation system, but it would have to be feasible for a home garden in a non-industrialized society (no rubber or plastic hoses, no tap water). The only other garden watering method I know is the watering can, but that would be a horribly inefficient way to water a quarter acre (give or take) of vegetables and herbs.

They could, of course, minimize the need for watering by using permaculture methods, but that wouldn't eliminate the need entirely. So how would they do it? Trudge back and forth with the watering can? Or would there be a more efficient way?


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## Chasejxyz (Nov 17, 2021)

How big is your kitchen garden? Cause if it fits inside a normal house, then they'd use something akin to a watering can. So saying "that's inefficient for a quarter acre" doesn't make sense if it's a garden in a kitchen/in a town, because it wouldn't be that big.

We've also been using irrigation for thousands upon thousands of years. Using stuff like gravity and the physics-y properties of water can make things happen "automatically."

Most civilizations are based around a water source. If not a pond/lake/river, then a spring or something underground they can pump up. Any town is going to have pumps where someone can go get water.


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## pmmg (Nov 17, 2021)

I suspect a people living in an area with a dry season would likely have plants also adapted for the dry season.


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## Prince of Spires (Nov 18, 2021)

The method depends on how dry the dry season normally is. If we're talking no rain for the whole season then most growing would have been done in the wet season and water would be conserved for drinking. Some rain means lots of storage is used, which gives manual work to get the water out of the ground. If it's western Europe dry season (which just means the rain is warmer than in winter...), then you're mainly looking at rain barrels. 

Yes, they would water their kitchen gardens simply because it would be one of their main sources of food, and water really helps stuff grow. How depends on 2 things. The size of the garden and the technology available. The bigger the garden the more automised the process will be. A rain barrel (which all houses would have) and gravity can do most of the work. A simple bamboo pipe gets the water to the garden and small trenches in the ground spread it from there to the plants. Once you have that in place, you can draw buckets from a well, dump them in the barrel and it will spread from there.


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## Slartibartfast (Nov 18, 2021)

Interesting question. I used to deal with historical drainage systems a lot and from my perspective the problem that people used to experience always seemed to be the reverse: I almost exclusively found systems designed to get rid of excess water, not the other way around. Of course it might just be that irrigation systems are naturally higher and many of the features woul get destroyed more easily than drainage. But on reflection I saw a surprising lack of things that would survive, like irrigation ditches, even in places where you would have thought this to be feasible and useful.

Anyhoo, if you _did _have an irrigation system, you could use gravity to distribute water as long as you start the water higher than your land. It would be more or less feasible depending on how level the garden is and which way it slopes. Depending on how pre-indutry they are, you could have them use something ceramic as a distribution channel (brick would work), wood-lined channels or, if the local soils allow, you could even have semi-permenant clay channels. Just a case of finding something that seems like the cheapest and easiest likely solution for that socity.

I think the real trick would be storing the water. Getting water out of a well is a pain in the backside, even if it's a higher tech society and they use pumps. As you say, rainwater barrels would be used and I suspect they would be so helpful compared to dawing water out of a well that they would be used a lot more than they are today. I'm sure cooking water and any other clean-ish waste water would be used thoughtfully too, not just chucked out of the nearest window.

Finally, I expect they'd develop a keen sense of what needs to be watered. I'm a lazy gardener but tend to water everything because it involves turning a tap on and once I do, the water never stops. If it was much harder that that I would know exactly what I didn't need to water and how long it would live for if I didn't. I would probably also develop a far better sense of how drought resistant my various crops were, and how well the soils retained water in various different parts of the garden.


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## CupofJoe (Nov 18, 2021)

Things like Qanats have been used for hundred if not thousands of years to get water from where it was to where it was needed.


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## Karlin (Nov 18, 2021)

There were all sorts of ancient water systems. Canals and ditches if you had springs uphill-there are still many in use.  Shadoof, which can lift water up from a river or well, to a ditch or bucket..


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## Slartibartfast (Nov 18, 2021)

Just re-read my post and should have been way clearer with what I was trying to say.

