Vegetable Gardening Tips & Techniques for a Great Garden in Any Soil

The Mittleider Method of vegetable gardening is sometimes called "the best of organic", because we use only natural mineral nutrients, and eliminate weeds and pests without pesticides and herbicides. And virtually nothing is left to chance - unlike some who depend on the unknown composition of manure and compost as the only source of food for their gardens.

These methods promise every family a great garden in any soil - without any soil amendments - and in virtually any climate. And millions of families' lives are being blessed and made healthier and more prosperous by following this recipe for vegetable gardening success. A free ebook, and excellent free gardening tips and techniques are available at www.foodforeveryone.org.

I'm asked occasionally if the Mittleider gardening method is really sustainable in the long run, because some folks think it requires modern day fertilizers. Since some folks feel that today's fertilizers may not always be available in the future, how viable is this system for ongoing sustainability in the long-run?

First, the Mittleider method is NOT dependent on commercial fertilizers! Our experience around the world for over 40 years, however, is that everywhere we have been - including several countries in Africa, Armenia, Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, Russia, and 23 others - fertilizers have always been available. We just provide them as a "pay-it-forward" loan to those we teach, and their greatly increased production makes next year's natural mineral nutrients affordable!

The careful use of natural mineral fertilizers increases a family's gardening yield many times - sometimes as much as 10 times what they were growing without them. This is what has allowed America to change from one person feeding 4 or 5, to one person feeding 100 other people. So why would we NOT use them?? And why would we not want to teach people in the developing countries to use them - unless perhaps we WANT them to stay in the 19th century?

In America and the other developed countries, we recommend people obtain enough natural mineral fertilizers and seed (a #10 can of 15 varieties of heirloom seeds is available at www.growfood.com) for at least one extra year's garden. Mineral Fertilizers keep almost indefinitely, and they cost very little, compared to the yield they produce. Small storable packages of micro-nutrients are also available at www.growfood.com. I'll explain how to grow without mineral nutrients next.

I strongly recommend everyone buy and store enough fertilizeers for one growing season, along with seeds. Fertilizer has an almost unlimited shelf life, and seeds in your freezer will keep 20 years!

If fertilizers do ever become unavailable, using the methods we teach with manure, compost, or even human waste, as "Manure Tea," I submit that the Mittleider gardener will still grow 2 to 4 times as much as traditional methods.

As an example, let's discuss the worst case scenario: Suppose there ARE no mineral nutrients available. Here's how you can grow a productive and healthy garden using manure tea. Get a large burlap bag and a 55-gallon barrel. Find cow or horse manure (chicken or turkey is twice as hot, so less will be needed), and fill the bag 2/3's full. Place the bag in the barrel and fill it with water. Let the manure "tea" soak or "steep" for 24 hours, then use the tea to water your vegetable plants.

Replace the bag of manure in the barrel and let steep for 48 hours. Use the tea, then dump the spent manure out and dig into an unused portion of the garden - it has almost no nutrient value, but can improve soil tilth.

Remember to plant your plants a little further apart when using manure tea, because they will be competing for less available nutrition. And every watering should be with the manure tea for your plants to be healthy and thrive. You should expect to grow a smaller garden, and spend some time finding manure.

If manure isn't even available, consider saving kitchen scraps and human waste. Many countries do it all the time, so it's not the end of the world. And all clean, healthy plant residue should be saved and properly composted for re-use in the garden - again preferably as manure tea.

Whether or not you have mineral nutrients be sure you learn how to grow your plants vertically wherever possible. All vining crops, as well as not-so-traditional candidates such as tomatoes, eggplants, and even peppers (the greenhouse indeterminate variety), should be grown up baling twine strings to T-Frames, or on stakes.

Done properly, this one procedure can improve your garden yields at least 2 to 4 times. The details are in several of the Mittleider gardening books, and much free information is in the FAQ section at www.foodforeveryone.org/faq.

Are tomatoes one of your favorites? But only if they're picked ripe from the garden, right? And wouldn't you like to grow your own!

The Mittleider Method of gardening can produce 100 tons of tomatoes on one acre! Now you may only have 250 square feet for your garden, but that means you can grow over 1,000 pounds of tomatoes in that tiny space! How is this possible, since field-grown tomato growers do well to produce 35 tons per acre?!

