Covers garden planning, house plants, trees, compost, flowers, herbs, bulbs, vegetables, pest control, and common problems

A collection of essays on gardening taken from Ruth's programs on public radio which is sponsored by the National Gardening Association.

Can you really have a productive garden without plowing, hoeing, weeding, cultivating, and all the other bothersome rituals that most gardeners suffer through every growing season? "Sure," says Ruth Stout, a prolific author and writer at 80 years young. The reason that Ruth can throw away her spade and hoe and do her gardening from a couch is a year-round mulch covering, 6 to 8 inches thick, that covers her garden like a blanket. Thousands of curious gardeners have visited her Redding, Connecticut garden, including university scientists and horticulture experts. The experts have been dazzled by the technique used by the queen of mulch! But the results of 41 years of gardening experience can't be denied. The Ruth Stout No-Work Gardening Book gives Ruth's unique advice on growing techniques and tells how she has escaped the bugaboos that haunt most gardeners. Her poison-free method of combating slugs and other insects, her scheme for growing tasty vegetables all year, her method of foiling both drought and frost -- these and many other growing secrets are revealed -- secrets that have brought this perky organic gardener season after season of growing pleasure. If you're tired of being a slave to your garden, yet still want to enjoy it without the bother of sprays, weeding, hoeing or other toilsome garden chores, The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Books has the information you need. It's completely tested gardening method, perfected during more than 40 years experience and reported in the pages of Organic Gardening magazine, eliminates gardening strain and toil, and does it organically with no dangerous chemical fertilizers or toxic sprays. Take it easy. Put nature to work in your garden.

Essays that tap the creative wealth of the Vermont regional community, now available in print.

A collection of gardening tips, recipes, crafts, gift ideas, tales, and more from the author of Every Garden Is a Story. Simple Pleasures of the Garden is a treasure chest of tips, how-to’s, stories, and trade secrets gathered together in one beautiful book. Organized by season, the hundreds of suggestions and recipes present a profusion of ways to celebrate the bounty of the Earth all year round. Projects include handcrafted lotions and oils, baskets and wreaths, potpourris and floral waters, along with dozens of simple, inexpensive home decorations and easy-to-prepare recipes that utilize all of your garden’s harvest. From compost tea to confetti corn chowder, Simple Pleasures of the Garden will inspire you to bestow the comforts and charms of your garden on family and friends.

In Ruth Page: The Woman in the Work, the Chicago ballerina emerges as a highly original choreographer who, in her art, sought the iconoclastic as she transgressed boundaries of genre, gender, race, class, and sexuality. Author Joellen A. Meglin shows how her works were often controversial andsometimes censored even as she succeeded in roles usually reserved for men in the ballet world: choreographer, artistic director, and impresario.From extensive dramaturgical analysis of her most famous ballets - La Guiablesse, Frankie and Johnny, Billy Sunday, Revenge, The Merry Widow, Camille, Carmina Burana, and Alice - to embodied re-imagining of an avant-garde solo performed in a "sack" designed by Isamu Noguchi, this biography followsthe global reach of Ruth Page's career spanning the greater part of the twentieth century. In the process of discovering the woman in the work, it also offers encounters with an international cast of dancers (Anna Pavlova, Harald Kreutzberg, Frederic Franklin, Alicia Markova), composers (WilliamGrant Still, Aaron Copland, Jerome Moross, Darius Milhaud), visual artists (Noguchi, Pavel Tchelitchew, Antoni Clave), and companies (Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Ballets des Champs-Elysees, London Festival Ballet). In doing so, it also disrupts notions that New York was the only cradle of theAmerican ballet, and George Balanchine, its exponent to eclipse all others, Ruth Page explores the woman's unique sensibility, corporeal praxis, and collaborative ethos to reveal her Chicago-centered network of creativity.