Firstly, my experience is from Northern Europe and doesn't apply outside of that area. Secondly I was trying to answer the question 'how does someone who already has a water source go about spreading this efficiently on their 30x30m garden?' I'm not trying to deny the existence of water sources and water supply systems in general 

Damn me and my rambling.


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## CupofJoe (Nov 18, 2021)

What are they growing? As others have said, they are probably going to pick the plants that need the least maintenance. After that, I'd guess it would be by hand and probably the job of young children, the lame/crippled and elderly.


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## pmmg (Nov 18, 2021)

I've seen water captured from the air using tarps. If they raised some tents around the garden for this reason, they might be able to cause some type of natural watering using dew and a method of capturing it.


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## Rosemary Tea (Nov 18, 2021)

Slartibartfast said:


> Just re-read my post and should have been way clearer with what I was trying to say.
> 
> Firstly, my experience is from Northern Europe and doesn't apply outside of that area. Secondly I was trying to answer the question 'how does someone who already has a water source go about spreading this efficiently on their 30x30m garden?' I'm not trying to deny the existence of water sources and water supply systems in general
> 
> Damn me and my rambling.


Your post was perfectly clear to me.


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## Rosemary Tea (Nov 18, 2021)

CupofJoe said:


> Things like Qanats have been used for hundred if not thousands of years to get water from where it was to where it was needed.


Interesting! I'd been wondering how the Persians did it, building a highly urbanized society in such a dry climate. 

Perhaps the farmers in my story would use something like that, if the natural weather isn't quite enough to keep their crops going. I'm not sure they'd need it for a kitchen garden, though, if they have adequate well water and rain catchment. (I'm not setting any of it on a farm, but farmers appear as peripheral characters: they show up at the market in town to sell their harvest; some townspeople came from farming families and have relatives who've remained on the farm.)


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## Rosemary Tea (Nov 18, 2021)

Prince of Spires said:


> The method depends on how dry the dry season normally is. If we're talking no rain for the whole season then most growing would have been done in the wet season and water would be conserved for drinking. Some rain means lots of storage is used, which gives manual work to get the water out of the ground. If it's western Europe dry season (which just means the rain is warmer than in winter...), then you're mainly looking at rain barrels.


I'd been playing with that, and I think I have it worked out. Winters are much wetter than summers (a weather pattern I'm well used to; I'm from California, which is dry half the year in a good year, longer in a drought). Summers are not completely devoid of rain (that's where the setting departs from California weather), but it's less frequent. By late summer, the rain tapers off. Until mid to late autumn, it rains very little or not at all. So that's perhaps two or three months with little or no rain, three to five months (depending on whether it's an especially wet or especially dry year or somewhere in between) with lots of rain and occasional snow, and the rest of the time, a moderate amount of rain.

So, they'd probably need to start adding water to the rain barrels sometime in the summer, and keep it up until the winter wet season starts, by which time the only crops left would be the frost tolerant ones. (Night frosts start happening not long after the autumn equinox, although days remain warm for a while.) That would mean most vegetables would have to be harvested by early autumn. Planting would be done in the spring, when it's still wet. Some herbs do best with autumn planting; those would go in the ground probably around the time the rains start.



Prince of Spires said:


> Yes, they would water their kitchen gardens simply because it would be one of their main sources of food, and water really helps stuff grow. How depends on 2 things. The size of the garden and the technology available. The bigger the garden the more automised the process will be. A rain barrel (which all houses would have) and gravity can do most of the work. A simple bamboo pipe gets the water to the garden and small trenches in the ground spread it from there to the plants. Once you have that in place, you can draw buckets from a well, dump them in the barrel and it will spread from there.


 Simple, and they'd certainly have that.


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## Rosemary Tea (Nov 18, 2021)

Slartibartfast said:


> Interesting question. I used to deal with historical drainage systems a lot and from my perspective the problem that people used to experience always seemed to be the reverse: I almost exclusively found systems designed to get rid of excess water, not the other way around. Of course it might just be that irrigation systems are naturally higher and many of the features woul get destroyed more easily than drainage. But on reflection I saw a surprising lack of things that would survive, like irrigation ditches, even in places where you would have thought this to be feasible and useful.
> 
> Anyhoo, if you _did _have an irrigation system, you could use gravity to distribute water as long as you start the water higher than your land. It would be more or less feasible depending on how level the garden is and which way it slopes. Depending on how pre-indutry they are, you could have them use something ceramic as a distribution channel (brick would work), wood-lined channels or, if the local soils allow, you could even have semi-permenant clay channels. Just a case of finding something that seems like the cheapest and easiest likely solution for that socity.


