I also enjoy using the Stout method. My garden plots are currently covered with about 2' of layers of leaves and hay.

I have always wanted to downsize and do this, but DH is addicted to his Troy Bilt horse. ;) So we end up with huge gardens (yes, multiple) and rows 3 feet apart, for 2 people. Sigh!!! LOL

I try.use lots of shredded leaves and anything else but have found that grass clippings do bring in some very obnoxious weeds.I started bermuda grass in my yard using hay and horse manure as compost and mulch.Am trying to contain it with mulch and a real fancy chicken tractor.Posy Pet

posy pet-let me know if anything works on bermuda grass, the %%***** grass was here before me, and i've been here 40 years. so--after i've faced it, dont think i could possibly bring in worse weeds.i understand roaches survived the atomic bomb-- i believe it was sitting on bermuda grass.

I'd never heard of the ruth stout method but did go read up. She's very amusing and informative. Even though we didn't know about her, we did mulch heavily with old hay in the veggie garden this year. It worked great! Few weeds and less watering. The only time I'd mulched with hay before was in the rose beds a few years ago for winter protection. The neighbor's cows got out and guess where they headed?? Yep, right in the roses.

As to controling bermuda grass, there's a chemical that ONLY kills bermuda grass. I've used it in my beds for several years now and, man, is life sweeter! It can be sprayed right over the top of other plants and only gets the bermuda. In fact, one label is "Over the Top" by Hi-Yield. Ortho's Grass-B-Gone is the same chemical in a ready to spray form. Several brands of the concentrate are out there. The chemical is fluazifop-P-butyl.

I bought Ruth Stout's book back when organic gardening was not fashionable! I always mulch, but have never tried the no tilling completely method. Is this what you do? I know it would work and may try a section next year. This is the year that I am pulling out all cattle panels, steel posts and starting over! Sure would be a good time to do this. I would miss using my Merry Tiller though!

gd

Just my 2 cents, but I would ammend the heck out of that garden and till it in well before starting the no-till method. It will take a year or two for the breaking down of the mulch to keep up with the needs of the soil. I really believe it will work, though. I wish you could see my 18 year old asparagus patch where all we have done is haul in at least 8-12 inches of wood shavings per year...it is no-till and just beautiful.

An additional experience on using this method. In my tomato patch last season, I just pulled back the mulch and could dig the hole with a hand spade for the plants. The ground was just beautiful.

Oh, me. When we lived near Antioch in White County AR, Bermuda grass was the bane of my existence. We would solarize the garden spot from early April until Memorial Day and then plant. By the end of the growing season, the Bermuda would have invaded to the point that the solarization would need to be repeated the next year. In Missouri, I had always deep mulched ala Ruth Stout and I'm doing it again now that we are back. We are wintering the chickens in one of the hoop houses and I've fenced the garden to keep them in it. They will dig a few holes in the mulch, but I just figure they are finding grubs, etc., that would cause problems next year. I take them grass clippings, shredded leaves (from mowing) and the cleanings from the hay feeders and they spread it for me--helpful little critters, those hens, and they provide eggs as well!

The way I see the deep mulch technique is as a wonderful way for me to keep gardening into old age (okay, older age if you want to be picky about it!). Wasn't Ruth in her mid-ninties when she passed away and was able to garden nearly until her passing? That's for me. When I fall dead in the garden, just throw more browns over me and let me compost.

I agree with using mulch, even hay, especially spring hay cut before too much seeding takes place, still, so lang as you have the ground mulched well enough, the weeds simply can't grow.

I also agree that before you can expect full success with no-till/mulch you need to build the soil. My best vegetable plot took about 5 years, but since then It's not been tilled. It's now converted to a blackberry patch and gets a foot of leaves I haul in from a neighboring town, where the folks are nice enough to shred and bag all their leaves for me, free for the picking!

