“My way is simply to keep a thick mulch of any vegetable matter that rots on both my vegetable and flower garden all year round. As it decays and enriches the soil, I add more.”

— Ruth Stout, in “Gardening Without Work: For the Aging, the Busy and the Indolent,” 1961

Thank you to everyone who has sent emails saying they are happy my gardening column has found a new home with the Rogue Valley Times. For those who are new readers, I gather a dozen garden-related books each year — classic and contemporary nonfiction, novels and poetry — and relate them to my own gardening experiences here in Southern Oregon.

April’s Garden Plots articles will come from Ruth Stout’s classic “Gardening Without Work,” her second highly entertaining volume that explains her method of applying a thick mulch of straw and/or other organic material to her flowerbeds and vegetable garden. A 6- to 8-inch layer of mulch keeps the soil rich and moist, reduces weeds and saves gardeners a considerable amount of time and labor.

Stout assures us, “The labor-saving part of my system is that I never plow, spade, sow a cover crop, harrow, hoe, cultivate, weed, water or irrigate or spray. I use just one fertilizer (cottonseed or soy bean meal), and I don’t go through that torturous business of building a compost pile.”

The Stout Method is perfect for gardeners who consider themselves to be, or in fact are, aging, busy and/or lazy. I celebrated my 60th birthday last week, so I am firmly planted in all three categories. I’ve seen firsthand how a thick layer of straw mulch provides all the benefits Stout claims in her book, but I’ve used a thick layer of shredded fallen leaves on my own vegetable and flowerbeds with good results.

I don’t like the look of straw mulch in my flowerbeds, so I combine shredded leaves with shredded bark for ornamentals. Years ago, I invested in a Worx electric leaf mulcher, and I’ve not regretted the $175 expense or the rather satisfying work of feeding the leaves into the drum. I buy shredded bark mulch in bulk to avoid purchasing single-use plastic.

I have access to plenty of horse manure, so I mix composted manure with shredded leaves for my raised vegetable beds. My less-than-scientific method of composting consists of dumping manure and pine shavings from my horse’s stall into a pile and let it sit for six months before mixing it with leaves and applying it to the raised beds.

I add an organic fertilizer high in nitrogen (see below) to the pile to speed up decomposition. I always intend to turn the compost pile, but never actually get around to doing it (thus my earned place in the “indolent” category). Somehow, it all works out anyway.

Stout used cottonseed meal as an organic fertilizer high in nitrogen. She recommended applying five pounds of cottonseed meal per 100 square feet on top of the mulch in the fall so winter rains will wash it through to the soil underneath. The nitrogen is released when the weather warms up, which benefits young plants. If you wait until spring to apply cottonseed (or bloodmeal, also high in nitrogen), it’s best to pull the mulch aside, apply directly to the soil, and water it in thoroughly before replacing the mulch.

When sowing seeds in the vegetable beds, particularly very small seeds like carrots and lettuce, pull the mulch aside until the seeds germinate and grow a few inches tall. For plant starts and large seeds, you can make a hole and plant right through the mulch layer.

To see just how easy the Stout Method is, watch the YouTube video “Mulching a Raised Bed the Ruth Stout Way” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiRWjkic7C8). The 5-minute video entails watching a man pull straw from a wheelbarrow and spread it around his zucchini bed.

The gardener in the video says an added benefit of the straw mulch for his strawberries is that it keeps the berries off the soil so they are less likely to rot, or fall victim to soil-borne pathogens or insects.

I’ll leave off by sharing a bit of Stout’s humor. She writes, “I get letters complaining that mulch won’t kill cockleburs, morning glories, witch grass or vetch. I could add that neither will it plant your seeds nor harvest your crops: I am only saying in a sarcastic, friendly way that just because mulch does 100 things for you, should it be expected to do 101?”