 The premise here is that the Industrial Revolution never happened, so technological and economic development has gone the way it would have (or could have) in the absence of that. Technology that could not have existed without the Industrial Revolution can't appear in this setting. Anything that existed somewhere in the world by the eve of the Industrial Revolution can. So, for that matter, can technologies that could have existed under those conditions but did not, simply because no one thought of them. It doesn't have to be historically accurate, but it does have to be possible within those parameters.



Slartibartfast said:


> I think the real trick would be storing the water. Getting water out of a well is a pain in the backside, even if it's a higher tech society and they use pumps. As you say, rainwater barrels would be used and I suspect they would be so helpful compared to dawing water out of a well that they would be used a lot more than they are today. I'm sure cooking water and any other clean-ish waste water would be used thoughtfully too, not just chucked out of the nearest window.


 Yes, water pumps exist. They don't require industrial level technology. And I've already decided they'd put their gently used water into a graywater system, where it would ultimately end up watering the garden. Only difference from a modern graywater system would be that it probably doesn't drain directly from the kitchen sink (though I suppose that wouldn't be impossible).



Slartibartfast said:


> Finally, I expect they'd develop a keen sense of what needs to be watered. I'm a lazy gardener but tend to water everything because it involves turning a tap on and once I do, the water never stops. If it was much harder that that I would know exactly what I didn't need to water and how long it would live for if I didn't. I would probably also develop a far better sense of how drought resistant my various crops were, and how well the soils retained water in various different parts of the garden.


 Excellent point.

Maybe they'd let gravity do most of it and then go do some touching up with a watering can as needed.


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## Rosemary Tea (Nov 18, 2021)

CupofJoe said:


> What are they growing? As others have said, they are probably going to pick the plants that need the least maintenance.


 I haven't spelled it out, but in my mind, they're growing the same kinds of plants I would if it were my garden: vegetables like carrots and cabbage and beets and chard and squash and tomatoes and peppers and beans (I know those aren't all native to the same continents, but I'm not concerned about historical accuracy, just what would be possible in the climate). And pot herbs and medicinal herbs, which are mostly the same thing: rosemary (of course!), basils, yarrow, sage plants, chamomile, calendula, mints... the list goes on.

They would naturally arrange the garden so that the plants are in sunnier or shadier spots according to their needs, and the plants with the greatest need for water are at the lowest points, which will receive the most drainage. But from there, a helping hand would be needed.



CupofJoe said:


> After that, I'd guess it would be by hand and probably the job of young children, the lame/crippled and elderly.


If watering means hauling water from the well and dumping it in the rain barrel, that couldn't be a children's job. Buckets of water are HEAVY. A teenager could do it, and maybe a strong eleven or twelve-year-old could, but younger children wouldn't be able to manage. Neither could anyone who's infirm.

But I do see most of the gardening work, the weeding and picking and planting, being delegated to the children. The adults have a lot of other work to do. The children, not so much. They'd be available for routine, necessary, simple chores, like weeding the garden.


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## Rosemary Tea (Nov 18, 2021)

pmmg said:


> I've seen water captured from the air using tarps. If they raised some tents around the garden for this reason, they might be able to cause some type of natural watering using dew and a method of capturing it.


If you're doing an ultra primitive desert campout, that's a way to get drinking water. But there's good reason why deserts are not, traditionally, farm land. (Not to say there's never been desert farming. Indigenous peoples in the Sonoran Desert have done it for ages, but always near a river that could be used for irrigation.) If water is that scarce, gardening isn't feasible.

If there is enough dew to water the plants with, the simplest way to do that would be to let the dew fall on the plants. In other words, do nothing. But then that comes back to growing drought tolerant plants. 