I'll describe "The poor man's hydroponic method" of growing in a 1-acre garden, using raised beds, or Grow-Boxes, as Dr. Jacob R. Mittleider calls them. And remember that just one acre of tomatoes grown successfully using this method - and selling them for just $.50 per pound - would yield $100,000 per year! You can quickly figure how much you could grow, just by comparing the size of your own garden.

One acre (43,560 square feet) will accommodate 312 - 30' rows of tomatoes, grown in 4' X 30' Grow-Boxes, with 3 1/2' side aisles, 5' end aisles, and 5' aisles around the perimeter.
Planted 9" apart, that amounts to 12,792 tomato plants (41 per bed).Growing a large tomato that averages 8 ounces (some varieties actually average 10-12 ounces), feeding and watering properly, and growing vertically, each plant should produce 16# of fruit from July through October in zone 6, which is Salt Lake City, Utah.
Good varieties like Better Boy and Big Beef will produce a "hand" of 3-7 tomatoes every 5-7" up a 7' stem in 4 months' production. Using 4 per hand X 12 hands X 1/2# per tomato you get 24#. And I will reduce that by 33%, in order to be very conservative. This amounts to 204,672 pounds of tomatoes - or $102,336 at $.50 per pound. Maybe you could live off the land!

In the next module I'll expand on this subject and discuss costs. I'll also tell you how you can increase these already great yields by another 50%!

In the last module I discussed how you can grow more tomatoes than most folks ever thought possible. Now let's have a reality check on the costs of all this - and then go further and REALLY produce some tomatoes!

There certainly are costs, such as, 1) creating and filling the boxes, 2) making T-Frames, 3) wires or pipes - and baling twine strings, and 4) automating the watering. These one-time capital expenditures - amounting to less than $250 - will be more than recovered in the first year (1,000# of fresh home-grown tomatoes is worth how much?).

The ideal size for your 250 square feet of space would be 11' wide by 22 1/2' long, with 2 4'-wide 8"-tall containers and a center aisle 3'-wide. This will grow 4 rows of 31 plants at 9" apart and yield 1240# with only 10#/plant.

Now, suppose you'd like to increase your yield even further (consider the fact that hydroponic growers can grow 330 tons or 660,000# per year on one acre. Of course, they have millions of dollars invested in year-round greenhouses, etc.).

By simply putting an arched PVC roof over the Grow-Boxes and covering them with 6 mil greenhouse plastic - for less than $100 - you can lengthen your growing season by 4 to 8 weeks, or as much as 50%!

Now you're looking at 300,000# of tomatoes per acre, and almost half the yield of the expensive hydroponic growers - but you're growing "in the dirt", because your boxes are open at the bottom, so your plants get all the natural nutrients available to them from the soil.

And you don't use the greenhouse covering all the time, so your plants benefit from direct sunlight as well. Imagine That! And your garden can qualify as an organic garden, if you do everything properly and don't use any pesticides or herbicides.

Do you think these numbers are hard to believe? Just visit a greenhouse tomato operation and see tomato plants that are 20' and 30' long - still producing after more than a year!

Several of Dr. Mittleider's books teach tomato production, and I encourage you to read them. Go to www.growfood.com and look for Let's Grow Tomatoes, Gardening By The Foot, and Grow-Bed Gardens - all available as part of the Mittleider Gardening Library CD.

Would you like to SEE how it's done? Pictures of the plants I'm growing adjacent to Utah's Hogle Zoo, in Salt Lake City, are posted at MittleiderMethodGardening@yahoogroups.com, in the Pictures section.

Let's hear it for growing - and eating - our own tomatoes!

The question is often asked about the frequency of fertilizing vegetable plants. One chart says summer squash is to be fed 5 times in the growing season. But what about those lucky people who grow it from February through November? Do they need to keep fertilizing for a longer period of time?

Fertilizing frequency is an important topic for several reasons. Issues such as cost, toxicity to plants and/or humans, and seepage into ground water sources are a few.

Let's answer the question first, and then explain in detail the reasons for it. If you want to continue to produce a crop throughout the growing season you must continue to feed your plants.

How many times to feed should only be an issue with ever-bearing crops, such as squash, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, etc., because single crop varieties, such as cabbage, lettuce, and spinach only receive between 3 and 5 feedings after transplanting, and you stop feeding 3 weeks before harvest.

