Desert Gardening Secrets: Vines, Fences, Soil & Mulch Explained- Desert Garden Part 3
Your desert garden isn't about fighting constraints—it's about mastering the specific techniques that turn scarcity into abundance.
We have already covered in part 1 the root cause of desert gardening challenges, and how to reverse it. In part 2, we covered how to plant vegetables and perennials, and how to attain a foundation of diversified stable food that gives calories and vitamins. In this edition, we will deal with vines, fencing, dealing with soil conditions in arid landscapes, and mulching. These last techniques bring everything together in an arid landscape, and afterward you will be equipped to just go there and start building your oasis garden.
Vines, fencing, and mulches are cornerstone strategies in this climate.
In this edition, in 6.2 minutes or less:
#1 Vines: The Vertical Strategy
#2 Fencing: The Primary Requisite
#3 Soils: Working With Desert Conditions
#4 Desert Mulches: Emulating the Ant and Termite
#5 Building the Complete Bed With Mulch
Vines: The Vertical Strategy
Vines have a key role in desert gardens.
Correctly spaced and pruned, they provide both productive crop and shade cover. They moderate climate in designed houses and retrofit uncomfortably hot homes.
Every wall should be seen as a vine trellis. Every roof should be covered with dense vine.
Vine Over Garden
Horizontal trellis bars at 1-2m spacing furnished with grape vines throw a shade system over the greater part of your vegetable garden, preventing light saturation.
Design principles:
- The eastern side must be shaded in order to protect the garden from the early morning sun—dew and guttation moisture are important to plants early in the day (which evaporates if exposed to the hot sun), and soil temperatures stay cooler longer.
- The western side needs fleshy vines (like Mikania, mile-a-minute) as a lot of heat builds in the late afternoon.
- Leave the shady side of the garden quite open (North-facing side of the garden in northern hemisphere and South-facing side of the garden in southern hemisphere).
- The sun side can have wide-spaced pole crops (South-facing side of the garden in northern hemisphere and North-facing side of the garden in southern hemisphere)
The sides of this trellis can be closed with herbaceous vines: beans, climbing tomatoes, yams, and cucurbits.
Light saturation point:
the level of light intensity at which the rate of photosynthesis reaches its maximum and no longer increases with further increases in light intensity. Exceeding the light saturation point can lead to photoinhibition, where higher light intensity damages the photosynthetic apparatus, particularly chlorophyll, resulting in a decline in photosynthetic efficiency.
Guttation:
the exudation of drops of internal liquid out of the tips or edges of leaves of some vascular plants, and also a number of fungi.
Vine as House Retrofit
You can quite improve your desert home's comfort in over-hot homes by attaching trellis:
- West walls: Stand dense evergreen vine crop out from the wall (Mikania, Dolichos, Pelargonium). Add a vine awning above and out from any west windows.
- East walls: Grow winter-deciduous or summer-herbaceous vines in a screen fixed out from the wall. Place at verandah edge if one exists. Washing down the verandah and spraying vines with water rapidly cools the shaded area.
- Shade-side rear door: Build extensive closed trellis to provide a cool air source. Lay thick bark mulch below the vine with fine sprays to dampen it. Roof vents or a small sun-side greenhouse draw this cool air indoors.
- Roof: Run perennial non-invasive vine (Mikania, Pyrostegia) completely across.
- Water tank placement: Position under vine crop to keep garden air cool and cool the water itself.
Vines as Mulch and Forage
Well-chosen shade vines provide foliage for garden mulch and feeding small livestock. Some provide stick fuel for efficient cook-stoves.
Desert-Adapted Vines
Several vine crops survive dry, harsh, stony, or dune conditions. All thrive better if a around 50 L (a few cubic feet) of humus is pitted below the plant when set out. Valuable vines grown in large containers can await rains or soakage from water harvesting before being placed for permanent field growth.
Fencing: The Primary Requisite
The great impediment to home garden success in drylands is browsing animals—wild, feral, and domestic.
It is much cheaper to fence out these animals from gardens than to deal with food security problems.
Fencing is a primary requisite for intensive food production in deserts. Within fenced areas, surprising natural regeneration of trees can occur, and hardy food plants can be set out in unirrigated areas.
Fencing Options by Resource Level
Where money is available: Post-and-wire fencing, preferably electrified, to exclude goats, camels, cattle, donkeys, and sheep.
Where money is scarce: More laborious alternatives work:
- Ditch and bank systems, rock-faced or thorn-crowned
- Woven fences of plant materials (reeds, cane)
- Living fences: cactus (Mexico), Euphorbia antiquorum (India), Euphorbia tirucalli and Lycium ferocissimum (Africa, Australia)
- Combinations of stone walls, thorny shrubs, and steel pickets
- Burnt brick walls
- Unburnt mud brick (adobe) walls around large gardens
Fenced Corridors
"Stock routes" can permit milk and draft animals to enter certain areas while keeping them out of gardens.
Harmless Livestock
Within your fenced garden area, some animals cause no damage: poultry, domestic rabbits, bees, guinea pigs, and pigeons. These provide protein without destroying vegetation.
Soils: Working With Desert Conditions
Desert soils present specific challenges that require specific solutions.
