What vegetables can you grow in a Ruth Stout garden?
On August 3, 2019 by Vlad4 min readAlthough the Ruth Stout gardening method is over a century old, there are still a lot of questions out there regarding its performance and success. Most people doubt that food can grow from just hay, while others feel like they will be restricted, in terms of what crops they can grow.
I’ve already gone over the basics of the Ruth Stout gardening technique in my previous post. So today, I want to go over some of the vegetables that are best suited to grow following Miss Stout’s gardening style.
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What vegetables can you grow in a Ruth Stout garden?
Potatoes, tomatoes, garlic, onions, kale, cabbage, pumpkins, squash, peas and beans are all great crops for your Ruth Stout garden. But the list can be a bit more generous, depending on how old your garden is and your growing zone.
As a rule of thumb, plants that do well in moist soil will perform best in a Ruth Stout garden bed. The thick mulch layer works like a tiny water reservoir for these plants.
You should also aim to plant crops that are taller since the mulch layer should be over 30 cm deep, smaller plants don’t fare well. Needless to say that sowing small seeds is in a Ruth Stout garden is pointless; the seeds will fall through the hay and they will never see the light of day, ever again.
Potatoes are the stars of Ruth Stout gardens
Potatoes are probably one of the most famous and favoured crops to grow in a Ruth Stout garden. Miss Stout herself was famous for just throwing potatoes randomly in her hay-mulched garden and getting amazing crops in return with no additional effort.
Potatoes grow amazing in hay or straw bales, even when stacked vertically. The broken down hay gives them all the nutrients they need, while the top mulch layer keeps the moisture and temperature constant.
Planting potatoes using Ruth Stout’s teaching, simply create long rows of hay or straw (both work equally well) and throw the potatoes on top. Cover the rows with another, smaller layer of hay and wait for the potatoes to sprout.
After the potatoes bushes get over 15-20cm big, cover them again more hay and repeat whenever the bush growth gets out of hand or when the rain packs the mulch layer too much.
Fall garlic grows best in Ruth Stout gardens
Over-wintered garlic is one of the best vegetables for this gardening style. The hay is a great insulator and will keep the garlic cloves from freezing during winter.
When we first started our Ruth Stout garden, garlic was the first thing that went in. During that winter we had temperatures dropping as low as -17 C / 1 F and all our garlic cloves survived.
In fact, I ended up adding too much hay over it (about 50 cm) and some of the garlic plants were not strong enough to poke all the way through. In retrospect, 30 cm of unpacked hay should suffice.
What else can you grow in a Ruth Stout garden?
Tomatoes can be planted sideways under the hay and they will do amazing. Kale and cabbage can also benefit from the hay’s insulating properties and work great as late-season crops.
Squash, pumpkins, zucchini will do well, but not great. Adding some decomposing vegetables under the hay layer will improve their growing conditions though.
Beans will also adore the high humidity of your Ruth Stout garden bed and will thrive if planted in 5 cm in the mulch. We like to also throw a hand of compost in the hole we dig to give it a head start.
What crops did you plant in your Ruth Stout garden?
Have you tried the Ruth Stout gardening method yourself? Did you have success with any of your crops? If so, let us know in the comments below what else should I add to the list?
You might also like these articles:
 | How to grow Ruth Stout potatoes |
 | Our experience with growing vegetables indoors |
 | Top 5 Easiest Herbs to Grow Indoors Right Now |
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Hello and welcome!
We (Vlad & Greti) are building a home on a homestead in a rural area of Romania in Western Europe and sharing our story as two passionate gardeners who ditched the city for a simpler, better life.
I dont understand how the seed gets sunlight thru thick mulch?
Garlic doesn’t require sunlight to start sprouting. It will shoot up the leaves until it reaches sunlight or dies from consuming all its energy. Although we put 40 cm of mulch on top of the garlic, the layer gets compacted after it rains or snows on top of it. Ultimately the 40 cm of hay turn into a 4-5 cm layer of much on top of the soil, and that’s easy for a garlic to poke through.
The purpose of any mulch is to prevent unwanted seeds from sprouting. If you want to plant seeds directly into a Ruth Stout they will take longer to germinate and you should make sure there mulch layer is thinner where you sow the seeds. My suggestion is to use transplants, bulbs, tubers or perennials in your Ruth Stout garden for best results.
Hi, what part of Romania is your homestead! I’m doing a Ruth Stout garden this year also. I cant wait to see the results. Small world we live in, it just happens that I’m from Romania too! Happy gardening.
Hi there Sylvia! It is a small world, glad to see you stumbled upon our blog. We’re right next to Cluj-Napoca, about 20km away from the city.
We ended up plowing the Ruth Stout beds, but we’re rebuilding them this year. If I were to do it again, I would’ve plowed before starting the Ruth Stout beds in the first place. But that’s mostly because we’re on 90% clay soil and plants can’t dig their roots down in it. On the bright side, the soil under the Ruth Stout beds was the easiest to plow, it was soft and brittle, not rock hard as the rest of the garden.
Where are you from Sylvia?
Vlad,
Greetings from the Pikes Peak area of Colorado, USA. We are very dry here, 14″ rain/yr. The Ruth Stout method is one way to save moisture. I use unglazed flower pots buried in the soil with a plate as a cover along with heavy mulching with straw to grow broccoli, tomatoes, cauliflower and squash. Because of space I use a wire cage for potatoes, along with alternating layers of soil, compost, and straw. By the way, my grandparents lived in Pap, Hungary, not too far from you.
Hey Barbara! Colorado is way dryer then what our weather here. Those clay pots should work wonders for the adjacent plants. It’s also amazing to hear you have relatives so close by… such a small world after all.
I always pulls the hay aside to plant. After the seedling comes up, I move the hay back close to the stem. For okra, I make a little round area without hay on it. It comes up fine. If there’s a weed or two, I pull it. So far I’ve grown beans, tomatoes, kale, rhubarb, asparagus, lettuce, spinach, swisschard, various herbs, zuchini, cucumbers, yellow squash, beets, collard greens. Unsuccessful plants were broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, cabbage. I may have planted too late for those, since I never saw a decent broccil flower. Right now I’m having trouble with bugs, bugs I’ve never seen before, and worms on the kale. But it’s been a very wet year. I am in zone 7.
Catherine, we also didn’t have much luck with broccoli and cauliflower this year. The temperature warmed up all of a sudden and they all bolted, but we already planted new seedlings in trays getting ready to plant them again in the fall when the weather is cooler towards the end of the growth process. As far as bugs are concerned, we use row covers for all our brassicas. These tend to be the most affected by bugs, so keeping them covered is a must for us.
Hi! Thanks so much for the list of vegetables that can be planted via Ruth Stout. I am doing a large plot of potatoes now and they are doing great. I have a suburban farm in Columbus, OH (USA).
Potatoes love the heavy hay mulch, just keep adding more on top when the leaves get big. This will force them to put more energy into the tubers and less into the leaves.
Wow…so glad I have found this site…a true Christmas pressie!
I have a not so good site under a tree with dappled light….so this system should work I presume or is lots of sunlight very important…