What's grown on everyone? Kevin here from Epic Gardening. Today we're going to talk about

another old school gardener who almost none of us have probably heard of, especially if you are

born in the generation that I'm born in.

I was born in the late 80s.

Well, this woman, the mulch queen, Ruth Stout.

She was born in the US back in 1884, 103 years before I was born.

That is amazing, and we're still learning from her today.

And so as early as 1920, what she realized is that many of the traditional methods of working with the soil.

That means digging, weeding, watering, plowing, hoeing, could be replaced or removed simply

by adding hay to the ground.

And if you've listened to yesterday's episode

on Lazy Man's Gardening, which is the no dig gardening

method that is promoted by Charles Doubting,

you're gonna see a common thread here.

Ruth Stout is similar.

She just has a different approach, but she wanted to spend less time in the garden, but

either not decrease or actually drastically increase her harvest.

So here is what she did.

All she really did that's different is she consistently kept a thick layer of hay mulch permanently on the soil.

And so this allowed her to put in quite a bit less effort than many more, many other people

because that means that hay mulch means moisture is kept in because that's one core function of mulch in general a lot of weeds are kept out because they're being smothered.

Eventually that hay does break down and build the soil,

...