Let's review a comparison with typical organic growers, who apply 2-3" of manure on their garden before planting, with the Mittleider Method, to put the toxicity and ground water pollution issues into perspective (and hopefully to discourage you from indiscriminate applications of manure).

Some folks praise manure because it's only 1% nitrogen, and curse ammonium nitrate because it's 34%. However, they may not have checked their math on what is actually happening in their soil. Applying just 2" of manure to a single soil-bed (not the aisles - just the growing area) adds 250-300# of manure to the soil. This includes about 2.5 pounds of actual nitrogen. That's a lot of nitrogen all at once - the equivalent of over 7 pounds of 34-0-0 - and it will often burn young plants or emerging seedlings.

The Mittleider Method advocates applying only 1# of Weekly Feed mix each week to a 30'-long soil-bed. The Weekly Feed mix is 13-8-13, therefore you have added only 2 ounces of actual nitrogen to your soil. For you to apply as much nitrogen as the average organic gardener using manure, you would have to apply the Weekly Feed 20 times!

In addition, they apply it all at once, and much fertilizer is therefore susceptible of being toxic to their plants and/or washed into the ground water system. You, on the other hand, never have more than a couple of ounces at a time in the 3,000+ pounds of soil that make up the top one foot of your soil-bed, and your plants quickly use that up.

Part II follows - Read it!

Your plants need water-soluble mineral nutrients constantly throughout their growing cycle, but nitrogen is volatile and returns quickly to the air. Phosphorus and potassium also become fixed (adhered) to the soil particles fairly quickly, and so become unavailable. Therefore, we feed weekly to overcome those problems - rather than applying everything all at once at the beginning.

Some people are tired of their garden and fresh produce by the first of August, so they're happy for it to quit producing. However, if you want your tomatoes and peppers to continue producing right up until winter frost kills your plants, you should keep feeding them until a few weeks before frost. We recommend 8 weeks for tomatoes, 6 weeks for peppers, and 4 weeks for cucumbers.

Are you a successful gardener? Have you ever wished you could share your knowledge and experience with others - and maybe even get paid for it?

Writing a gardening book is a LOT of work! It requires a broad and deep level of knowledge about the subject, as well as a major commitment of time AND money for many months, if not years.

Thankfully, you don't have to write a gardening book to tell others about great gardening methods. Someone else has done all the hard work, and is willing to share with everyone, including you and everyone you know.

Dr. Jacob R. Mittleider traveled the world for almost 40 years, devoting himself to teaching and demonstrating the best possible family vegetable gardening methods. His gardening books are classics that work and are loved in countries and climates all over the world.

Food For Everyone was established in 1998 as a non-profit Charitable Foundation to preserve Dr. Mittleider's legacy and help EVERY family increase their gardening success.

To help accomplish this mission 5 of Dr. M's gardening books have been digitized, including all the pictures and illustrations as good as or better than in the paper books.

The final piece of the puzzle fell into place just last week, when we were able to team up with a big player in the internet market called ClickBank, and create a free affiliate program that works for virtually everyone!

You can now sell - as an Affiliate of the Food For Everyone Foundation - these 5 great gardening books. And to repeat, it costs you NOTHING to be an Affiliate and receive 40% on all sales of the books that you generate.

You don't have to stock the books, handle the transaction, ship the goods, or collect the money! Clickbank has autometed everything.

All you do is tell people about these wonderful gardening books. Your email list will even work fine.

And if you have a webpage, a blog, or a Squidoo lens you can place the gardening books link there also.

Even if you are on MySpace or Youtube you can tell people about these great gardening books and receive 40% of the sale price.

And by the way, the digital copies cost 40% less than the paper copies, without sales taxes or shipping/handling costs, plus of course people have instant access to them.

Here's the simple 3 step process that will make you the real gardening hero for those you know and care about:

Step 1 - Sign up for a Free Clickbank account using this link http://steveffeo.mittleider.hop.clickbank.net/

When you sign up you will create a nickname/id

Step 2 - Looking at Example 1 and 2 below -
Replace the word "Steveffeo" with your Clickbank id/nickname.

Step 3 - Add this code to your Website, Blog, Squidoo lens, Myspace, Youtube, or send it to your email list and earn 40% of every sale.

The process is 100% automated by Clickbank. They even handle all payments to you directly!

It is literally that easy! Just replace Steveffeo with your CB id and you are making money.

You can use the code on a website, Squidoo lens, blog or via email to your friends, family or email list.

