Gardening Without Work: For the Aging, the Busy & the Indolent -- Ruth Stout

<p>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!"</p><p><br></p><p>Ruth writes, "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." <em>Gardening Without Work</em> is her second gardening book and is even more entertaining and instructional than the first, so hide it from your friends!</p><p><br></p><p>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 vege