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Ruth Stout

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Ruth Stout, The No-Dig Dutchess

By Barbara Bamberger Scott

In the early 1980s I went to Sussex, England to study small-scale agriculture at a Rudolf Steiner center called Emerson College. The course trained people to demonstrate good gardening methods in third world villages. I learned three ways to garden: the right way, the wrong way, and the easy way. The easy way was Ruth Stout's way.

The wrong way was obvious: industrialized farming, including the use of chemical fertilizers and poisonous pesticides, leading to the de-naturing of the precious soil. Everyone knew that this was destructive, and had been the downfall of many a third world village project. It was a given that a better method was required.

The right way was, of course, what they taught us at Emerson. It was a tough row to hoe, because the instructors were proponents not merely of digging, not just double-digging, but triple digging. This was a technique based on the ancient small-scale agricultural practices of hearty Gallic truck farmers on the outskirts of Paris as well as of terribly finicky, upper-class British rose growers and formal gardeners. Triple digging is organic and fanatical. It's done at Wisley and Kew. It involves cutting into the earth three spits (spade depths) down and systematically inserting various kinds of material from the most decayed compost – horse manure, preferably French - to the coarsest new-cut straw. It rebuilds soil and if you respect the earth and love to work (those with back problems, take warning) this is a rewarding method over the long haul. Along with “biodynamic preparations” made from diluted compost, triple digging promises new, permanent soil vigor after a season or two. Certainly my teachers thought so. That was the “right way.”

Much as I wanted to be a good student, I was far more attracted to the "easy way," the less invasive approach of Ruth Stout – especially after a few weeks of the grueling physical labor involved in Steiner's soil building technique. The easy way was the precise antidote to all that physical hardship. American Ruth Stout called it “no dig, no work.” Even our excessively Euro-centric teachers gave grudging kudos to Ms Stout and her “permanent mulch” method. Stout was sufficiently kooky for the Steiner followers (also known as anthroposophists) to embrace unabashedly. She had a near-religious respect for the natural environment and, most importantly, believe it or not, her method does work. With provisos.

Born in Kansas in 1884, Ruth was a Quaker whose family worked a farm. She lived into her nineties, died in 1980, and developed a reputation for being brilliant, if eccentric. She laid claim to having smashed saloons to smithereens along with temperance queen Carrie Nation. The dates fit and no-one ever proved otherwise. Her famous brother Rex was also a gardener, entrepreneur and author. As most everyone knows, he penned the Nero Wolfe mysteries. Wolfe, who has his own website as though he were a real guy (he wasn’t), was portrayed by Rex as a morbidly obese highly cerebral solver of mysteries who raised rare orchids in a penthouse roof garden. In real life Rex thought his sister crazy for her no-dig technique, calling her yard, affectionately one assumes, a “garbage dump.” But as one writer has correctly pointed out, Rex had servants to help him compost, and he was as strict about his composting as his hero Nero was about schedules for watering the orchids. Whereas Ruth had only herself and a rather dotty philosopher/carpenter partner, Richard Clemence, who probably wasn’t the brawniest gnome in the garden.

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