Customer Reviews

Gardening Without Work: For the Aging, the Busy, and the Indolent

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

One of my favorite books on gardening. Humorous and folksy. Her methods work extremely well. Save yourself lots of sweat in the garden. Read this book.

Ruth is pretty much a one-note song (mulch, Mulch, MULCH) but it's nice to know that I'm not alone in using tons of hay to mulch my gardens. This isn't literature and Ruth is, at times, a bit too folksy but given that my method of gardening isn't much different, I would probably write a lot like her. It turns out I've been a Ruth devotee for a while without even knowing it.

If you are not using mulch in your garden/landscape and are tired of weeding and looking at hard, baked dirt, you owe it to yourself to give Ruth a shot. Though written in 1960, the book is still relevant and useful (except the parts about parsnips and turnips :-).

Ruth Stout knows what she is doing but I sensed a tone of irritation in her book with people who need information on what to do. Most of the book is relating her experiences without any real information. She talks about a fence her brother built to keep out raccoons but yet no details about what this fence was or how it was constructed. This isn't a book for beginning gardeners. I was dissapointed with the books lack of real information. If you want information on how to garden this is not the book to read. If you want to read about a gardeners experiences and how irritated she gets with beginners this is the book you want.

This is a great book about gardening with little work involved. The author lived what she wrote about and proved that it works.

I really enjoyed this book. This is very entertaining, and yet also informative. The key point she hammers across is mulch, mulch, mulch, and then mulch some more!

This book is an old fashioned book written in a rambling conversational kind of way. I often found myself wondering how the different subjects related to one another but Ruth Stout would bring them back to the central point of the chapter. The basic premise of her whole theory is 'mulch, mulch and mulch more'. While this is a valuable tool in gardening this book is not written by an expert (and she never claims to be an expert). If you are looking for a fun read you might find this book interesting, however if you are looking for up to date gardening advice you would be better looking at more modern books with up to date information on mulches currently available. I did enjoy this book though and when written it would have challenged a lot of the expert thinking of the time and challenged a lot of the 'shoulds' gardeners do.