Ruth Stout And Permanent Hay Mulch

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GARDEN &YARD

A generation ago, Ruth Stout was world famous as the "No-Work Gardener." Her secret was a permanent straw or old-hay mulch over everything. She was best known for growing potatoes by "just throwing them" on the ground and covering them with hay. Then, in a couple of months, when tiny new spuds were developing, and onto full harvest time, she'd just "kick the straw aside" and pick potatoes off the ground.

There's not much agronomy to her system, but there is a lot of chatter involving her brother, then-popular mystery writer Rex Stout, Professor Richard Clements, and a large group of friends and correspondents. You'll have to read her delightfully old-fashioned books for the whole entertaining story. See Sources for a welcome new reprint of her delightful 1961 Gardening Without Work for the Aging, the Busy and the Indolent. Miss Stout gardened in a long "house dress" and kept at it till she died at age 91.

I've used her method off and on for years and it works ...most of the time. But I usually end up mulching with half-dollar bales of half-rotted wet hay that won't fluff up like fresh, dry hay or like that straw she talks about just tossin' on and kickin' aside. It peels off the rotten-string-bound bale in fairly dense, four-inch-thick "books" full of mold, mushroom roots, and field mouse nests. These can be laid out on the soil like floor tiles, and will dry and inter mesh to some extent in the wind and sun.

New potato vines can have a struggle getting through the compressed hay. But after pushing some books up an alarm ing inch or two, the plants will manage to work through to the sun, and the books will flatten down. If the straw layer is kept up, potatoes grow at the soil/hay boundary, only half buried in the ground. Planting and harvest are indeed a snap. But toads adore a hay mulched garden, as do slugs and snails.

Drawbacks that never seemed to bother Miss Stout include slugs and snails, cold, wet spring weather, and mice and voles that will tunnel around, safe from predators, under the hay mulch. In wet years, potato sets under a deep mulch will rot before they sprout, and slugs will get what's left; it is best to delay mulching till it warms up or plant well-started sets in bare spots raked out in the straw. In a bad vole year-typically following a short, mild winter-most of the tubers will be nibbled. Shallow wounds will heal over, but deeper ones will admit storage rot, preventing the crop from keeping. In my experience, you can tell if the gardening year will feature a vole explosion if the fishnet-like network of winter-foraging tunnels under the snow -hat's revealed briefly at the end of the -now melt is really extensive, covering :he whole yard and garden. In this case, plant potatoes a good five inches deep in well-tilled bare soil.

Don't put up a scarecrow or you'll scare off hawks and owls that will soar over frequently because it's easy for them to spot marauding rodents on your bare garden soil. Keep the dogs in the back-Yard and the grass cut short in a wide apron all around the garden to deny deep rodent cover (rabbit and woodchuck cover as well), and don't mulch the garden till the ground dries out and rainfall totals less than an inch a week.