Vegetable gardening the easy way

From July onwards, Greg rarely needs to water his garden.

By Greg Auton

A few years ago, I came across a short video on YouTube called Ruth Stout’s Garden. of her books, such as her 1963 book Gardening Without Work: For the Aging, the Busy and the Indolent. Her 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 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 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.

No fertilizer needed here. The soil organisms break the mulch down and the plants get what they need.

By keeping all of the soil covered with an organic mulch that is in a constant state of decomposition, the soil organisms are constantly being supplied with what they need to go about their business: living, sometimes moving, eating, excreting, and dying. All of that activity keeps your soil loose and replenishes the nutrients in the soil, which benefits your plant. A side effect of the mulch always being on top of the soil is that there is less evaporation of water from the soil so there is less need to water. In addition, many types of weeds are suppressed by mulching, so there’s that added bonus as well!

As a result, the weeding, watering and fertilizing are kept to a minimum, and for large stretches at the height of the season, the only activity that might be required in the garden is collecting food.

How to start

If you already have a garden, just start mulching using something that will compost. That can be almost anything you would add to a compost pile. To date, I have used leaves, straw, hay, grass clippings, various weeds, cardboard, paper, and seaweed. Very large stuff can be run over with a lawn mower and collected if you want, but in many instances even this step is not needed. For most garden beds, two to three inches is all that’s needed. To sow just move the mulch aside and plant. Once the seedlings are about six inches high, move the mulch back to completely cover the soil. For transplants, just plug them into the soil.

If you want to start a new bed over unprepared soil like a lawn, the easiest way is to grow potatoes in the first year. In a matter of minutes you can have a four-by-eight potato garden planted that will yield buckets of potatoes in August or September. Throw more mulch on it in October, having harvested earlier, and forget about it. The following year you will have a garden in which you can grow anything. Here’s how to do it:

1) mow down the grass or weeds

2) put down about three to four inches of soil

3) space out the seed potatoes and jam them in the soil

4) pile mulch about a foot high over the whole thing

5) do nothing for two or three months

6) pick and eat your delicious potatoes once the plants seem dead.

You will notice a miraculous transformation when you are digging out your potatoes a few months later: all the grass and sod will be gone. Having been smothered out by the heavy mulch, it decomposes, turns into compost, and feeds your potatoes, leaving beautiful rich soil behind. What an easy way to claim new soil!

These three 4-by-8-foot potato beds took less than 30 minutes to plant.

Final thoughts

I’m amazed that this and other similar information has been out there for years, and people are still growing their food in bare earth, with the perpetual watering, weeding, and fertilizing that is needed with such an approach. These chores are all dramatically reduced or eliminated when you start working with nature to build healthy soil, and that means laying down a cover of some kind to protect and feed the entities that live there. They ask so little and give so much!

So this spring, when you see people raking up all the leaves and yard waste that they neglected to address last fall, pull over, grab a few bags and give the Ruth Stout Method a try this growing season. r

Greg Auton is a podcaster and YouTuber for The Maritime Gardener. He lives in Nova Scotia.