Building and Maintaining our Ruth Stout Garden 

Hey Stella! So glad to hear! Oregon will provide an ideal environment for this type of garden :) Let me know if you have any questions down the road 👍

Congrats. God bless you and your garden.

Thanks Michele! Comments like these always make my day 🙂👏

Thanks! They'll be coming out in due time :)

My soil surface is 150 + in the summer so succession planting is not something we started with. Instead we went with perennials and self seeders. The subsurface stuff is just pits filled with carbonaceous material that collects biologically active material that we do not want to directly dump into compost or below a treee.

They're young Buff Orpingtons, a good breed for friendliness and egg laying :)

There it would be wise to get a couple hundred gallon storage tank and collect rainwater from the wet season (all two days lol) and use that as a primary/occasional irrigation system. Irrigation from groundwater, in dry climates, results in salting of soils.

ruth said add more straw I've read. i laid out 40 bales on a grass yard in aprl sprayed it with molasses to get it started composting and just finished planting it. It is about 8 inches deep and nothing was getting through. fwiw

This year I had been even more lazy, and so more weeds popped up with some grasses, and this year we planted crops from seed in the garden rather than potatoes. Around mid year there was a bit of growth in the thin mulch that was left, so my wife and I took a whole hour to go out and cover the entire place entirely with another coat of hay. Doing it mid summer kills weeds when they have the least energy stored up in their roots, so we haven't even really had weeds since. Currently growing watermelon, peanuts, asparagus, rose of Sharon, hardy kiwi, peas, beans, mulberry, grape, mint, sweet potato, kale, apple seedlings, okra, thornless blackberry and sorrel on the same plot. 🙂

@@frenchiepowell Amazing! Do you have a video of how you planted the seed?

I don't have any experience with cabbages, but year to year your soil nutritional profile should be improving due to continuous mulch. In this case you should be able to wean off of fertilizing. Burying your scraps in the mulch is still a good way to recycle them though, so feel free to keep up that habit 🙂

@@frenchiepowell thanks for reply✌️

I’m betting tomatoes! They’d love the nitrogen .

Potatoes work great for a first year crop, since they're able to push through any mulch you put on top. Planting seeds requires removing mulch temporarily, and young plants require a thin mulch to begin with. Next year though, now that the grass is gone, we'll be planting in a variety of crops :)

@@frenchiepowell so the first year potatoes are recommended then after that any kind of seed vegetables?

Pretty much, depending on the state of the soil. If you're working with a very dense clay soil, it may take a year or two before you're able to do things like carrots, but by in large, as soon as the grass and other weeds are gone, you can begin other plantings. Even mid summer we began a fall planting of kale, Swiss chard, brassicas, peas, and beans (shown in another video), and they have done quite well. And that's all in this first year.

@@frenchiepowell actually, you can put a 2 l container full of compost in the mulch and plant your seedlings.

@@kjaan If you want to ant the next spring put 5 inches of compost and plant in the compost. But I recommend you put compost and mulch in the fall so you have the whole fall and winter for the soil to absorb and work on the material you put on just like nature does

Hey Cathy! Thanks for the question! When planting seeds we pull back the hay, then when the seeds sprout up and start growing as plants, we tuck them back in with hay as soon as they're large enough to not be covered :) So for a short while the soil is actually exposed, however we're experimenting now with sowing the seeds on top of the soil, and spreading a light dusting of hay on top in order to cover them. Looking forward to how that turns out compared to burying seeds. As for cottonseed meal, we don't use any. I'm too cheap to buy it and too lazy to spread it. I'm sure it likely works very well, but things also seem to work just fine without it :)

How did the 'light dusting' of hay go ?

@@lennyreynolds3971 It worked splendidly! We created a video on the subject called "planting seeds in a Ruth Stout garden". Definitely the go to method I'll be using in the future :)

@@frenchiepowell Awesome! Gonna check that video out right now

YES! :) We mulched with hay, and that's where we planted. We mulched with leaves and wood chips, and that's where we walked. You could mulch everything with the same material, then mark your path too. Keeping EVERYTHING mulched keeps most weeds at bay, and feeds the soil.