Some of the plants they're growing would be like that. Rosemary only needs to be watered when it's first planted, and after that, never again. Plant it during wet season, and you won't have to water it at all. Yarrow keeps itself going with or without rain (it will die back and not look so nice, but as long as there's any moisture at all in the air, it will keep putting out new leaves).


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## Slartibartfast (Nov 18, 2021)

Rosemary Tea said:


> The premise here is that the Industrial Revolution never happened, so technological and economic development has gone the way it would have (or could have) in the absence of that. Technology that could not have existed without the Industrial Revolution can't appear in this setting. Anything that existed somewhere in the world by the eve of the Industrial Revolution can. So, for that matter, can technologies that could have existed under those conditions but did not, simply because no one thought of them. It doesn't have to be historically accurate, but it does have to be possible within those parameters.



Sounds like a fun place to write about.

In that case, one other thing to consider (if you like) is not just the availability of a technology, but its scale and application. Barrels are certainly common technology in the early post-medieval period, but their cheap, volume manufacture wasn't. Ditto ceramic building material. Depends on how much of a rabbit hole you intend to go down.

Another thing that came to mind is the different balance of costs they would face. In particular, materials being comparatively far more expensive and labour being comparatively cheap compared with the modern Western economy. Perhaps rather than using a physical system made from expensive resources, the cheapest irrigation device really would be a person with a bucket?


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## Rosemary Tea (Nov 18, 2021)

Slartibartfast said:


> Sounds like a fun place to write about.
> 
> In that case, one other thing to consider (if you like) is not just the availability of a technology, but its scale and application. Barrels are certainly common technology in the early post-medieval period, but their cheap, volume manufacture wasn't. Ditto ceramic building material. Depends on how much of a rabbit hole you intend to go down.
> 
> Another thing that came to mind is the different balance of costs they would face. In particular, materials being comparatively far more expensive and labour being comparatively cheap compared with the modern Western economy. Perhaps rather than using a physical system made from expensive resources, the cheapest irrigation device really would be a person with a bucket?


There are coopers in town. Barrels wouldn't be too hard to come by.

Cheap, volume manufacture of anything wouldn't exist, you're right. But in an economy like this, everyone's an artisan, more or less. Every family's income is derived, in full or in large part, from making goods to order. Prices have to be affordable to the community, otherwise there wouldn't be any business... but then, everyone is getting paid comparably. 

And families are doing their own gardening, which has to be fit in with all the other work of making a living and running a household. Maybe there's the occasional hired helper involved, but that person would be hired as general help, not just to water the garden with a bucket. Having someone do that would be extremely cost ineffective, whether or not they get monetary pay for it.

The scenario you've raised fits more with the early industrial era, when factory made goods started undercutting the artisans. That was what really crashed the economy. That was what made labor cheaper: lots of desperate people who could no longer make a living through crafts, or who'd been farmers but lost their land. 

For artisan made barrels and bricks to be unaffordable, there would have to be something disrupting the artisan economy. In our timeline, the Industrial Revolution did that. Before that happened, artisans typically made enough to be able to afford other artisans' goods. It wasn't a problem. In fact, not buying from the other local artisans would have been a problem, because that would have been denying them support.

Besides, the house and garden have already been built. The irrigation system would have been put in at that time. The people living there now aren't spending money on that. Maybe on repair and maintenance of the irrigation system, just like any homeowner has to deal with, but that would just be a now and then thing. Since the system is already in place, the most cost effective way is to use it.


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## pmmg (Nov 18, 2021)

I forgot the old fashioned way. Have lots of kids and tell them to do it.


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## Puck (Nov 19, 2021)

In somewhere like Medieval England they definitely used 'watering cans' of various sorts (except they were not cans but pots - being made from ceramics).

Here is a link to a late Medieval/Tudor example in the Museum of London.

Here is another link to an article on watering in medieval and early modern times, with some pictures of the implements they used.

