Vegetable gardening the easy way By Greg Auton
From July onwards, Greg rarely needs to water his garden.
A
few years ago, I came across a short video on YouTube called Ruth Stout’s Garden. The 23-minute video, filmed in 1976, contains an interview with a 92-year-old woman who maintains a 2,500-square-foot garden like mine all by herself. As you might imagine, I was intrigued. After a little investigation, I found out that Ruth Stout was an author of many books on the topic of gardening, and the method she used for managing her garden was so intriguing to so many, that it is now referred to as the Ruth Stout Method. Gardening should not be hard work Ruth was a champion for the argument that keeping a garden should be easy if you are doing it right. Indeed, this was basically the title of a number 12 • 2021
of her books, such as her 1963 book Gardening Without Work: For the Aging, the Busy and the Indolent. Her ability to maintain her garden into her 90s speaks volumes to the validity of that argument. In the video, she explains that on any given day, after waking up whenever she feels like it (though usually by eight-ish), then having a leisurely breakfast and answering all her handwritten mail and doing all her housework, her gardening for the day would be done by 11 a.m. In essence, she implies that she spends far less than an hour each day in her garden. I have had much the same experience in my 50-by-50-foot heavily mulched garden. People often tell me that gardening is a lot of work, but like Ruth, I have found that not to be the case. On any given day, I only spend 15 Issue 3
minutes or less in my garden and there are plenty of days during the height of the growing season where I do nothing. I never till the garden, hardly need to water it, spend very little time weeding, and don’t need fertilizer. The Ruth Stout Method Ruth Stout’s method exemplifies everything I value in an approach to gardening. It’s cheap, easy, organic, and it works. Ruth, like me, employed a heavy mulch system in her garden, where the soil is never left exposed. Ruth was partial to using hay as a mulch, but was not insistent on that being the only option. I use whatever I can get easily, which is mostly leaves and other types of yard waste. These are easy to source because people are in the habit of leaving them in nice bags at the end of their driveways. By keeping all of the soil covered localgardener.net
