Garden expert and lovable eccentric Ruth Stout once said: "At the
age of 87 I grow vegetables for two people the year-round, doing
all the work myself and freezing the surplus. I tend several flower
beds, write a column every week, answer an awful lot of mail, do
the housework and cooking; and never do any of these things after
11 o'clock in the morning " Her first book about her no-work
gardening system, "How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching
Back," was the kind of book people can't bear to return. She
reports, "A dentist in Pennsylvania and a doctor in Oregon have
both written me that they keep a copy of my garden book in their
waiting rooms. Or try to; the dentist has had twenty-three copies
stolen, the doctor, sixteen." "Gardening Without Work" is her
second gardening book and is even more entertaining and
instructional than the first, so hide it from your friends How does
it work? "And now let's get down to business. The labor-saving part
of my system is that I never plow, spade, sow a cover crop, harrow,
hoe, cultivate, weed, water or irrigate, or spray. I use just one
fertilizer (cottonseed or soybean meal), and I don't go through the
tortuous business of building a compost pile. Just yesterday, under
the Questions and Answers' in a big reputable farm paper, someone
asked how to make a compost pile and the editor explained the
arduous performance. After I read this I lay there on the couch and
suffered because the victim's address wasn't given; there was no
way I could reach him. "My way is simply to keep a thick mulch of
any vegetable matter that rots on both my vegetable and flower
garden all year round. As it decays and enriches the soil, I add
more." Regardless of topic, Ruth Stout's writing is always about
living a joyous and independent life, and "Gardening Without Work"
is no exception This book is a treasure for the gardener and a
delight even to the non-gardener. First published in 1961, this
Norton Creek Press version is an exact reproduction of the original
edition. Ruth Stout, who, in her teens helped temperance activist
Carrie Nation smash saloon windows, could turn any aspect of life
into an adventure. She may have been the only woman who both
gardened in the nude and wrote a book on being a hostess ("Company
Coming: Six Decades of Hospitality"). She died in 1980 at the age
of 96.
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