If you want to use the link in an email use Example 1 for proper formatting..

Example 1
http://steveffeo.mittleider.hop.clickbank.net/

For all other internet applications use Example 2..

Example 2
a href="http://steveffeo.mittleider.hop.clickbank.net/"
target="_top">Click Here! at the end to make it live. You can replace "Click here" with any marketing tag lines you prefer.

To dress up your pages, and make them look professional, you can use any of the images on the Food For Everyone Foundation website. Simply mention where it came from

If you don't have a website, but would like to, I recommend you consider creating a Squidoo lens. It's free of charge, simple to do, and you can earn money AND help the Foundation at the same time.

To create a FREE Squidoo lens and earn 40% please use the link below. This will automatically join you to the main Foundation group. I will approve all lenses that have five sections or more. Squidoo will not publish an empty lens, so have fun with building a lens.

Tell the world about your gardening success and your opinions about the Foundation's method of gardening. And advertise the books to receive the Affiliate's 40% of all sales.

http://www.squidoo.com/group/create_lens/Foodforeveryone?forward=true

Best of success! We look forward to having you join us.

I'm often asked by people how they can maximize the use of the limited space they have for a vegetable garden. Many urban dwellers only have a couple of hundred square feet of ground that's sunny enough to grow a successful garden. Others, in the suburbs or in more rural settings, might have as much as 5,000 to 10,000 square feet. With that size garden you can actually feed your family if you will use the tips I'll give you here.

I will describe the steps to a highly successful gardening experience in a garden of 1,000 square feet. These tips and techniques are the secrets to a great garden in any soil, and in virtually any climate.

A one thousand square foot garden can grow a tremendous amount of produce if you do it properly (how about 5,000# of tomatoes)! If left alone, or done haphazardly, however, it will be a big disappointment, and you will grow weeds instead, so following the recipe is definitely important.

Many people have clay soil, and believe they cannot grow successfully without substantial time, effort, and money spent in amending it. Clay soil is NOT a problem, and NO soil amendments are needed if you will create slightly raised, level, ridged beds as described in the free e-book at www.growfood.com - in the Learn section. And be sure to use the lime and other natural mineral nutrients as instructed!

Lay-out and stake your garden with 18"-wide soil-beds, and aisles at least 3' wide. These are the ideal dimensions to maximize the use of your limited gardening space, while giving plants the space they need to grow. Use 4 - 2" X 2" PAINTED stakes per soil-bed. Depending on your dimensions you can have 11 - 20'-long beds with 3'-wide aisles. I'll use that shape for my example.

Another common mistake family gardeners often make is planting too much of the single-crop vegetables, such as lettuce, cabbage, cauliflower, etc.

I recommend you plant only a small amount - say 1/2 bed of each of these things at most - for the following reason. Single-crop plants mature all at once. This means that even with only 10' rows of each you will have 20 heads of lettuce, 20 heads of cauliflower, and 20 heads of broccoli all maturing at virtually the same time, and THEY'LL ALL NEED TO BE PICKED AT THE SAME TIME. Otherwise they get old and bad, and they attract both bugs and diseases.

Whenever you plant single-crop vegetables, plant only what you can use, give away, sell, or store in the 1-2 week ideal harvesting window. If you want them all season you must do several small plantings - spaced at 2-3 week intervals.

It's for this reason, as well as to get the most from your gardening efforts and limited space, that I recommend you grow EVERBEARING crops like tomatoes, cucumbers, pole beans, peppers, eggplant, melons and squash. And I recommend you grow everything you can vertically using T-Frames or stakes! This is a BIG secret to multiplying your yields AND reducing your losses to diseases, foot traffic, and pests.

Start your garden by being certain that it's totally weed free, including 4-5' on all sides, at the time of planting. Then use a 2-way (also called a scuffle or hula) hoe to quickly and easily weed again about 10 days after planting, or as soon as the weeds begin to show their faces. NEVER WAIT for the weeds to grow bigger! They're most vulnerable when they are tiny, and they are very easy to eliminate. You might have to weed two or three times, but then you will have a healthy, weed-free garden all season long. This will also reduce your problems with bugs and diseases!

Rather than planting everything by seed directly in your garden soil, I recommend you grow seedlings in a mixture of sawdust (or peat moss, perlite, etc.) and sand - in a 2 to 1 ratio - using plastic trays, as the best way to start many varieties of plants.

