Corn/garlic seed guy here. I'll have an update for /out/ in a few days on that stuff. For now, I want to talk about Tepary beans, a nice little crop that few have heard of.
First off, they're a dry bean only, so if you're looking for green beans, you might as well skip this post. They are also often considered the most drought tolerant crop in the world. Some of those plants are on a raised walkway. They're volunteers from seed that I harvested late last year, and many of the pods had already opened. What is notable is that, except for a very small amount of rain that caused them to germinate, they have received no direct water. They're thriving with having stuff near, but not on them get water.
Where I live, 100f days aren't uncommon during the growing season, and my average annual precipitation is around 8.5" (22cm) per year. If I water them once every one to two weeks, I can easily get a 200 to 1, if not greater, return on the seed planted. If there is no rain likely for two or three weeks, I can simply not water them and watch some of the weeds go bye-bye while they still survive. Some of the cultivars are incredibly tough:
>In 1912, ethnographer Carl Lumholtz found small cultivated fields primarily of tepary beans in the Pinacate Peaks area of Sonora. In the Pinacate, with an average annual precipitation of 75 mm (3.0 in) and temperatures up to 48 °C (118 °F), Papago and Mexican farmers utilized runoff from sparse rains to grow crops. In the 1980s author Gary Paul Nabhan visited this area, and found one farm family taking advantage of the first large rain in six years, planting seeds in the wet ground and harvesting a crop two months later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaseolus_acutifoliusTough, as in dry farmed in the Sonora Desert.
