Apricots grow well here in the badlands without irrigation. Also chokecherry, service berry, currents, some varieties of plums.
There are a number of shade loving species that grow in the wildlands: burdock, claytonia, violet, viola.
Wild parsley and biscuitroot grow without irrigation. Some members of the lily family have edible bulbs and/or greens. They may lie dormant during the hottest part of year.
Some species of the cactus family have fruits without spines.
Are there any cactus plants that have no spines anywhere on the plant, including the leaves, and also have tasty fruit?
. . . Actually, that’s such a potentially useful question for other people in the community, I’ll start a new thread about it. If you know of any, reply over here!
Great to have these specific links/varieties! Native Seeds seems like a particularly amazing resource. Wondering how many seeds I need as I’m concerned nothing is going to come up (like last year!). One idea I had was to plant half in the non-irrigated field and half where I could irrigate but would not unless it really needed it, but maybe this would undermine the experiment to find something that could really work here?
More excellent ideas! I’ve studied to some degree native plants here, and love many of the things that I find in the wild. Dates is a neat idea, don’t know how long I’ll be on this land, but trying to think of anything that is longer term as more about the land and less about us being able to harvest from it.
What great ideas! Thank you. There is an established plum tree in my field that does just fine. With the apricots and berries, were you able to establish them without irrigation? Or do you start them irrigated and then transplant - that’s one of the things I’m not sure about.
I think planting in both the unirrigated and irrigated plot are great ideas. Sometimes the first year is mostly about getting seed increase or hybridization so doing whatever is necessary to be able to increase seed can be a good idea. So irrigate if needed and you can select for drought tolerance in later generations. In my area one of the biggest problems I have are from ants. I planted a whole packet of sorghum in prime conditions for germination and only 2 came up because the ants ate the seeds. I’ve learned to plant half a packet or to save at least some seed in case all fails.
What bratty ants! If you chit the seeds indoors, just get them a little bit sprouted, can you direct sow them without ants eating them?
@UnicornEmily, what does it mean to chit the seeds?
Sorry, not meaning to flood you, but one more idea occurred to me I’m not sure had come up - - planting a mix of easier-to-manage native weeds for the unirrigated plot and revisiting the question later. You might also find the growing of these weeds kickstarts your soil biology and starts surviving seeds from last season going. I’ve seen new plants or newly sown seeds get the seed bank going before.
This may have been mentioned already but you also don’t have to do the same thing for the entire plot 
In the deep desert here, trees rarely get established without 2 years of irrigation after transplanting. Sometimes, I plant bareroot trees into the badlands with no attention after, and they grow. Helps to transplant them in a wet year, or in the fall.
I prefer to start them in an irrigated and tended nursery bed where they reside 1-3 years before being transplanted into the wildlands.
I throw thousands of tree seeds per year into the badlands. Some of them get established. I wonder how many apricots were involved in the food fight when my daddy inadvertently planted an apricot grove into the badlands? And over how many years?
Ha ha, sorry, I like words. 
When you chit a seed, that means you sprout it a little bit indoors before planting it out. It’s similar to presoaking seeds before planting them, and it tends to take a little bit longer. Basically, you wait until you can see the very tip of a root poking out of a seed, so you know that it’s sprouted. Then you can direct sow it, knowing that it has committed to germinating, and won’t just stay dormant.
The best thing that works for me is putting the seeds on a damp paper towel and putting them inside a sealed plastic container. Then I check for a root tip, and take the seeds out and plant them carefully where I want them. Sometimes I tear the damp paper towel and plant shreds of it along with the seeds, so I disturb their tiny root tips as little as possible.
This has a lot of advantages. It also has two serious disadvantages. The first is that the seed is more easily damaged by clumsy fingers. The second is that, if you misjudge the timing of when to put them out, and they would have been better served by germinating a few days later, they might be more likely to die instead of waiting until more favorable conditions and growing eventually.
So far, I have found that chitting tiny seeds like carrots, tomatoes, and brassicas doesn’t work for me very well. It works great for large seeds like cucurbits.
The main reason I originally wanted to chit seeds was to get better germination on the small seeds. (Wry grin.) That doesn’t seem to work for me, although it could just be me. The main value I find in it now is that, if the garden bed isn’t ready yet, or if the weather will be ideal in a week but is horrible now, I can start the seeds a few days to a week earlier inside, without any of the disadvantages of transplanting.
Ah, that’s kind of what I guessed. I just direct plant pretty much everything. If I’m worried germination might be low, I plant extras and thin later if necessary.
Oh, that’s interesting! Do you just find weeds growing nearby and try to gather seeds/transplant?
Thanks- maybe I will start some indoors where I have the best controlled conditions, and see what I get!
I planted a lot of things under deep mulch, in sandy, rocky soil. Most did just fine. Generally I would plant the seeds and saturate the soil around them. 1-2 gallons per plant was usually sufficient. Then I waited, and usually they came up and thrived on that amount of water for a month or more. In some areas I was able to plant without watering at all in a summer that lasts from May to September with little or no rain. Wood chip mulch worked best. Leaves were usually gone by the middle of the season, in which case I had to start watering at that point. Partial shade was sometimes helpful. We got about 12 inches of water per year, so the plants (including dry farmed grapes) were surviving on that.
I also found that most of the stone fruits did just fine with once a month deep watering. Any less and they struggled, dropped their fruit but still survived. The most important thing for the trees was going into the winter well hydrated. A dry fall meant no fruit at all the following spring, and often no blossoms.
Lauren is my inspiration. Thanks to her experience, I’m going to try deep mulching all my beds in wood chips and try watering very stingily. (Grin.)
@Lauren, that’s good to know about dry falls. I was thinking that my baby peach trees would be well hydrated by spring because of all our winter snow and rain. Will I need to water my stone fruits before the rain starts coming in October? (If so, that’s a bummer!)
They should be fine if they’re established trees. If the fall rains don’t come, or are really light, you’ll want to supplement.
I’m going to be selecting for plants that do well with no watering or no watering after the first week or so transplanted. But I’m in Ohio with about 40" precip/year. But depending on the year we may get a rain in late June and then no measurable rain in July, August, and into Sept. A few years ago I was scared to death the grass would catch fire in a strip that had been mowed to put up fence! I’m in a bit of a microclimate because we’ve had dry years that the surrounding area had some record flooding. But every storm and cloud would either dissipate or go around us and not a drop of it fell here.
How well seeds from my selections would do in a much drier climate is unknown. Would be interesting to find out in the future.
That . . . might explain why the peach tree in my backyard, which is about four years old, hasn’t fruited yet. (Sigh.) Our baby peach tree in the front yard did flower and fruit this year, just a few months after I planted it, so I was very pleased with it.
I read somewhere about intentionally stressing fruit trees to press them into fruiting. If I recall it was suggestions like circling the tree and cutting into the soil with shovel to cut roots. The idea being to get the tree to think oh crap I can’t die without sending out seed! Also severe pruning.
I’m sure there is pros and cons to that.