- Garden
- >
- Gardening Without Work
Gardening Without Work
Stout, Ruth. Gardening Without Work, For the Aging, the Busy & the Indolent. Eighth Printing. 1973. Book is in very good condition; dust jacket is in good plus condition—jacket shows mild discoloration, chipping to the spine ends, and a few minor tears.
Midcentury garden enthusiast Ruth Stout, sister of mystery writer Rex Stout, became something of a literary celebrity herself when she happened upon a minimalist approach to horticulture. In this book, she writes about the success she had on her fifty-five-acre Connecticut farm through a laborsaving system that relied almost entirely upon mulching. In that factory farming, ultra-processed era, her traditional approach was ironically avant-garde, but in the back-to-nature 21st Century, it has returned to the mainstream.
“Now and then I am asked (usually by an irritated expert) why I think I invented mulching. Well, naturally, I don’t think so. God invented it simply by deciding to have the leaves fall off the tree once a year.”
--Ruth Stout