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.

 

Unlocking the Plotto Plot Generator

When William Wallace Cook wrote Plotto: A new Method of Plot Suggestion for Writers of Creative Fiction, his introductory chapter made a lot of readers sit up and ask, “Huh?”

So Cook got do work and came up with an instruction booklet in the form of a seven-lesson course on how to use Plotto to help you overcome the thorny task of coming up with plots for short stories and novels.

The original Plotto Instruction Booklet is impossible to find, and I counted myself very lucky when I discovered that the University of Oregon library in Eugene had a copy. A quick round-trip to the Emerald City later, I’ve republished it for the benefit of anyone who has a copy of Plotto.

If you’ve bounced off Plotto before (and many have), be sure to work through the entire instruction booklet. It makes quite a difference!


Amelia B. Edwards’ Legacy, 125 Years Later

Amelia B. Edwards was a noted nineteenth-century author who wrote travel books and novels. She fell in love with Egypt in the 1870s and wrote a wonderful book on her travels, A Thousand Miles up the Nile. I liked it so much I brought it back into print!

More than that, she founded the Egypt Exploration Society, which still funds important archaeological research 125 years later. In her honor the EES has their Amelia Edwards Projects, which are clearly defined, affordable field projects that are funded by donations from members and supporters.

And she inspires more than research. Elizabeth Peters used Amelia Edwards as the model for her character Amelia P. Emerson in her wonderful and long-running series of Egyptology-themed murder mysteries (starting with Crocodile on the Sandbank).

That’s influence that lasts and lasts!



Finally Back in Print! Gardening Without Work by Ruth Stout

ruth_stout_gardening_without_work_cover_200pxAfter many years out of print, I’m proud to reissue Ruth Stout’s organic gardening classic: Gardening Without Work: For the Aging, the Busy, and the Indolent.”

I’ve been a fan of Ruth’s since I was ten years old, when her column was the first thing I read in each new issue of Organic Gardening magazine. Practical, funny, and irreverent, her books are even more compelling than her columns.

Gardening Without Work introduced the “permanent mulch” system of gardening, which replaces weeding and plowing with a thick mulch of straw or whatever else is available. The mulch conserves water, smothers weeds, prevents erosion, and fertilizes the soil. Perhaps it was the inspiration for modern “no-till” farming? I don’t know. Although
Ruth died thirty years ago, her writing has legions of fans, and you’ll see why
when you read it!

You can order Gardening Without Work from any online or brick-and-mortar bookstore.