ASK MY FRIEND ANDREW: I will make the same resolution (to label all the plants in the garden) and then break it. My labeling-the-plants pronouncement is a long-standing annual event, as he is sick of hearing me mention. So how about this instead: I resolve to have a no-work garden in 2010. (I thought that would get a laugh from all of you, and maybe even from Andrew.) But here’s what I was thinking:
“Gardening Without Work,” Ruth Stout’s wonderful 1961 work, is one of my most treasured vintage gardening books, published when she was 76 years old. Though I am a couple of decades shy, the subtitle running up the right side of the cover cries out: “For the Aging, the Busy & the Indolent.”
Guilty on all counts at the moment, Ruth. Mea culpa.
It is more the spirit of the book than anything that I love, an attitude brought to life in a series of videos of her that I am thrilled to have just found (you can watch them at the bottom of this page). Written a year before Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” came out, Stout’s funny little volume likewise decried use of pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers. Stout had no tolerance for the burning of leaves, or for wasting the most precious of commodities, water.
Long before phrases like “lasagna garden” were making the rounds of the as-yet-uninvented internet, Stout was layering all her organic materials on top of her soil—sheet composting, as it might be traditionally called—to thwart weeds, reduce the need for fertilizers, conserve moisture and spare herself the work of composting in a conventional heap with all the toting and turning of materials.
Her approach to gardening starts with the foundational principle of applying mulch, mulch and more mulch, and then simply moving it back a tiny bit each year a bit to make room for a row of seeds rather than all that turning and tilling (and weeding).
She says the “aha” came one spring when the plow man hadn’t come yet to till, and she was eager to get planting. She saw that the asparagus (a long-lived perennial vegetable crop) was already up and growing, right through the layers of fallen leaves and such. “I walked over and said to the asparagus, ‘We don’t have to plow for you; why do we have to plow for the other vegetables?’” Stout recalls. “And the asparagus said, “You don’t.’”
Where do you get all that mulch? The garden creates it, or at least some of the raw material that becomes it: spent cornstalks and uprooted pea vines and the like, to which Stout added fall leaves and also bought-in straw or hay (“spoiled” hay was fine, and cheaper; don’t worry about a little decay).
She was practical in so many ways: suggesting you take cues from the pace of plants to know what goes where (for example, that peppers can be planted in the spinach bed, since the latter will be done before the former get big enough to interfere). If there was no room in the good soil of the garden proper for space-hogging potatoes, no matter; she grew them on top of the ground somewhere sunny (including as an impromptu border to her big iris bed some years) and just covered the tubers with clean hay or straw, no digging involved. (See the potato technique in Part 2 of the videos, below.) Or try this precursor to the ubiquitous salad spinner of today: Put your rinsed lettuce leaves in a big piece of cheesecloth, gather it closed as if it were a bag, and swing it overhead. Yahoo!
We all have much to learn from Stout’s vintage wisdom, though I am the first to admit that “no-work” (along with “easy” and “instant”) are on my list of gardening antonyms, on the same page as “probably not happening here anytime soon.” It will be less work, yes, and much smarter work to keep Stout in mind in 2010, but I suspect I’ll come indoors ready to drop on more than one spring day. That would be fine with Stout, who was nothing if not a believer in each to her own.
Listen to Stout herself, who lived from 1884 to 1980 and gardened in Connecticut, in these amazing videos:
- Details of Ruth Stout’s system, from “Mother Earth News”
Related posts:
I often refer to Ruth’s work, but these videos make her so much more real. Thanks a lot & have a bountiful no digging garden in 2010!
It feels as if I have found a great treasure; enjoyed the videos so much and look forward to reading more on the website.
Welcome, Lieven. I was delighted to visit your website after your comment, and though my Dutch is not so good, it was a world I could immediately relate to. Thanks for the good wishes; see you soon again in the year to come.
Welcome, Rhonda. “A great treasure” is right; I feel just the same way about those film clips. A lot of wisdom in those minutes, to be sure. See you soon!
great post; ms stout is a philosopher as much as a gardener. she reminds me a bit of my grandma, who used to wear a print dress like ms stout and an apron, and place the picked vegetables in her apron rolled up to her waist; she used to say you can never truly tell whether a rule (in life or in the garden) was important until you broke it and saw what happened; most times, it’s no big deal. and if it turned out to be a big deal, then you understood the rule better than if you just went about following it in the first place. though grandma never demolished saloons to my knowledge.
Thank you for sharing your discovery. What a marvelous person. Hearing her tell her story is great. Happy New Year.
Love gardening with a touch of philosofy behind it. Nice post. Hope you have a good new years eve and a great 2010. Happy new year-greetings from Sweden.
Welcome, Rene; it’s a real piece of oral history, isn’t it, listening to her tell her tale. Thanks for your good wishes, and see you soon again, I hope.
Welcome, Utblickaren (all the way from Sweden). I agree; the philosophy make the gardening even richer. I often think that gardening is my main spiritual practice in life. Hope to see you soon again, and happy New Year to you, too.
I have to leave another post. I have been consumed with this no-work garden idea for the past day and a half since reading the post. We have a couple of hay bales in the back yard left over from this fall. I’m going to try out her method and will let you know how it works for me this spring/summer. :)
My ‘no work’ garden started out of neccessity–my job requires that I am gone for 2 months at a time, so weekly weeding was not an option. Wood chips from a small sawmill here are free and abundant, so I use that for a heavy mulch in my perennial beds. I have very few weeds, and the ones that manage to struggle through the mulch are weak and easy to pull. Some people said I would kill my plants because wood uses nitrogen as it breaks down, but after 14 years of this, my plants still look terrific. I guess the ‘breakdown’ is happening at the soil surface, not at the plant root level. Anyway, it works for me.