For added nerdiness get yourself a copy of Thomas Hill's _The Garden Labyrinth_ (written in 1577).  He wrote, on the subject of watering gardens:

_The common watering potte for the Garden beddes with us, hath a narrow necke, bigge belly, somewhat large bottome, and full of little holes, with a proper hole formed on the head, to take in the water, whiche filled full, and the thombe layde on the hole to keepe in the aire, may on such wise be carried in handsome manner..._


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## Rosemary Tea (Nov 19, 2021)

Puck said:


> In somewhere like Medieval England they definitely used 'watering cans' of various sorts (except they were not cans but pots - being made from ceramics).


 Sure, but they probably didn't water the whole garden with them in a situation where we would turn the hose on. A watering can is good for watering a single plant or small bed, when that's all that's needed. It's not an efficient way to do a mass watering.



Puck said:


> Here is a link to a late Medieval/Tudor example in the Museum of London.
> 
> Here is another link to an article on watering in medieval and early modern times, with some pictures of the implements they used.
> 
> ...


In the illustration at the second link, they're using the watering can to water a seedling. Which is, probably, what the watering cans were mainly for (really no different today). Plants do need to be watered when they've just been put in the ground, and it makes sense to water them individually. For regular irrigation of an established garden, a quicker method would suit better.


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## Mad Swede (Nov 19, 2021)

I wonder if you're not approaching this the wrong way round. Historically, people have selected those plants which grow best in their local enviroment. Rye and oats are examples, here in Sweden they grow and ripen even in cold wet summers. Alternatively they breed plant variants which survive local conditions. Corn is an example here in Sweden, the local variants were found not to do very well when they were tried in southern Europe, just like the southern variants didn't do well up here.

So in your case the locals might have bred a variant of wheat which requires a nice wet spring but which then doesn't need much rain in the summer to ripen. They might also dig ponds to store water (my grandparents farm has an example) or they might select areas with a good ground water supply (eg at the bottom of a hill) for planting crops.


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## skip.knox (Nov 19, 2021)

>people have selected those plants which grow best in their local enviroment.
This. On your farm you grow what grows. What doesn't grow naturally isn't among your crops. This is why some parts of the world were monocultures.

That said, *if* you happened to have a water source and *if* you happened to have rights to that water source, then you might irrigate in the ways described in the excellent posts preceding. But that would be a minority of the farmers and would be one of the things that marks a wealthy farmer (or village) apart from a poor one.


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## Rosemary Tea (Nov 19, 2021)

Mad Swede said:


> I wonder if you're not approaching this the wrong way round. Historically, people have selected those plants which grow best in their local enviroment. Rye and oats are examples, here in Sweden they grow and ripen even in cold wet summers. Alternatively they breed plant variants which survive local conditions. Corn is an example here in Sweden, the local variants were found not to do very well when they were tried in southern Europe, just like the southern variants didn't do well up here.
> 
> So in your case the locals might have bred a variant of wheat which requires a nice wet spring but which then doesn't need much rain in the summer to ripen. They might also dig ponds to store water (my grandparents farm has an example) or they might select areas with a good ground water supply (eg at the bottom of a hill) for planting crops.


And do they not need to water their vegetable gardens in Sweden, either?

That's the scenario I'm working with: not a farm, but a vegetable garden. How the farmers are farming isn't really relevant to the story, although if they're using some sort of aqueduct, I suppose that could get a mention somewhere. For the purpose of the story, it's enough to know that there are farmers around and they're getting their crops somehow.

Where I was coming from was, I had my MC weeding the garden. Then I thought, hmmm, it's late summer, seems to be pretty dry, would she have to water the garden too? Probably. But she can't just go turn on the hose, so how would she do it?

I can believe that the farmers are growing grains that are suited to the climate.


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## skip.knox (Nov 19, 2021)

The easy answer is, she didn't have to water because she was only growing vegetables that survive. Is she in a town? If in the countryside, she's probably a cotter of some sort--woodcutter, shepherd, that sort of thing. Anyway, she'd have access to water for the household itself. It would be a straightforward matter to have two jars or buckets she could carry by yoke from the well or stream or pond. I know (from parish registers) that one cause of death in the late Middle Ages for young girls was drowning. They'd be sent to fetch water. 

For a vegetable garden, I don't think it needs any more than that.