You can EXTEND YOUR GROWING SEASON BY SEVERAL WEEKS simply by transplanting healthy seedlings of almost all large plants. They will grow faster and will be healthier in a protected environment than what you grow in the ground from seed. The seedlings must have constant sunlight to thrive, however, just as if they were in the garden. Growing seedlings is very rewarding, and is a simple process, but again you MUST follow the steps accurately and consistently.

You can quickly learn to become competent at growing your own seedlings by reading and applying chapter 22 of The Mittleider Gardening Course, also available at www.growfood.com.

If you decide to grow directly from seeds in the ground, make sure your seed-bed is soft and smooth. Scratch a SHALLOW furrow on both sides of the bed near the ridges. For very small seeds mix seeds with sand in a 1 to 100 ratio, and sprinkle carefully the length of the row, as evenly as possible. Then cover the seeds WITH SAND rather than the clay soil (this goes for ALL seeds in clay soil), and less than 1/8th inch deep. Meanwhile, remember that only ONE OUNCE of small seeds like tomato seeds includes TEN THOUSAND SEEDS, so don't plant too many!

Which crops you should plant depends on the temperatures in your growing area. Most places cannot grow warm-weather crops like tomatoes, peppers, beans, melons, and squash in the winter months. Wait to transplant those into the garden until daytime temperatures are 65-70 and night-time temperatures are 50 or above.

Cool-weather crops like cauliflower, broccoli, spinach, beets, lettuce, and the like, can be planted when it's colder, but don't plant if you have frosts at night, and remember that even these hardy plants need daytime temperatures above 50 degrees Fahrenheit to grow.

Some people like to minimize the chore of weeding by putting black plastic everywhere. Using black plastic is generally NOT a good idea when planting seeds. The open space needed for seeds to emerge and grow successfully leaves room for weeds to grow as well. And weeds from all around the opening will find it and choke out your tiny vegetable seedlings as they emerge. Meanwhile, the plastic makes it very difficult to weed thoroughly and successfully.

Black plastic can be used successfully when growing seedlings, but it is not a cure-all, and I believe it's less desirable than leaving the ground bare and weeding early and often.

Proper and timely watering is essential to a successful garden. Sometimes people think they can save time by sprinkling everything, or by leaving soaker hoses on while they do other things. Soaker hoses are less than ideal for several reasons: First, the holes are easily plugged. Second, weeding around the hose is difficult. Third, the hose is easily cut when attempting to weed around it. And fourth, water quantity is uncertain and sometimes inadequate.

You should never sprinkle a vegetable garden. It is a great waste of water, it waters the ridges and aisles, encouraging weed growth, and it increases diseases and pest problems.

The best and easiest watering method I know is the semi-automated method taught in chapter 16 of the Mittleider Gardening Course. This uses 3/4" Schedule 200 PVC pipe, drilled with 3 #57 holes every 4", with the pipe running down the center of the soil-bed and lifted off the soil about 2" by small 2 X 4" wooden blocks. Water is controlled by an inexpensive ball valve placed at the head of each row, and the whole garden is plumbed together for fast, accurate, and highly efficient watering.

If you can't or don't want to automate your watering, simply wrap a large rag around the end of your garden hose, then place the hose in the soil-bed. If your beds are level, as they should be, the entire soil-bed will quickly receive the needed 1" of water. And whichever method you use, remember to water daily - especially in warm weather - unless it rains. Whether your watering is automated or manual, watering only the root zone of the plants will save you more than 1/2 the water you'd use with traditional methods.

For a highly productive garden feed your plants the natural mineral nutrients they must have for healthy growth. And provide those nutrients regularly throughout the growth cycle to maximize your yields of tasty, healthy fruits and vegetables. Complete instructions for fertilizing your garden are provided in the Learn section and in all of the gardening books that are available on the website at www.growfood.com.

And finally, harvest your vegetables at peak maturity! Many home gardeners leave crops in the garden for weeks past the ideal harvest time. This is bad for several reasons including the food loses nutritional value when it is past its prime; it begins to attract bugs and disease; it often even begins to spoil; and the plant residue is worthless as compost or soil amendment if it is infested with bugs or disease.

Pick produce when it's ripe, and give it away if you can't use, preserve, or sell it. That way many people are blessed by your bounty, and your own garden doesn't suffer.

Successful gardening!

Jim Kennard