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.
Foreword
When Organic Gardening and Farming decided to publish, in book
form, the articles that Richard Clem-ence and I had written for them
through the years, they sent us the material to look over. To change, to
improve, to correct? Well, in the second paragraph of the first article I
wrote, I found something to change: that I freeze turnips, which I
haven’t done for years; I just leave them in the garden, cover them
with bales of hay, and dig them, when wanted, all winter.
Realizing that these articles were full of reports of things about which I
had later changed my mind, I decided that the sensible thing to do was
not to alter anything. And why did I decide that? Perhaps because it
would be too much work, but I rationalized my conclusion in this way:
maybe it is more helpful to other gardeners to tell of the things that
seemed all right, but weren’t, than to simply say “I do this, I do that”.
So here is the story of the things I have learned, and “un-learned”,
about gardening. The first article was published in 1953, the last one in
1971. The later ones