People still love Ruth Stout’s no-work, no-dig, permanent mulch gardening methods, as described in her book Gardening Without Work. Here are some recent blogs posts from people who use Ruth’s methods in their own gardens:
And over on The Survival Gardener, David has collected videos of no-dig gardening from the large-scale to using an old tire as a planter.
These are just a few examples of the thousands of gardens worldwide using Ruth Stout’s methods.
Don’t have your copy of Gardening Without Work yet? I’m the publisher! See my Gardening Without Work page and order yours from Amazon or the Kindle Store or whatever.
Norton Creek Press, 194 pages.
ISBN 978-1-938099-00-7 .
Simple-living advocate Ruth Stout, author of Gardening Without Work and How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back, believed that life just doesn’t have to be so hard!
In If You Would Be Happy, she once again helps you find the sense amid all the nonsense that life offers, and find simplicity amid the rough and tumble of life. She says:
“It is happiness, not perfection, we’re concerned with here, and they’re not necessarily even related. . . Our activities are successful insofar as they are giving us real satisfaction.”
“Interestingly enough, if you do work for your own happiness and achieve it, everyone who comes in contact with you will enjoy you more and therefore be better off because you are happy. If you are busy building your own pleasant life, you have no time to criticize others. You are more relaxed, more fun to be with; your sense of humor is in good working order, and you are a do-gooder in the best sense without even trying.”
“Being annoyed will keep a person awake more effectively than Benzedrine. If you need pepping up, just think of someone you’re furious with.”
“Any experience, trivial or important, is likely to give us more pleasure if we are interested, unhurried, and are looking for the best the situation has to offer. It also helps if we expect something good, for in that case we don’t overlook it if it’s there in front of us.”
“We must forever keep in mind that it is our inside feelings we are aiming to change; we are really going to become a serene and pleasant person, not merely give the appearance of one.”
Foreword by Michaela Lonning
As a counselor, I’ve read plenty of self-help, recovery, and psychology books over the years, and I’m familiar with therapies and techniques that instruct people in how to be happier.
If You Would Be Happy is different from any of the happiness manuals I’ve read though, because it’s so refreshingly frank and conversational.
Ruth Stout is the eccentric relative that I wish I’d had, one with that refreshing mix of caring and candor.
Rather than challenging errors in my thinking or analyzing my issues, she might serve tea, and point outside to a lovely flower in bloom. She would have modeled for me that there’s happiness to be found, right here, right now. No fuss, no formula.
Ruth’s ideas are far from new. They are continually being rediscovered and repackaged, often in forms far more elaborate than Ruth’s deceptively simple wisdom. For example, DBT (dialectical behavior therapy) teaches mindfulness, as well as giving step by step guidance in important skills, like to keep the little things from building up into catastrophes. And it shows, step by step, how to make interactions smoother, how to relate to difficulties without inadvertently making them worse, and how to keep small things from building up into catastrophes.
These are good skills. They are outlined in DBT handbooks and worksheets, hundreds of DBT groups meet every week to discuss these skills, and many people are helped.
The best DBT therapy relies on the humor that the counselor brings to the process. If you’re looking for the kind of candor and wit that DBT therapists are encouraged to offer, this book is a great source.
If You Would Be Happy is meant to help anybody with a desire to have a bit more—or a lot more—contentment. Ruth offers plenty of “case examples,” too—funny and touching ones about that neighbor down the road, or that eccentric acquaintance that stayed with her years ago.
This book reminds us that we are in this happiness quest together. We could all use a little coaching now and then to take our troubles a bit less seriously and to tend to our own happiness, and the contentment of those around us.
These ideas apply to grown-ups and children alike. They’re fun, they work. And they just make sense!
“‘What Do You Want?’ Quoth God. ‘Pay the Price and Take It.'”
Don’t Depend on Things That Can Desert You
Making Mountains Out of Molehills
Petty Values Belong on the Trash Pile
Light Shimmering Through the Darkness
And Now You Have Earned the Right to Dream
About Ruth Stout
Ruth Stout was a beloved advocate of organic gardening, and her book,Gardening Without Work, and her magazine articles popularized her style of simple living to millions. If You Would Be Happy was first published in 1962, and Norton Creek Press is proud to offer it to a new generation.
