7 Food Forests in 7 Minutes with Geoff Lawton
Obviously this wouldn't work in the desert, but maybe some of the techniques and a different selection of plants could be used to approximate this kind of a set up. The idea of kick-starting this with a winter crop of legumes to enrich the soil makes a lot of sense. Clover probably requires too much water, but there might be other legumes which would do well. It's worth looking into anyways.