After the wet summer, Sarah Marriott finds an old method to put the weeds back in their place - just lay down straw, throw away your spade and put your feet up.
Weeding is the worst thing about gardening. However, there is a way of avoiding it, and all the other back-breaking, monotonous tasks in the garden, from digging to hoeing, feeding, watering, spraying and even composting.
Low-maintenance gardens, that staple item on gardening programmes, weren't invented for our modern, time-poor lifestyles. In the 1930s, Ruth Stout, an organic pioneer, developed a method of growing fruit, vegetables and flowers which could be done by anyone - no matter how lazy, how busy or how old.
The secret is mulch - but not a thin layer of bark chips along the driveway. It has to be a thick mulch of organic material, which prevents weeds from seeing the light of day and rots down to enrich the soil. Stout recommended piling six to eight inches of mulch (hay or straw for preference, but also leaves, grass clippings, garden waste - even sawdust or pine needles) on every bit of the garden, then simply pushing it back to put in new plants or seeds.
Known in the US as the queen of mulch, Stout, who was still gardening until her death at the age of 91, after 40 years growing all the fruit and veg for her family, described her experiences in Organic Gardening and Farming magazine from 1953 to 1971. She also wrote several books and thousands of people, including horticulturalists and scientists, made the trip to see her ground-breaking garden in Connecticut.
Sceptical at first, many were converted by her no-nonsense approach - and results. For anyone considering adopting the Stout method, she wrote: "About the hardest work is probably making up your mind . . . If you are the only person in your neighbourhood who is using this no-plough, no-dig, no-cultivating method, your friends and neighbours will say you are crazy. Ignore them. They will change their tune."
The first step is to "throw away your spade and hoe. The largest tool you will need is a trowel. And when you're getting along in years, you have a wonderful garden, and people marvel and ask who does the heavy work, you can truthfully reply: 'There is no heavy work'."
She developed her method when, failing to find a farmer to plough her vegetable plot, she realised that her asparagus beds, which had been mulched and never ploughed, were producing wonderful results. She would use mainly bales of hay, but also whatever was handy. Most radically, she believed there was no need for a compost heap, as all her vegetable peelings etc went straight onto the garden as mulch, to rot down on the soil: "As for the up-to-date gardener who may do year-round mulching, but who also bothers with a compost heap, here's a bit of unasked-for advice: better see a psychiatrist."
And she brooked little argument: "My conviction is that any gardener who hasn't given this method at least a three-year chance to prove itself has hardly any basis for opposition to it. And if he has mulched that long, he will be sold on the idea!" But why three years? "Any grower knows that no plants behave exactly the same every year. But if something should go wrong when you first begin the mulching method, you may be inclined to put the blame where it doesn't belong."
As a novice gardener without much time, I was in despair at the weeds threatening to take over my vegetable patch and front garden when I bought a second-hand copy of Ruth Stout's The No-Work Garden Book - for 50 pence. Inspired by her practical, approach, impressed by her zeal, and entertained by her idiosyncratic approach to life (she once ate nothing but raw vegetables for a year - including dinners comprising only raw turnip), I decided to give the Stout method a try.
In my front garden, I trampled down the nettles and long grass, threw on seaweed and some half-rotted, home-made compost to improve the soil and then piled on bales of straw I got from a local farmer. What a transformation - I suddenly had a neat, if rustic, area ready for planting.
Then 20 herbaceous perennials went in - with no weeding and little digging. Following Stout's instructions, I simply parted the straw and weeds below, made a hole big enough for the roots of each plant, stuck them in the ground, filled in the hole and watered well. All in under two hours. And in my vegetable patch, I piled straw over the weeds and around the vegetables which the slugs had kindly left me.
Six weeks later, despite a spectacular crop of fat slugs, the flowers are blooming and my broccoli, mangetout, strawberry, spinach, potato, herb and baby sweetcorn plants are big and healthy. When weeds force their way to the surface, I simple toss on more straw. Nothing could be easier.
"When gardeners who aren't letting mulch do most of their work are weeding, hoeing, watering, and maybe indulging in a spot of swearing at times, we mulchers can do just about as 'the spirit moves us' ", Stout wrote. Now I know that autumn, with its mountains of leaves, is not something to be dreaded - it's just nature's way of providing free mulch.
The No-Work Garden Book by Ruth Stout and Richard Clemence, Book Club Edition
E-mail: smarriott@irish-times.ie