I too have tried the Ruth Stout method, but gave up on it for the fact that too many bad insects used that mulch to winter over in! Esprecially the 11 spotted beetle, Squash bug, and blister beetle "MaMa", a huge ant -like bug. Also the huge rat-like Voles burrowed under the mulch and right into my coldframes[where they promptly ate my winter Spinach) I now mulch in Spring and till most of it underin Winter. Strong.

Yes, mulch provides wonderful cover for soil insects. What will eventually be found is that earthworm populations will increase dramatically. Of course, this attracts moles, which eat worms. In my heaviest mulched soil, it actually gets tilled by moles and worms, so you can't really call it 'no-till'. The only real problem with the mole burrows is that they sometimes dig close to plant roots, and especially when these are seedlings, they get damaged. During wintertime, these burrows do get used by mice/rats, but as spring approaches i set out some baits for them. Mole burrows can make flood irigation crazy. I've run a water hose on the ground for 8 hours, and found the water coming up 20 feet away!

All in all, mulch has problems like any other method, but it has many benefits compared to NOT using it. Th biggest drawback is getting enough, if you have a big plot. I regularly cut haul and spread 30-40 16' trailerloads of hay each year, plus several trailers of bagged leaves, some wood chips, and some bark. This year i'm planning to get into a trial with cardboard.

I garden square foot style using Mel's mix. I am in a new home and am building 12 - 10 inch raised beds which will have a chicken tractor and rabbit tractor rotating through them. It sounds like you guys are saying that I can add to my good soil, compost on the spot and have plenty of food for my hens as they rotate through the beds just by using this method.

I have not tried the hay mulch yet, but I did try lasagna gardening in a bed and it didn't work for me. It had tons of root running through it - albeit no weeds above ground. How is this different?

Nice to see this old thread rear its head this morning.

chrislyn, I don't see much difference between Ruth's method and the "lasagna" method. Just like the old organic movement and now everything is called "green". They seem the same to me. I want to tell everyone that heavy mulching using paper under was around for a long, long time.

If you built your bed near a tree or shrub that is why you had the roots coming up into that beautiful mulched ground.

I did a so-called lasagna bed in the fall of 2007 by just placing paper feed bags cut open on the grassy sod at one end of the garden. Next I put flakes of some old alfalfa hay that peeled off the bale in brick-like pieces.

The next summer I planted tomatoes at the intersection of the hay flakes. I couldn't believe the sod was gone and the ground was loose and had lots of earthworms in it. I had the most disease-free tomatoes ever. It will be interesting to see how they do there this year.

Over the time, I have lifted flakes here and there and dumped in kitchen waste from my compost bucket, composting in place.

I want to expand this area to cover the entire end of the garden so I don't have to mow and will have more planting area.

I am sold on the method even though I do love my old Merry Tiller.

I sure have enjoyed everyone's input. Since I'm a real Golden Oldie, I've been doing this thing now called "green" for a long time. On our farm, we mulched the whole vegetable garden with old hay from the old barn and had the most marvelous plants! It was a lot of work, but I was lots younger and was finally getting to prove out some of R. Stout's claims. Happily, my (late) husband didn't laugh too much at those "crackpot ideas." (Especially when he saw the results). We had all the manure, straw, sunshine, cats, a couple of chickens, wheat waving in the wind I could ever have wanted or dreamed of. I'm so glad I had the experience and feel very fortunate to have had Organic Gardening Lab 101.
Sunny

I wish I had a source for hay and especially alfalfa. They want $3 or $4 for straw. I don't begrudge the feed stores for the cost. Farmers have expense and so do the feed stores. There is very old hay in my mother's barn that I need to get on a cold day because copperheads and huge black snakes are in there in summer. The rats have chewed all the strings so it is not easy to get. I use a mixture of methods with no organization what so ever.

helen, be careful of those copperheads! I saw the pictures in your album and called my husband in. We have never seen one in the 'wild' before. Now I will know one when I see it.

Some of my straw for the cow is loose too because of mice and I have to pitchfork it on the truck.

I want to read about the Ruth Stout method. Is this the book I want;

The Ruth Stout no-work garden book, by Ruth Stout and Richard Clemence

Our library has it but it says "unavailable".