The Nitrate Flush Problem
In drylands, soil humus can rapidly decompose to nitrates with heat and water, giving a sometimes lethal flush to new seedlings. Dry cultivated soil exacerbates this effect.
Solution: Mulch or litter on top of soil prevents both soil cracking and the lethal rapid temperature gains that cook feeder roots at the surface.
Soil Treatments for Common Problems
Non-wetting sand: Add bentonite (volcanic fine clay that swells and holds water) to flood-irrigated beds.
Impenetrable clay: Add gypsum to enable water penetration into clay particles.
Salted soils or salty water: Mound beds up or raise them—salt washes down into paths and low places. Use rain harvested water to flush salts if local water exceeds 800 ppm or the garden isn't free-drained.
The Saharawi Methods (Total Soil Rehabilitation)
Where salt contamination is severe, the Saharawi people of North Africa developed two approaches that depend on irrigation to leach excess salt. Both methods fall into the category of an extreme intervention for an extreme situation:
Method 1 (where shingle/pebbles are available): Remove salt soil to 1-2m deep. Lay down a shingle layer. Cart in non-salted soil.
Method 2 (no stones available): Remove clayey topsoil to 20cm. Bring in salt-free sand. Cut deep canals to drain surplus salt with irrigation water.
Water Efficiency
Water use is efficient only if all water soaks in quickly and you stop once soil is saturated.
Mulch greatly helps fast soakage.
Whatever is true for home gardens is also true for swales—soil treatments can be the same.
Essential Soil Analysis
A careful soil and water analysis is essential before planting.
Expect phosphorus and zinc deficiency, probably iron and manganese too. Check water for excessive nitrates and fluorine—both common dryland pollutants. Excess boron from detergents can cause plant failure, so use common soaps where wastewater goes to garden beds.
Desert Mulches: Emulating the Ant and Termite
Organic matter is as invaluable in deserts as anywhere. But desert mulching has one critical difference:
When we mulch in deserts, we need to emulate the ant and the termite, who bury their organic materials out of the sun. Wherever possible, place a layer of stone, sand, or soil over your desert mulches. Create hollows where trapped leaves will later be covered with sand. Surface mulch in deserts can burn away or blow off.
Buried mulch stays cool, moist, and feeds soil life at depth.
Mulch Sources
- Detritus brought down in flood (arrest on strong mulch-trap fences)
- Tumbleweeds and plant wisps blown by wind (settle in pits, swales, or trap on fences)
- Grown mulch in gardens and orchards
- Planted mulch species: Casuarina, bamboo, tamarisk, comfrey, Acacia species, forage grasses and legumes
- Vine trimmings and hedge species
- Household and storage wastes
- Grazers on range (if regularly penned) for mulch-manure
Categories of Mulches
Domestic: Old skins, blankets, cotton or wool clothes, cardboard boxes, newspapers, hardboard, thin planks. Soaked, these line sandy pits or tile over ground in raised beds before adding other mulch.
Collected: Ashes, bones, dog/cattle/horse manure—kept dry or pitted in circle pits for in-ground compost. Ashes and dry herbivore manure can be shredded or pounded.
Fines: Chaff, bark, leaves, tea leaves, coffee grounds, flood detritus, rice or grain hulls, rotten wood, sawdust, shredded paper, wood chips. Combine with shredded manures, sand, and ashes to fill raised beds or lay as top mulch.
Coarse mulch: Logs, twigs, dry straw, thick bark, old wood. Use as bed edges or a base layer over which mixed soils and fines are spread 18-20cm thick.
Toppings: Seagrass, woodchips, pine or Casuarina needles, cocoa beans. Spread as final cosmetic layer.
Green Mulch Sources
Good green mulches for grapes and tree crops come from catch crops of lupins, fava beans, and coppiced Acacia or mallee eucalypt. Cut after rains and store as silage or in earth pits for later use. Lucerne establishes in swales and damp areas. Casuarina leaf and pine needles can be regularly gathered from field trees.
We must largely rely on mulch to bring down the pH of alkaline soils and make minerals available.
Building the Complete Bed With Mulch
Your bed, from bottom to top:
- Coarse mulch base (logs, twigs, straw)
- Fines layer (chaff, leaves, shredded manure, sand, ashes)
- Growing layer (sieved compost or good soil, 18-20cm)
- Protective topping (woodchips, needles, seagrass)
- Cover layer (stone, sand, or soil over exposed mulch)
Your First Steps - bringing everything together
- Analyze your water and soil. Test for salt content, nitrates, pH, mineral deficiencies. This determines your soil treatments and irrigation strategies.
- Fence first. Nothing else matters if animals destroy your work overnight.
- Build one complete bed. Follow the layered method. Plant one crop category to learn the system.
- Establish your vine infrastructure. Vines take time—start them early so shade is ready when you need it.
- Source your mulch. Desert gardens run on mulch—you can never have too much.
- Plan your staple trees. Site them on leach fields or swales. They're infrastructure, not decoration.
The desert doesn't care about your intentions. It responds to your design.
Match planting method to plant type. Build beds that serve your crops. Mulch like the ants and termites—bury it deep. Fence against browsers. Let vines do the work of cooling.
Do this, and your "impossible" desert becomes an oasis that feeds your family while others wonder how you grow anything at all.
