Ruth Stout’s Gardening Without Work Still Going Strong

 

Ruth Stout
Ruth Stout

I keep running across blog posts praising how well Ruth Stout’s “no-work gardening” methods work, like this post on The Messy Shepherdess.

I first ran across Ruth Stout’s writing when I became interested in gardening as a child, and got a subscription to Organic Gardening.

This was around 1970, and Organic Gardening was very much an end-of-the-world prophet of doom back then. Even articles about how to grow nice tomatoes with a trellis against your house would take time out to explain how you’d better hurry up, because we’d all be dead by 1975!

Gardening Without Work by Ruth StoutBut towards the back of every issue was a column by  Ruth Stout. Ruth was a life-long eccentric, a proponent of simple living, and thus wasn’t very impressed by the way most people insist on making life way harder than it has to be.

For example, she and her husband liked having friends drop by and hang out in their general vicinity, but didn’t much like being combination restaurant/maid service/entertainment. So they remodeled their barn to provide simple guest quarters, with its own kitchen, and invited people to come and stay more as neighbors than guests. This worked well, and Ruth writes about it, along with much else, in her book, Company Coming: Six Decades of Hospitality, which I’ve reprinted under my Norton Creek Press label. (Among other things, she describes the time that, when she was a teen, she helped Carry Nation smash up a saloon.)

Company Coming: Six Decades of Entertainment by Ruth StoutSo in her Organic Gardening column, Ruth ignored conventional wisdom, as always. She ignored conventional gardening wisdom. She ignored the writing conventions of Organic Gardnening. She acted as if politics didn’t exist. She assumed that what you did in your own garden was up to you. She talked about gardening. In particular, she talked about what she was doing in her garden, since she didn’t consider herself to be an expert about gardens in general.

So as a reader interested in gardens, her stuff was cool, because it was focused and clear and was all about doing stuff: without wandering off into theory and politics and never coming back. So, there I was, a ten-year-old gardening enthusiast, and I always opened up a new issue of Organic Gardening to the column by that eccentric octegenarian, Ruth Stout, because it spoke to me.

When I discovered that Ruth’s book, Gardening Without Work, had been out of print for years, I was amazed! I was also quick to correct this lapse, and reprinted it. It’s been one of the most popular Norton Creek Press books ever since.

This is a fun book to read. Her deep-mulch system is so simple that the step-by-step instructions only take a few pages. The rest of the book provides stories, anecdotes, and experiences that expand on the ideas and help them sink in. Which is just as well, because some readers take a bit of convincing that something so simple can work so well. In any case, Ruth Stout is a delightful writer.

 

Agricultural Uses of Dynamite, and Other Farm Tales

Did you know that dynamite was a traditional farm tool? For decades, you could buy it by the case by mail-order from Sears. It had many uses around the farm: blowing stumps, shattering boulders, breaking up plow-pan, digging holes for tree planting, and even (believe it or not) digging ditches.

I’ve republished We Wanted a Farm by M. G. Kains, which has a whole chapter about his newbie experiences with dynamite in the old days, including snake-holing and other semi-exotic techniques. M. G. Kains is the author of the 1936 back-to-the-land handbook, Five Acres and Independence. It turns out that (not surprisingly) the wisdom that went into Five Acres came partly from having a farm of his own, with the triumphs and tragedies that go with it.

If you head over to my We Wanted a Farm Web page, you can check out the sample chapters, including the one on dynamite!

Kains had an interesting approach to the back-to-the-land problem. He had a day job a an editor in New York City, and didn’t want to quit right away. So first he moved from his apartment to a rented house in the suburbs and had a big garden. Then he moved into a purchased house and tried berries and orcharding. Finally, he bought a farm and went into orcharding in a big way. So it’s not just a book about dynamite: there’s plenty about gardening and orcharding, too, more or less alternating with his yarns about his adventures, and even two poems insulting the Ben Davis apple, the Red Delicious of the day, which, among other things, “tastes like a mattress and drives you to crime.”

I think this multi-step approach is good. My parents went back-to-the-land, leaving L.A. (where my dad was an aerospace engineer) and building a campground in the redwoods. Not a bad idea — working in a campground in beautiful surroundings with happy vacationers was the ideal job for me (I was eleven when the campground opened, and had a built-in summer job) — but we did some things wrong. How could it have been otherwise? We hadn’t done this stuff before. The campground was never profitable, and we didn’t have enough money to fix our mistakes. So we limped along rather than flourishing. So I think the model is “three strikes and you’re out,” not “one strike and you’re out.” If you give yourself permission to swing at the ball several times, rather than placing a single giant bet, you’re more likely to succeed.

We Wanted a Farm is a great book but seems to have been forgotten. Not anymore! You can read sample chapters (including the one on dynamite) and order the book on my Norton Creek Press site. Check it out!

(If you just want to know more about dynamite, and don’t care about back-to-the-land books), check out this free online 1912 dynamite handbook.