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## Rosemary Tea (Nov 19, 2021)

skip.knox said:


> The easy answer is, she didn't have to water because she was only growing vegetables that survive. Is she in a town? If in the countryside, she's probably a cotter of some sort--woodcutter, shepherd, that sort of thing. Anyway, she'd have access to water for the household itself. It would be a straightforward matter to have two jars or buckets she could carry by yoke from the well or stream or pond. I know (from parish registers) that one cause of death in the late Middle Ages for young girls was drowning. They'd be sent to fetch water.
> 
> For a vegetable garden, I don't think it needs any more than that.


Town, though on the outskirts. The property she lives on has its own well. 

I had pictured a yoke and buckets to fetch water, but wondered if she'd do that for the garden, and if so, how that would translate to watering the garden.

It's a minor detail, but knowing how it works helps authenticate it. So, now I have it: she might put some water in the rain barrel, if it's running low and the garden needs a little irrigating. If a particular plant looks like it needs some help, she'd get it with a watering can. But mostly, she wouldn't have to water.


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## Mad Swede (Nov 19, 2021)

Rosemary Tea said:


> And do they not need to water their vegetable gardens in Sweden, either?
> 
> That's the scenario I'm working with: not a farm, but a vegetable garden. How the farmers are farming isn't really relevant to the story, although if they're using some sort of aqueduct, I suppose that could get a mention somewhere. For the purpose of the story, it's enough to know that there are farmers around and they're getting their crops somehow.
> 
> ...


The only time I ever saw my grandparents or parents water the vegetable patch was when there was a real drought. Otherwise they didn't need to, the ground water and the pond (water leaches out of the sides into the soil) did it for them. In late summer, we didn't have things like potatoes, they came later on. We had summer vegetables like peas or more usually some form of beans and fresh bread with our meals. We planted what we knew would grow at the various times of year.

The point I'm making I guess is that food is seasonal so you don't eat in the way that we do now. I still have trouble accepting the way some people make a salad with tomatoes, sweet peppers and lettuce in the middle of winter, it just doesn't seem right.


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## Rosemary Tea (Nov 19, 2021)

Mad Swede said:


> The only time I ever saw my grandparents or parents water the vegetable patch was when there was a real drought. Otherwise they didn't need to, the ground water and the pond (water leaches out of the sides into the soil) did it for them. In late summer, we didn't have things like potatoes, they came later on. We had summer vegetables like peas or more usually some form of beans and fresh bread with our meals. We planted what we knew would grow at the various times of year.
> 
> The point I'm making I guess is that food is seasonal so you don't eat in the way that we do now. *I still have trouble accepting the way some people make a salad with tomatoes, sweet peppers and lettuce in the middle of winter, it just doesn't seem right.*


Even worse, I've seen something like that advertised, unironically, as a seasonal recipe. Even in California, peppers and tomatoes aren't in season in the winter. Lettuce, yes.


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## pmmg (Nov 19, 2021)

I must confess, I having difficulty imagining a society without the advancement of irrigation having much of anything else. I could invent stuff, but why when irrigation seems like such a no brainer. If I want the water from the river to flow over here, how about I dig a path for it would seem an easy leap for even primitive cultures. If the know enough to dig a well, they must know how to dig a ditch.

I could suggest fantastical ways this might happen.


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## pmmg (Nov 19, 2021)

Get a giant bag. FIll it with water. Put it on the back on an ox. Poke holes in it. Have the ox walk around the garden.


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## Rosemary Tea (Nov 19, 2021)

pmmg said:


> Get a giant bag. FIll it with water. Put it on the back on an ox. Poke holes in it. Have the ox walk around the garden.


That is indeed a fantastical way. The garden is still standing after the ox has been through it?


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## pmmg (Nov 19, 2021)

You could use a giant kangaroo...

Suppose there was a plant like a cactus that stored water all year, and released it back into the soil in the dry season.


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## pmmg (Nov 19, 2021)

Or...they live in a valley, where mountain snow melt slows down hill, keeping the ground moist beneath the surface.