Ruth was born in Kansas. Her mother was a Quaker with a rate knack for coping with her nine children. One of Ruth’s brothers, Rex Stout, became the creator of the well-known Nero Wolfe mysteries, and Ruth herself began selling stories locally at an early age.
As a teenager, Ruth accompanied prohibitionist Carrie Nation on a saloon-smashing excursion (saloons were illegal in Kansas City at the time). In 1923 Ruth accompanied fellow Quakers to Russia to assist in famine relief.
Ruth moved to New York City, and before her marriage to Fred Rossiter she worked at a variety of jobs—nursemaid, telephone operator, bookkeeper, secretary, office manager, owner of a Greenwich Village tearoom. After her marriage, she and her husband moved to an old farm, Poverty Hollow, in West Redding, Connecticut.
Ruth’s career since moving to the country was that of cook, housekeeper, gardener, lecturer, and, of course, writer. Ruth wrote several books and innumerable newspaper and magazine columns. She died in 1980 at the age of 96.
by Ruth Stout.
Illustrated by Nan Stone. Foreword by Robert Plamondon
Norton Creek Press, 226 pages.
ISBN 0981928463.
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. And I beg everyone to start with a much eight inches deep; otherwise, weeds may come through, and it would be a pity to be discouraged at the very start.”
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, with illustrations by Nan Stone.
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.
“In my early childhood, I had some kind of vague yearning to Save the World from something or other.”
Gardening Without Work was first published by the Devon-Adair Company in 1961, was reprinted by The Lyons Press in 1998 (ISBN 1558216545), and again, with a new Foreword, from Norton Creek Press in 2011.
A Note From Robert Plamondon
When I was ten years old and in the grip of a passion for gardening-reading, planting seeds, and, on a good day, summoning the patience to wait for them to sprout—whenever a new issue of Organic Gardening came out, I turned first to Ruth Stout’s column. She was in her eighties and I was a child, but this was no barrier. Somehow she made it clear that we were kindred spirits.
And this was Ruth’s greatest talent, being a kindred spirit and a free spirit at the same time. She was innovative, practical, eccentric, and deeply entertaining, and her writing speaks across years and generations as if they weren’t there. And they weren’t, because when I read her work today, forty years later, it’s as fresh as ever.
Another of her talents that resonated with my ten-year-old self was her passion for enjoying life today—rather than putting it on hold until the necessary laws pass or the administration changes. I found it strange that even magazines about gardening would fill pages with gloom and doom! Ruth’s home-grown wisdom provided a refuge from this focus on what’s happening in other people’s backyards, rather than one’s own. It’s true that, before she learned this lesson, she smashed saloon windows with temperance activist Carrie Nation, but she later regretted this and adopted a live-and-let-live approach, one with a joyous focus on what can be done, rather than what can’t, and this gives her work its ageless quality.
So imagine my surprise when I discovered that Ruth’s masterpiece, Gardening Without Work, the best book ever written on the “permanent mulch” system, had been allowed to go out of print! How could this be? Fortunately, this shocking error lies within my power to correct, so I am proud to publish this exact reprint of Gardening Without Work, because Ruth Stout is at least as relevant and delightful in the twenty-first century as the twentieth. She was always ahead of her time.
Her “permanent mulch” system of gardening promises “no plowing, no hoeing, no cultivating, no weeding, no watering, and no spraying.” It takes most of the work out of gardening, so that hardly anything remains except your enjoyment of your growing plants, your beautiful flowers, and your delicious harvest!
Ruth’s irresistibly zestful approach kept her active and fit into her nineties, and will reshape your attitude about how much gardening (or living) can be fit into a limited amount of time and energy, a problem I didn’t have when I was ten years old, but which appeals to both my inner child and outer adult today.
Contents
God invented mulching
Asparagus—the easiest vegetable of all
Some startling things about corn and some comments on beans, peas as squash
Potatoes in the iris bed and onions in the hay
All those pesky so-and-so’s
Where to plant what
Jack Frost and a children’s garden
A strawberry, corn and potato rotation—with comments on witch grass
Flowers and mulch
Conservation is not enough
Fifteen hundred eager beavers
Be glad you’re a food faddist
Fit for a gourmet
How’s that again, professor?