Frenchie looks high af lol! No judgement here though. Smoke a little green, plant a little green, nature is beautiful 🙂

Like when I eat a delicious strawberry, whenever I get excited my hands tend to flail about lol! I have noted this though TBH, and am working on being mindful of it in newer videos :)

Mariam, it makes you sea sick.

Never.

I watered once every few days this first spring because I hadn't put the straw down last fall and had to get it breaking down. When I planted seed the last two days I hadn't watered it in a week and it was nice and moist amd all the grass turf below was breaking down. The previous owner had placed straw bales around my well house and the soil there is now amazing. looking forward to the 2nd and 3rd season when my whole garden wil be that rich and friable.

Hay

Hey Pia! I'm finding some mice are attacking some of my young trees, but haven't seen them go for the crops, and also haven't seen a difference of trees taken out by mice because of the hay, or because of the fact that they're in a grassy field. I suspect as the conditions change and our garden expands we may see them move along to the more field like habitat of the rest of the field lol

Frenchie Powell Thank you for your answer ☺️

cats

Get mice end up with snakes I gotta enough snakes ..has anyone had that problem with putting hay down?

We investigated and actually tested all of this in both fall and spring, I did a video answering the question. In short, fall is also when nature's grasses send all of the energy to the roots. So if you mulched in fall, all of the perennial weeds and grasses will poke up through all of the nice fertilizer you just gave them (I went a forearm's length deep just to "be sure"). But in spring they send their stored energy up, and if you cover then, then the majority of the weeds die as fertilizer. Nobody told be that when I was learning, and so I hope our experience here can be of great use to you someday :) I agree that fall "feeding" is best if you already have your crops established. But if you're converting new territory for a vegetable garden, spring is the best season to start from scratch :)

@@frenchiepowell THe weeds will not poke through if you put newspaper between the mulch and the compost. Besides, it seems most people have a weed phobia. I dont

@@svetlanikolova7673 with newspaper we've still had grass, thistle, dock, and violets poke through, and I'm curious how much you've done this? And if you've done it, what differences did you do to the normal sheet mulch lasagna layer technique? As for weeds, I like to select them. Thistle and grasses I weed out and harvest as more mulch, as well as any inedible weed. Violets begin to form a ground cover however, don't rise above 6 inches, and are entirely edible, so I've begun letting them grow :) It's definitely a balance, but from experience without newspaper and with. Without compost and with. And with thick mulch and thin, I definitely say from experience that a spring covering for a NEW garden is definitely best.

In theory one could be just "seeding grass", and that's often what hay is used for (but then you also get wildflower/weed seeds too). However, that only mainly works if you apply too thinly, remove the hay after application, or allow the hay to all be eaten by soil organisms. The key to keeping grass seeds at bay is to add more hay ironically enough. This keeps seeds at the soil layer from sprouting, and the seeds at the top from accessing the soil. It is theorized that the Ruth Stout bed would just seed tons of grass, but practice demonstrates that this is not the case. In ONE case, I had some grass seedlings sprout from a thin layer of field scythed grass I had laid down. I was worried thinking all of my mulching would have been in vain, but I covered it with another layer of hay, and it neither came through, nor sprouted any more grass seeds. Again, practice disproved theory. Always good to consider all potential pros and cons when beginning a new method, and seeding weeds is definitely something to consider and a wise thing to point out, but is easily solved :)

@@frenchiepowell Grass and any other weed seeds can stay in the soil and be viable for 10+ years... so basically I would be building up and icreading weed seeds year after year, not only that, growing in soil provides a higher harvest rste anx is more predictable. No weed, no till, is the best gardening method.

tannenbaum Not so this method actually decomposes the seeds after time so they wouldn’t survive up to ten years. The hay should be 8” thick compressed at all times.