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## Rosemary Tea (Nov 19, 2021)

pmmg said:


> Or...they live in a valley, where mountain snow melt slows down hill, keeping the ground moist beneath the surface.


They actually do live in a valley. So, going back to what Mad Swede said about the groundwater taking care of it.


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## pmmg (Nov 19, 2021)

Rosemary Tea said:


> Where I was coming from was, I had my MC weeding the garden. Then I thought, hmmm, it's late summer, seems to be pretty dry, would she have to water the garden too? Probably. But she can't just go turn on the hose, so how would she do it?



Shed give up, and wait till it rains.


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## LAG (Nov 20, 2021)

Watering of gardens is, in my experience, a matter of perception: a good gardener will see that her plants need water, and, as this garden is on a small scale, will probably fetch water in a bucket, ewer or water-feeder, whether from well or trench or stream. Watering depends on climate and species, so she will give some plants more water; some none.

Both over-and-under irrigation are common mistakes in agriculture and gardening, so it's pretty normal for an experienced gardener to fetch a bucket on a warm day or during drought/drier seasons.


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## Puck (Nov 21, 2021)

The medieval Chinese did use 2 buckets with holes in the bottom carried across the shoulders suspended from a yoke.

They also developed irrigation systems.

 Europeans also used irrigation and water meadows to provide water for agriculture.

Flexible hoses (made from leather) were not invented in Europe until the 1600s.


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## Prince of Spires (Nov 23, 2021)

Mad Swede 's comment made me realize something which is probably very easy to forget. Not only did they select plants suited to their specific micro-climate, but also those plants would be very different from those you find in your garden today. Modern plants have been selected to do well with the circumstances we have today. That is, readilly available water, fertilizer and all that sort of thing. They're bred to give the highest yield of pretty looking food while being pampered. 

That is very different from plants you would find even 50 or 100 years ago, let alone 500 years ago. This is very visible in fruit trees (I just researched an apple tree for my garden...). Compare a heritage fruit tree to a modern variety. Modern versions are grown to have uniform, pretty fruits, don't have leap years, and they do a specific thing really well. If you research heritage fruit trees, you'll find descriptions of exactly which environment they grow well in, how disease resitant they are, how hardy they are, if they need a lot of water or not. 

The same would grow for whatever plant you put in their garden. They might be optimized for wet springs and hot, dry summers, they might be disease resistant, give easy seeds, and so on. So I agree that in general they probably wouldn't water the whole garden all the time. They would water specific plants at specific times if it would have a significant impact on the yield of that plant.


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## Puck (Nov 23, 2021)

Agricultural yields in the middle ages were very poor compared to modern agriculture.  Poor and highly labour intensive.

In 1350–1399, in England, the typical agricultural yield was 7-15 bushels per acre for grain crops.  In a bad year it might be as low as 4.  A modern farmer in Europe or North America would expect a yield of least 60 bushels per acre.

Today, if we have a dry spell, crop farmers break out the sprinklers.  In the middle ages, in Europe, that was not an option.  Any lengthy period of drought would lead to crop failure and starvation for the poor.  Too much rain would also lead to crop failure and starvation.  People of that time did not have the farming technology we rely on today to keep our larders full.

It is worth saying that medieval gardens also often grew herbs and plants for medicinal purposes as well as vegetables and flowers for display.  But your tools for watering your garden were limited to buckets and ceramic watering pots.  Watering a garden with such tools and no hose would have been a very labour intensive task.  But that does not mean to say that people did not do it.  Life was labour intensive for ordinary people in the middle ages, labour intensive and, if you were poor, often near subsistence.

Sitting in our C21st armchairs we can have little conception of just how hard life in the middle ages really was for common folk.  The Great Famine of 1315-1317 brought appalling hardship.  A Bristol Chronicler reported just what this meant for ordinary folk in 1315:

_ 'a great famine of dearth with such mortality that the living could scarce suffice to bury the dead, horse flesh and dogs flesh was accounted good meat, and some eat their own children. The thieves that were in prison did pluck and tear in pieces, such as were newly put into prison and devoured them half alive.'_

The Great Famine was estimated to have led to the deaths of between 5% and 10% of the entire population of Northern Europe in the space of 3 years.

