Gardeners around the world throw stones out of their gardens. The residents of remote Easter Island carried stones in to use as mulch because rock mulch works. Also, because they had nothing else. Anyway, they were used to moving incredibly heavy things like those strange, iconic statues they carved out of volcanic rock with stone-age obsidian tools and set up all over the island because they looked so cool.

If you want to start a fistfight between anthropologists (and who doesn’t?), all you have to do is tell them you fully support (or completely reject) the conclusion advanced by Jared Diamond in his 2004 book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.” Diamond believes Easter Islanders unintentionally committed “ecocide” by completely deforesting their island. His opponents blame Polynesian rats, plus colonialism and climate change theory. Heaven forbid they should blame the islanders for cutting down every single tree, providing the tremendous amounts of wood they needed to transport those statues, and also to cremate their dead, whose ashes partly filled the platforms on which the statues stood.

But today’s discussion is about mulch, not about how Easter Islanders’ society degenerated into chaos and near-extinction. Not having wood for cremations was no longer a problem when, starving and fighting amongst themselves, they discovered a ready source of protein in cannibalism. (Diamond wrote that “The most inflammatory taunt that could be snarled at an enemy was ‘The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth.'” Have your children memorize that quote. It should stop a playground bully in his tracks.)

I fell in love with mulch from reading “The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book.” The old girl, a sister to detective novelist Rex Stout, was far ahead of her time in the 1950s when she described growing a wonderful garden without ever cultivating. She covered her garden permanently with eight inches of old hay, moving a little aside to plant and harvest her vegetables. If weeds come through, she said, throw more mulch on them. That’s exactly what I do. But I also cultivate; sorry, Ruthie. With all the rain lately, I’ve had ample grass clippings to mulch with in addition to old hay.

(Raised by Quakers to think unconventionally, Ruth once accompanied temperance radical Carry Nation on a saloon-smashing raid at age 16. What a gal!)

Stout wrote that practically anything can be used as mulch, but I don’t remember her mentioning rocks.

The Easter Islanders grew sweet potatoes, yams, taro, bananas and sugarcane in fields with large rocks spaced loosely so plants could come up between. Crops were planted in fields with gravel-size rocks a foot thick above the soil. Boulders were piled in walls as windbreaks to protect plants from frequent strong winds. Diamond said these “lithic mulch” methods are not unique to Easter Island, but have been recorded in many of the world’s dry zones, including in the southwest U.S. by the cliff-dwelling ancient Anasazi.

All types of mulch essentially help hold moisture, prevent weeds and reduce erosion, but the dark colored lava rocks from the prehistoric volcanoes which created Easter Island also slow-released valuable minerals into the soil and moderated temperature by absorbing heat in the daytime for release at night, greatly increasing yields.

If you use round river rocks or crushed limestone or lava rock as decorative mulch around your shrubbery, I suppose you could call yourself a “lithic mulcher.” It sounds impressive enough to include in your obituary. As for myself, I hope to be remembered as the gardener who introduced a completely new concept in garden mulch, that is, used carpet. It is readily obtained at no cost. Use a box cutter to easily cut it from the back side in widths to fit your rows.

Some years ago I began laying carpet strips along both sides of my green beans, which I trellis on six-foot-high hog wire because it has holes big enough that Honey can reach through to pick beans on the other side.

I like to tell people my wife won’t pick beans unless she can walk on carpet and doesn’t have to bend over.

(Fred Miller’s two books of stories are only $10, available locally at Calcutta Giant Eagle, Pottery City Antique Mall, Museum of Ceramics, Frank’s Pastries, Davis Bros. pharmacies, and the Old Ft. Steuben gift shop.)