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Can you really have a productive garden without plowing, hoeing, weeding, cultivating, and all the other bothersome rituals that most gardeners suffer through every growing season? "Sure," says Ruth Stout, a prolific author and writer at 80 years young. The reason that Ruth can throw away her spade and hoe and do her gardening from a couch is a year-round mulch covering, 6 to 8 inches thick, that covers her garden like a blanket. Thousands of curious gardeners have visited her Redding, Connecticut garden, including university scientists and horticulture experts. The experts have been dazzled by the technique used by the queen of mulch! But the results of 41 years of gardening experience can't be denied. The Ruth Stout No-Work Gardening Book gives Ruth's unique advice on growing techniques and tells how she has escaped the bugaboos that haunt most gardeners. Her poison-free method of combating slugs and other insects, her scheme for growing tasty vegetables all year, her method of foiling both drought and frost -- these and many other growing secrets are revealed -- secrets that have brought this perky organic gardener season after season of growing pleasure. If you're tired of being a slave to your garden, yet still want to enjoy it without the bother of sprays, weeding, hoeing or other toilsome garden chores, The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Books has the information you need. It's completely tested gardening method, perfected during more than 40 years experience and reported in the pages of Organic Gardening magazine, eliminates gardening strain and toil, and does it organically with no dangerous chemical fertilizers or toxic sprays. Take it easy. Put nature to work in your garden.… (more)
User reviews
Ruth Stout's book is also a good read for the experienced, traditional, organic gardener who is getting older and can't handle the physical work of digging, weeding, rotating crops, digging some more, turning over compost piles, digging some more, weeding again, and so forth. I'm not that experienced, but I think I can say without fear of contradiction that I do fit another category of gardener Mrs. Stout says she has in mind- the indolent gardener.
I'm not sure how well her method would work in the northwest, where snails and slugs are an enormous problem (three to five inch slugs are commonplace). But it worked well for her in the northeast over many decades. She was in her seventies or eighties when this book was published.
Basically, every fall Mrs. Stout would lay down at least eight inches of rotting hay over her entire garden. Instead of composting, she just puts her food waste right on the garden surface as well. She says turning a compost pile is too much work for an elderly woman. I thought this would pull nitrogen from the soil, but she asked a garden specialist and he told her that since the food waste (no meat, grease, or dairy, of course) was on the surface, this wouldn't happen. It was only if it were buried in the soil that it would pull nitrogen out of the soil for the decomposing process.
She just rakes back the mulch in the spring (if necessary) to plant her seeds, and then pulls the mulch back over the plants and adds more if needed when they get bigger. Or she leaves the mulch, digs a hole through it and sets in started plants.