I'd heard of this method before but assumed that you had to use straw rather than hay. Hay is easier for me to get (cheaper) so just a quick question while I'm waiting for the book:

Do you leave the hay there or remove it at the end of the season?

Christie, that's the book. See if your library has an Inter-Library loan program or check Amazon for "used." They are usually a reasonable price.
We just left the mulch on and added more next season.
Sunny

I also have used similar methods, aka newspaper and cardboard on the bottom layer, then start adding leaves, grass, etc. I live in town and don't have the barn materials so many of you have, sigh. But the cardboard pizza boxes, lol and newspaper and grass and leaves work really good..

Hubby thinks I'm a crackpot.

You can read about lasagna and Ruth on the disabled forum too.

KK

christie, I thought I replied but guess I messed up once again. Yes, you never remove the mulch but keep adding to it as it breaks down or a weed pokes through. Now sometimes you need to pull it back some to warm up the soil or to plant tiny seeds. She never used sprays or fertilizers once she got the garden all under mulch. She did have crop failure just like everyone does now and then. The purpose of the perpetual mulch is to save labor, no tilling or digging, no watering. She had a shallow well so didn't like to use it. She also had a unique way of planting strawberries.

Can anyone tell me if this method gets rid of bermuda grass?
Thanks,
Steve

Roundup gets rid of Bermuda if you keep after it. It would take lots of hay to smother Bermuda. The utility left a huge mountain of wood chips on my mother's farm at my request. The calves did play in it but it was deep. The area on the edges of the pile had Bermuda trying to creep in. It did smother it but the Bermuda came up I'd say two feet through the mulch to the sun. I think round up does work, but even that won't stop it forever. You have to spray again. If you shade the grass with newspaper and put hay on top, I think it might shade it to death if it didn't keep creeping in from the sides.

I, myself, have never had any luck with Roundup, and Bermuda grass. There is a chemical under the name of Poast, (cant remember the ingredient) that does seem to work well. Bermuda LOVES the Ruth Stout method, it can do its dirty work out of sight, untill theres more than you can handle.

I was going to investigate that Poast that you mentioned before. The link is long but my reading of it tells me it is not real bad stuff. It sounds like it doesn't stay in the soil long or hurt animals or soil organisms if you use it properly.

Here is a link that might be useful: information on the grass killing chemical

Though someone might have some feedback to what was "excitement" but now has turned into "total devestation"..I decided to try the Ruth Stout method last fall and put 3 bales of hay on my perennial flower bed. It's not that big..maybe 16x18' but a bed I've been working on by adding area, flowers, a small pond, etc. for the past 10+ years. Well I have probably lost approx 50% of my plants. Some stuff has came back up but a lot has not. Any ideas from anyone?

Pam, are you saying the mulch choked out the plants? Ruth Stout method doesn't advocate putting the mulch on top of the plants but pulling it up around them.

I have her book.

If the mulch isn't so thick and heavy, most should have come back through the mulch.

Has anyone else noticed this post is just like Bermuda Grass??Keeps coming back.....

But much more enjoyable. :D

LOL-I think so too. Like the post I started on my Mandevilla vine--which I'm not sure about this year -yet..

I personaly haven't tried the R.S. method completely. I did start out with newspapers on the bottom and covered it with straw (about 1.5 - 2 feet my first fall. it's now about 4" and I have afew weeds growing. My onions are doing great and my potatoes are up close to 2" so far. I plan this fall to add horse manure, worm castings, leaves and more straw to top it off. My raised beds are 2' tall and real easy to work with without breaking my back. I also plan intensively that helps too.

For those who may not have seen:

Ruth in action.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt-KHUITId8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyEQS0v75mc

Thank you for posting those videos Fuzzy. I watched them both. What a spunky lady. You have to admire her think-for-yourself attitude. She must've been past 90 in those videos and still gardening. I hope my mind and hands still work as well when I'm that age.