Gardening without Work

While everyone loves eating fresh garden produce, not everyone has the time and energy to create a productive garden. But what if growing delicious crops required hardly any effort? What if you could have succulent strawberries, perfect peas, and terrific tomatoes without needing to touch a spade, hoe, or plow—without needing to worry about irrigating, spraying, sowing a cover crop, weeding, cultivating, or building a compost pile? If that sounds good, the Stout System is the answer for you!

Ruth Stout has shown tens of thousands of gardeners how to greatly reduce their gardening workload. Let Ruth (and within a few chapters, she will feel like a friend!) show you how you can rejuvenate the soil and make your fruits, vegetables, and flowers thrive with low-maintenance mulch gardening.

Widely renowned as a gardening expert (and sister of the famed mystery writer Rex Stout), Ruth Stout wrote extensively about how to simplify gardening. Her techniques have brought people from all over the world to her garden, and now her advice can help you maximize your garden's output with minimal effort. In addition to the time-saving tips provided, Stout's joyous perspective on life and gardening makes this book a delight-and is a must-read for anyone growing food or flowers.

Gardening that requires only planting and picking seems almost sacrilegious, but with Ruth Stout's garden methods, weeds and bugs are no more than fading memories. In a neighborly, conversational tone that makes this how-to book on gardening a lot of fun, Stout gives advice on growing various vegetables and flowers, finding the best catalogues and nurseries, avoiding chemicals on plants, and--best of all--year-round mulching, which is Stout's pièce de résistance that keeps the unwanted elements out of your greened acres. If you've ever wanted your own asparagus bed, but thought it was too exotic a plant to grow on your own, Gardening Without Work is a great place to dig in.