Where Did Helen and Scott Nearing Learn About Organic Gardening?

The Nearings made compost using an all-plant-based version of the Indore Method.

Countless members of the counterculture first saw organic gardening in practice at Helen and Scott Nearing’s Forest Farm in Maine. But where did the Nearings learn organic farming?

From reading their books, you’d get the impression that the Nearings were using organic gardening methods from the time they first bought their Vermont homestead in 1932. When describing the inspiration for their farming methods in their 1955 book Living the Good Life, they cited Sir Albert Howard’s Agricultural Testament, Ehrenfried Pfeiffer’s Bio-Dynamic Farming and Gardening, Lady Eve Balfour’s The Living Soil, and J. I. Rodale’s Pay Dirt. This leaves the impression that they learned how to make compost and garden organically by reading these books, as did most other American organic gardeners of the 1940s and 1950s. And the influence of these authors is apparent in their writing.

But there’s just one problem with the Nearings’ story—the chronology doesn’t work out. The earliest of the above books, Pfeiffer’s Bio-Dynamic Farming and Gardening, was published in 1938—six years after the Nearings bought their first homestead in 1932. So how did they garden before that, and were they making compost?

I asked Eliot Coleman—the Nearings’ neighbor and protégé—if he had any insight into this dilemma. He showed me a copy of Thomas Smith’s 1909 book French Gardening, given to Scott Nearing by Joseph Fels, the soap millionaire who funded the Arden community in Delaware where Scott spent his summers between 1905 and 1915. In this book, Smith details the intensive gardening methods used in France in the late nineteenth century. He describes in detail how to use horse manure in hotbeds, along with other season extension methods like cold frames and cloches. In this system, horse manure provided both soil fertility and heat for season extension. The decomposed horse manure from hotbeds was used as rich soil in the French gardens, so that “after a time the only soil really in use in the garden…is this thoroughly-decayed manure.”

Unfortunately, Scott Nearing didn’t talk about his gardening and composting methods in his autobiography, The Making of a Radical: A Political Autobiography (1972). So it’s unclear whether Scott and Helen used the French gardening methods at their Vermont homestead in the years before they read Howard’s book. All they say in Living the Good Life is, “In our early experiments with compost making, we used animal residues—chiefly manure.” This could have referred to either making hotbeds according to the French method or making Indore compost. They seem to have been familiar with both; what they didn’t explain is what they did when.

Wherever they first learned composting, the Nearings made one important modification to the process. All existing composting systems in the 1940s used at least some animal manure. This didn’t fit well with the Nearings’ vegetarian lifestyle, since they had no farm animals and didn’t like to haul in manure from other farms. Eventually, they developed a modified version of the Indore method that used only plant wastes. By layering nitrogen-rich plant wastes like legumes and green manures with higher-carbon stalks and stems, they were able to make high-quality compost without any animal products at all. In fact, the commonly used guideline to make compost piles by layering “greens” and “browns” (instead of plant and animal wastes) may have originated in the Nearings’ vegetarian composting system. Any backyard composter who only uses plant wastes, whether they know it or not, is following in the Nearings’ footsteps.