Ruth Stout, beloved author of Gardening Without Work, tackles the problem of living without (too much) work in It’s a Woman’s World. As always, Ruth’s quirky, common-sense approach manages to entertain as much as it informs, and because fundamentals never change, this 1960 book is still as delightful as ever.
Ruth could turn any aspect of life into an adventure. She may have been the only woman who gardened in the nude, wrote a book on happiness (If You Would Be Happy), and wrote another about the quirky people who came to visit Company Coming: Six Decades of Hospitality. All these titles are available from Norton Creek Press.
Ruth died in 1980 at the age of 96.
Table of Contents
1. The Right Window
2. Live and Learn
3. For Reluctant Cooks
4. A Matter of Taste
5. Guests-Welcome and Otherwise
6. Once Over Lightly
7. Why the Whirlwind
8. Turning Pennies into Dollars
9. Making Time for Yourself
10. For Better-We Hope
11. The Hand That Rules the Cradle
12. Does Your Garden Grow?
13. To Hell with the Joneses
14. When Evening Comes
About Ruth Stout
Ruth Stout was a beloved early advocate of organic gardening, and her book, Gardening Without Work, and her magazine articles popularized her style “no-dig gardening” in particular and simple living in general to millions.… Read more ...
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.
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.… Read more ...
“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!… Read more ...
Ruth Stout (1884-1980) was everyone’s favorite gardener and lovable eccentric, and we’re delighted to have republished four of her books:
Don’t have your copy of Gardening Without Work yet? I’m the publisher! See my 
