Introduction

These were used by the Zuni people, and the technique is still used today. The Dine and other

"“They are the inverse of raised beds, and for an area where it is more arid, they’re actually very efficient at conserving water,” said Enote, who leads the Colorado Plateau Foundation to protect Indigenous land, traditions, and water. Each interior cell of the waffle covers about a square foot of land, just below ground-level, and the raised, mounded earthen walls are designed to help keep moisture in the soil.

Similar sunken beds for growing food with less water have been used globally in arid regions, arising independently by Indigenous farmers, including across distinct Pueblo tribes in the Southwest. “When you have ecological equivalents you often have cultural equivalents,” said Enote. As climate change deepens, he sees this tradition as one of many ways to adapt while building food security and sovereignty."

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"Rather than buying soil to fill the program’s box gardens they use a mix that includes soil hauled from the base of hillside trees. “We’re taking the same concepts Zunis used to prepare their field,” said Bowannie. “They would clear the brush and then allow the rainstorms to run off and capture the tree soil and spread it on their fields.” The nutritious, carbon-rich soil helps absorb water, while replacing the need for fertilizer.

Not everyone opts for Bowannie’s box gardens. Curtis Quam, a Zuni museum technician and cultural educator at the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center, decided to go a more traditional route and planted a waffle garden with clay-soil walls with his family in 2017. This year, he planted onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, yellow crookneck squash, basil, jalapeño, and carrots in the garden."

"Gary Nabhan, an agrarian activist and ethnobotanist based in Arizona, has observed waffle gardens in Egypt and the Canary Islands with trees that offer shade to underlying vegetables and vines extending beyond the beds. He sees the broader “very sound ecological principles” of the gardens as widely effective in arid landscapes, though cautions against replicating a specific tradition outside its original climate.

“People have already independently invented this in multiple places, so you really have to localize its size, the water source and type of soil. That’s already happened all over arid lands around the world,” said Nabhan.

That includes the area directly east of the Zuni Pueblo. In the el Valle region of New Mexico, Yvonne Sandoval, who describes herself as “mixed-race Indigenous,” tends to a 20-square-foot square waffle garden. It’s part of the Bueno Para Todos Cooperative, a small farm predominately led by queer farmers of color, as a way to reconnect with Indigenous methods for farming on dry, arid land and feed the surrounding community.

“In this region, we have really high winds and the air can be really dry, so waffle bed gardens are ideal,” said Sandoval. “I want it to be an example that shows pre-colonial farming methods can still be an answer to climate change.”

This summer, the waffle garden brimmed with corn, squash, amaranth, chilies, several varieties of peas, carrots, tomatoes, and herbs, which was fed entirely by rainwater captured in cisterns and the waffle garden’s sunken beds.  This catchment system has enabled Sandoval to reduce her dependence on the acequia, the centuries-old irrigation canals that are at risk of running dry."- https://civileats.com/2021/10/26/resurgence-waffle-gardens-helping-indigenous-peoples-thrive-amid-droughts-grow-food-less-water/