Don’t weed and don’t water — mulch it. Mid-May has already given us an early taste of St. Louis summer: hot, sunny, and humid perfect weather for weeds and lousy weather to work hard on a garden. The solution is a method called “no-work gardening” by Ruth Stout, an 88-year old author who plants and maintains her own large garden. Surround all flowers and vegetables with a thick mulch. With mulch, the weeds can’t grow, the soil stays damp and cool and you can pick your crops immediately after the heaviest rain without muddy feet or muddy produce.
Mulch can be almost anything that you have a lot of. One of the best and most readily available mulches is grass clippings. I have a mountain of grass now, thanks to the apartment behind me. Grass looks neat, mulches beautifully and by the end of the summer will be breaking down to enrich the soil. Another plentiful source of mulch is newspaper. Laid between the rows and around the larger plants it works beautifully. One word of caution, weight the papers with rock or bricks so they don’t blow around on a windy day. Other good mulches are leaves, sawdust and wood chips. (Maybe when the city trims the trees you can talk the crew out of the wood chips.) Even plastic bags that dry cleaners use will serve in an emergency, although they don’t let the rain reach the soil like the other mulches and they don’t decompose and enrich the soil.
Mulch now to reduce watering and weed pulling to a minimum and raise garden production, whether flower or vegetable, to a maximum.
Good luck with your gardens. In the fall I will report on my successes and failures and would like to hear about yours.
Originally published in The Paper, June 1975.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1975_06.pdf, printed page(s) 5; PDF page(s) 5.
