Ruth Stout And Permanent Hay Mulch

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You must feed a permanent mulch. While the constant breakdown of the hay into compost attracts earthworms and adds tilth to the soil, it uses up nitrogen that must be replaced. Miss Stout "just threw on" handfuls of cottonseed meal. Any natural nitrogen source will do. Gardening in coastal Maine, I heap the soil with ocean kelp gathered after winter storms. Near the ocean, we can also mulch with salt hay, a species that grows only in the tidal salt marshes. Its seed won't germinate in ordinary garden soil, so weeds are minimal. But it is neither plentiful nor cheap. If you have access to straw-the relatively weed-free stems of harvested wheat or other small grain-use it if the cost isn't prohibitive. Last time I priced straw at a garden center, it cost $5 for a two-third-sized 40-pound bale. At that price, I may take up straw farming.

More readily available (and cheaper) inland hay-even inexpensive, rained-on "mulch hay"-contains weed and hay seeds. And they sprout. By the millions. If permitted to grow, your garden will become a perennial hayfield in a week's time. I learned from Lyman Wood, a contemporary of Miss Stout's and founder of the Garden Way Companies, that when weeds in the hay sprout, you just go along the row with a pitchfork, lifting the hay and dropping it to smash down the new growth. You may have to perform such cultivation several times in a season. But it's a whole lot easier than hoeing or tilling.

I've also found that, after a soaking rain, you can go along a mulched row with a little propane flame-weeder and shrivel new hay and weed sprouts to a frazzle. The wet hay or stout potato vines won't shrivel or catch fire. Unfortunately, the old vines can't be burned in the fall without taking the mulch with them. But the ash will sweeten soil for the green manure or small-grain crops that should follow spuds-straw-mulched or not.

Modern agronomists have tested the hay mulch method and found production to be at least equal to in-soil planting especially in the South where a deep mulch can keep soil closer to potato's preferred around 50°F temperatures. In the North, particularly during a long, cool, and wet spring, it can keep soil too wet and cool for top production.

If you try the Stout method, the agricultural school experts recommend spreading eight to ten inches of loose straw or hay over seed potatoes and then maintaining a settled-hay mulch of four inches. Of course, dear Ruth never bothered to measure.

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