Ruth Stout

It's the birthday of garden author Ruth Stout, born on this day in 1884.

Ruth wrote a number of garden books including the No Work Garden and Gardening Without Work.

Here's a sampling of her famous prose:

“If you have the soul of a gardener, not for anything would you work with gloves on.”
 
“I read somewhere that a shallow pan of beer put into a garden at night will do away with slugs. (Whether they are dead or just dead-drunk in the morning, I don’t know.) I wrote this to one inquirer and he answered: ‘I’m certainly not going to carry beer out to the garden for slugs. If they want beer they can come in the house and ask for it, like everybody else.'”
 

"If 'heartache' sounds exaggerated then surely you have never gone to your garden one rare morning in June to find that the frost, without any perceptible motive, any hope of personal gain, has quietly killed your strawberry blossoms, tomatoes, lima and green beans, corn, squash, cucumbers. A brilliant sun is now smiling at this disaster with an insensitive cheerfulness as out of place as a funny story would be if someone you loved had just died."