If you would be happy all your life.
About Ruth Stout
Ruth Stout was a beloved advocate of organic gardening, and her book, Gardening Without Work, and her magazine articles popularized her style of simple living to millions. If You Would Be Happy was first published in 1962, and Norton Creek Press is proud to offer it to a new generation.
Ruth was born in Kansas. Her mother was a Quaker with a rate knack for coping with her nine children. One of Ruth’s brothers, Rex Stout, became the creator of the well-known Nero Wolfe mysteries, and Ruth herself began selling stories locally at an early age.
As a teenager, Ruth accompanied prohibitionist Carrie Nation on a saloon-smashing excursion (saloons were illegal in Kansas City at the time). In 1923 Ruth accompanied fellow Quakers to Russia to assist in famine relief.
Ruth moved to New York City, and before her marriage to Fred Rossiter she worked at a variety of jobs—nursemaid, telephone operator, bookkeeper, secretary, office manager, owner of a Greenwich Village tearoom. After her marriage, she and her husband moved to an old farm, Poverty Hollow, in West Redding, Connecticut.
Ruth’s career since moving to the country was that of cook, housekeeper, gardener, lecturer, and, of course, writer. Ruth wrote several books and innumerable newspaper and magazine columns. She died in 1980 at the age of 96.
“Guess who’s coming to dinner?” With Ruth Stout, you never knew! Would it be sweet-tempered temperance activist, Carrie Nation, who smashed the windows of illegal saloons with a hatchet?
Would it be her younger brother, Rex Stout, who finagled his way onto Teddy Roosevelt’s presidential yacht and later became famous for his Nero Wolfe mysteries? Would it be Dr. Poulin, the famous hypnotist? Simple-living guru Scott Nearing?
Not to mention friends, neighbors, starving artists, and refugees.
In this charming book, Ruth Stout tells the story of her life in terms of who showed up for dinner, and she describes the way she and her husband Fred turned their barn into simple visitor accommodations, turning guests into neighbors and avoiding Ben Franklin’s maxim that “fish and visitors stink after three days.”
The main flaw of this book is that it’s too short! Major events like Ruth’s work in Russia during the great famine in the Twenties are mentioned only briefly, and when we realize that the New York brownstone that they lived in for a while became Nero Wolfe’s house in her brother Rex’s famous detective stories, we’d like fuller descriptions and, if possible, floor plans!
But for everything that isn’t there, there’s something that is, making the book funny and wise and full of surprises, like all of Ruth’s writing.
Ruth Stout was a beloved advocate of organic gardening, and her book, Gardening Without Work, and her magazine articles popularized her style of simple living to millions. “Company Coming” was first published in 1958, and Norton Creek Press is proud to offer it to a new generation.
About Ruth Stout
Ruth Stout was a beloved advocate of organic gardening, and her book, Gardening Without Work, and her magazine articles popularized her style of simple living to millions. If You Would Be Happy was first published in 1962, and Norton Creek Press is proud to offer it to a new generation.
Ruth was born in Kansas. Her mother was a Quaker with a rate knack for coping with her nine children. One of Ruth’s brothers, Rex Stout, became the creator of the well-known Nero Wolfe mysteries, and Ruth herself began selling stories locally at an early age.
As a teenager, Ruth accompanied prohibitionist Carrie Nation on a saloon-smashing excursion (saloons were illegal in Kansas City at the time). In 1923 Ruth accompanied fellow Quakers to Russia to assist in famine relief.
Ruth moved to New York City, and before her marriage to Fred Rossiter she worked at a variety of jobs—nursemaid, telephone operator, bookkeeper, secretary, office manager, owner of a Greenwich Village tearoom. After her marriage, she and her husband moved to an old farm, Poverty Hollow, in West Redding, Connecticut.
Ruth’s career since moving to the country was that of cook, housekeeper, gardener, lecturer, and, of course, writer. Ruth wrote several books and innumerable newspaper and magazine columns. She died in 1980 at the age of 96.
Other Books By Ruth Stout
Norton Creek publishes these other books by Ruth Stout:
Don’t have your copy of Gardening Without Work yet? I’m the publisher! See my Gardening Without Work page and order yours from Amazon or the Kindle Store or whatever.
