Hay
There! Ruth Stout, Deep Mulching, Beer,
Pizza and You
By
Robin Ford Wallace
When is the best
time to start your garden? NOW!
Forgive me if I
sound like one of those prim financial pundits who urge you to begin your
child’s college fund before you finish developing your own secondary sex
characteristics; but if you wish to use the deep-mulch method, as I do, the
best time to start is last fall.
Lacking that, you had better get down to the garden this minute.
I would help but I am afraid my pizza has just
arrived. I will instruct you from the
porch, if you will first be kind enough to fetch me a cold beer.
Thank you. Now, start by marking out your garden. Next: take hay – old, spoiled hay is fine,
and can usually be had for cheap or free – over the plot one foot deep. It is not necessary to till first, or even
to dig up the grass.
Hmm. I thought I told them green olives, not
black. Is it youthful inattention, or
centuries of inbreeding?
But back to the
hay: Yes, I said not to till, and no, I
have not partaken of enough beer to impair my faculties. This is the famous deep-mulch method Ruth
Stout, grandmother of organic gardening, described in her No-Work Gardening
Book. Ruth was the sister of Rex
Stout, author of the Nero Wolfe mysteries, and wrote just as entertainingly as
her brother.
Her idea was
simple: Instead of tilling, ones uses a
thick layer of hay to smother grass and weeds.
This perfect mulch, via its constant composting process, also adds
nutrients to the soil, improves friability and fosters earthworms.
I
started using the Stout method in 2001, when, for reasons I no longer remember,
I bought this house. The home site had
been made by bulldozing a flat place on the side of a mountain, incidentally
scraping it bare of trees, undergrowth and any vestige of topsoil. It was a sun-baked little acre of red clay,
covered by patchy tufts of pasture grass, except where it wasn’t. The last earthworm had died of
loneliness.
That October, I
buried the garden area in 12 inches of hay.
Mulching
in the fall gives the hay a head start.
In the beginning it is high and fluffy, with weeds underneath. By April, the weeds are gone and the hay has
compacted and composted. Underneath is
a moist black layer you might call dirty hay, or hayey dirt.
To
start transplants such as tomatoes or peppers, you simply part the hay and
stick your plant in, drawing the hay back around it. It keeps the ground moist so you need not water, chokes out other
growth so you need not weed, and nourishes the garden so you need not
fertilize.
To
put in seed crops such as corn, squash, okra or beans, you just mark out rows,
then push the seed down through the mulch with your finger. The big seedlings push up through the hay without breaking a sweat,
and so do root crops like potatoes and asparagus.
If
you do not start until spring, the hay will still work as long as you give it
three or four weeks its miracles to perform.
I frequently make new flowerbeds this way.
Does
the hay method work? It has worked so
well for me that I not only have rich black dirt where the red clay used to be,
earthworms enough to start a bait store, and bumper crops of vegetables, I also
have the leisure, while others sweat behind their hoes, to sit here on the
porch swilling beer.
And no hurry, but
I am ready for another.
Robin
Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt,
disturbing no one.
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