Hi Margaret, you did give me a laugh. I have her book about Gardening without an aching back. It’s very funny.~~Dee
I am just so thrilled to learn that someone else keeps making these labeling-the-plants resolutions! Another triumph of hope over experience . . . this year, for certain!
And thanks for the discovery of Ruth Stout, can’t wait to find a book.
We made it past the solstice: Happy New Year!
Thank you so much for sharing these marvelous videos with us. Ruth Stout’s free spirit is an inspiration and encouragement to me.
Welcome, Anita. Glad you like them; I keep re-watching them myself and always hear new tidbits of wisdom. I just enjoyed a visit to your photoblog, thank you — beautiful work indeed. See you soon again in 2010 I hope.
I watched all three videos. And you can be sure that in 2010 I’m planting my potatoes exactly as she did. I’m also resolving to remember Ruth Stout’s grandfather’s words: “Thee was looking out the wrong window.”
Now, please tell me where I can get a copy of that book.
Wishing you all the best in Two Zero One Zero!
Welcome, TC. I think the only place is in online used-book searches or at local used-book sellers. Glad you are joining us in the Ruth Stout resurgence of 2010. :)
I wanted to add a comment about where to find Ruth Stout’s book: I found it in my local library!
Thank you for sharing Ruth’s videos and wisdom. She reminds me of my grandmother and the gardening knowledge she had. We have a lot to learn from our elders! Back to basics for 2010!!
Margaret, I am thrilled to see these videos. For 20 years I gardened in the same part of the (very small) town as Ruth Stout..and always loved to go by her very modest, oh-so-Connecticut charming home and garden. IMO it was her free-thinking, irascibility combined with unpretention and empirical good sense which she was able to skillfully communicate in her writings, and NOT her manicured landscapes. (The land was stunning in it’s naturalness..still is.) Most often mentioned about town was that she gardened in her birthday suit…a precedent adopted by many of us in that beautiful, private woods…
Welcome, Penny. We do indeed have a lot to learn from our elders, and I think of my Grandma Marion every day over here. :) See you soon again, I hope.
Welcome, Christie. “Irascibility” is the buzzword. Love it. Also “unpretention” and “empirical good sense.” Let’s all keep those great words of yours in front of mind as we go full-tilt into the New Year. See you soon!
Wonderful videos! Thanks so much for sharing them.
Welcome, Kathy, and thank you for saying hello. Glad you like the film clips — she continues to inspire, to be sure. See you soon again.
Margaret, thank you for posting the Ruth Stout videos not only to show us ideas about gardening, but about how to grow old with style and verve. Ruth’s confidence and certainty in her own choices is inspiring.
But what about the slugs?!! If I mulched that deep, I’d have phalanxes and regiments of them. I wouldn’t be able to sleep for the munching sounds. How did Ruth manage the slugs?
Welcome, Katha. Many people over the years have asked her (and those who have written about her) about the slug problem. She says she never had any issues with her 8-plus-inches of (mostly hay) mulch. I have to say, until the deluges of 2009 here, I never had slug issues, either, and I have always used a few inches of mulch (composted stable bedding, a wood-shaving or fine chip product) on all my ornamental garden beds and more in the vegetable areas.
Like Ruth, I am in a rural area, and I wonder if the fact that I have tons of reptiles and amphibians (slug-eaters) in the garden is the reason. This article talks about their role in slug-prevention. I also have loads of skunks and raccoons, and I suspect both like some escargot as well. :)
I love Ruth Stout–thank you so much for posting these videos! I checked the VHS tape out from our library about 10 years ago, but they’ve since taken it out of circulation and I was afraid that I’d never see it again.
I have as many RS books as I can find. I buy every copy of every book that I see because I know there will always be someone who needs to be “witnessed to” as to the awesomeness of her methods. I have about 8 in. of straw on the garden right now (under a few in. of snow!) and I can’t wait to pull it back in a few months and see how nice the soil has become.
Welcome, Megan, fellow Ruth Stout fan. I wish I had the tape to watch on the TV screen here, to take in more details. What a treat that you had seen it before; lucky you. Don’t know how it eluded me all these years. Hope to see you soon again.
Enjoyed the videos so much! Sometimes I garden that way also. Your site is a wealth of information, can’t wait to explore it more.
Wecome, Desiree. Thanks for the encouragement, and I am so glad the videos were an inspiration. Hope we see you regularly in 2010. We’ll be here. :)
Thank you Margaret for the videos. The whole time I was watching I couldn’t wait to leave a comment. Ruth is inspiring. Her style of gardening and living are relaxing. She has done a lot with some basic principles, use what you got, grow what you need, don’t manage anyone. I thought of Fukuoka a little. And more so I thought of L. H. Bailey. I was lucky to be given his book by my father, The Manual of Gardening, 1918. “The satisfaction of a garden does not depend on the area, nor, happily, the cost or rarity of the plants. It depends on the temper of the person. One must first seek to love plants and nature, and then to cultivate the happy peace of mind that is satisfied with little.” …”The moment the owner lets it (the soil) alone the planting has begun.”
Welcome, Luke. I have many vintage editions of L.H. Bailey here, too…big surprise, huh (or not)? I cannot tell you how appreciative I am of your reminder to look at them once again with a close eye now. Thank you — and come again soon, yes?