Re: Low Maintenance

jperson wrote:
> 
> Surely everyone knows about Ruth Stout's book, How to Have a Green Thumb
> Without An Aching Back. She wrote it years ago, and advocates the use of salt
> hay, which she piles everywhere in her Connecticut garden. In fact, it works
> with any deep mulch, which in our case, has also remediated our alkaline clay
> to a good degree. Since my husband, who does the hard work, insists on
> watering, which makes ours a Medit+ garden, this is our best labor-saving device.

In my posting on this subject I mentioned regular mulching as one of the
best ways of avoiding a copious growth of  seedlings on any bare ground.
The use of  mulch is a major feature of any sort of organic gardening,
not only to suppress weeds but to insulate the soil, cut down water-loss
and provide a trickle of food for the plants  thropughout the growing
season. It was indeed the late Ruth Stout who started this valuable ball
rolling, but those of us who do not live in New England have had to find
substitutes for the salt hay, of which perhaps the most successful and
popular in vegetable gardens and flower borders is some sort of mixture
of fallen deciduous leaves and lawn clippings, while bark and tree
shreddings have a place in the shrub and tree sections.

Moira
-- 
Tony & Moira Ryan <theryans@xtra.co.nz>
Wainuiomata, 
New Zealand (astride the "Ring of Fire" in the SW Pacific).
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