The reality is that our modern view of medieval times is greatly sugar-coated - mainly by Victorian romanticism and their idealised tales of chivalry and knights of the round table etc.  Some people find George RR Martin's realisation of a medieval society in Westeros a little bleak.  But the reality is that even Martin's worldbuilding sometimes puts a modern gloss over the grim reality of what life was really like in the real middle ages.  Characters like Martin's Hound may seem extremely brutal and violent to us today but even someone like the Hound is a fairly cuddly character compared to the violent reality of a real life Henry V, Black Prince or Baron John Clifford.


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## Rosemary Tea (Nov 27, 2021)

To clarify, I never said this was a medieval setting. It's an alternate world. Technology may be at a roughly medieval or post medieval level, but the culture and people's lifestyles are not a complete match, by any means, for medieval Europe.

My characters do not, for the most part, consider their lives hard. Why? They have enough. Food supplies have been stable enough for long enough that they're not concerned about shortage. There may be times when they have to carefully mind how fast the food supply is being used, kind of like having to watch your bank balance right before payday when you're living paycheck to paycheck, but they're not in danger of starving. No major famine takes place in the few years my story covers.

They have plenty of work to do, and they don't have the modern conveniences we take for granted, but to them that's just life.

As for violence, I doubt it was that different in medieval times from now. Plenty of violence happens today. Including plenty of extreme violence. What will people in the future think when they read about twentieth century serial killers and twenty-first century mass shooters? Probably something like, "Thank god I'm not living back then!" 

Bet you anything future pop culture will include popular tales of extreme violence set in our time. 

But despite what you see in any newspaper, most of us aren't witnessing violence most of the time. I expect the same was true in our purportedly violent past. _Game of Thrones_ is based on the worst of the worst. No less violent stories could be gotten out of our time, and have been.


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## pmmg (Nov 28, 2021)

While i do appreciate the expanded perspective i am still wrestling with a culture who has not gotten to digging a trench from the water to the garden having much else than a watering can to water with. I think the Chinese example of two pots with holes in them and walking between rows seems a tech period solution to this.


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## Rosemary Tea (Nov 28, 2021)

pmmg said:


> While i do appreciate the expanded perspective i am still wrestling with a culture who has not gotten to digging a trench from the water to the garden having much else than a watering can to water with. I think the Chinese example of two pots with holes in them and walking between rows seems a tech period solution to this.


No one ever said they hadn't gotten to digging a trench from the water to the garden. In fact, someone suggested up thread that they could have, and I accepted that possibility. I think they would have, unless the garden has enough groundwater for it not to be a concern.


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## Puck (Nov 28, 2021)

Irrigation trenches for agriculture was certainly a thing.  It is also quite possible it would have been worthwhile using irrigation for a large garden attached to a monastery or a noble household.  For a smaller garden it may have been a bit ott (but that would of course depend on where the garden was located relative to surrounding water sources and agriculture.


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## pmmg (Nov 28, 2021)

Rosemary Tea said:


> Every garden I've ever watered had irrigation lines in the beds, or, at the very least, a hose and spigot. These characters wouldn't have any of that.




you had said that in your opening post. They have no irrigation  lines.  If they have irrigation, then they have a lot more options. Why not use that.


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## Rosemary Tea (Nov 28, 2021)

pmmg said:


> you had said that in your opening post. They have no irrigation  lines.  If they have irrigation, then they have a lot more options. Why not use that.


Irrigation lines in the beds means something like this: Soaker Hose Irrigation System for Garden Rows | Gardeners.com

I said my characters wouldn't have that. They wouldn't, in the absence of modern irrigation materials. I did not say they wouldn't have any irrigation system at all.


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## pmmg (Nov 30, 2021)

So....are you still wanting something different than a watering can, and irrigation trenches?


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## Rosemary Tea (Nov 30, 2021)

pmmg said:


> So....are you still wanting something different than a watering can, and irrigation trenches?


No. All I really wanted to know was how they might irrigate a home garden without the convenience of hoses and spigots. I've gotten plenty of usable answers.


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