Ruth Stout Garden Method

The video, above, is an interview with Ruth Stout who developed a deep mulch gardening method that's really similar to Paul Gautschi's "Back to Eden" method. She used straw or hay instead of wood chips. She fed two people all year with the produce from a 45x50' garden with very little work.

Many youtubers apply deep mulch garden methods with success. It seems like the key component is access to cheap or free mulch of basically any kind. One of the better recommendations I've seen is to use a variety of materials to provide a broad spectrum of nutrients to the soil.

In the fall of 2016, I put a load of woodchips on our 40x40' garden. So far, over the winter the woodchips haven't decomposed much. By contrast, last summer we had a pile of wood bark mulch delivered, and that's already become soil, more or less. It's totally laced with fungus and breaking down. Similarly, other material I started composting in the fall has already become soil, so it seems like this load of chips will serve as a matrix for other compost rather than providing much nutrients itself.

 I think the key point of Ruth Stout's method or Gautschi's method is the same--the traditional way we conceive of gardening or farming is just incorrect. Gardening is really all about soil building, and soil building is not really difficult. It's the natural course of things. The idea that the complexity of the woods needs to be reduced to a sort of mathematical form--stripped bare soil tilled into uniform texture is just a delusion.

The first principles approach on the problem is to come up with an in-garden compost scheme that works for your area, your property, and the materials you have readily available. Our property is mostly wooded. The forest builds the soil with leaves and twigs and animal waste and tree roots.

There are places in our woods where the leaves completely smother the soil, but in 99% of the woods, the leaves and trees form a hummus producing mixture. It seem like a mix of twigs, sticks, and leaves leads to decomposition to nice soil, where a mat of leaves with no routes for air produces something like a tarp that kills plants. So basically, we just have to reproduce that mixture and avoid that tarp-like-mat composting and it should be successful.