Self Reliance – Grow Your Own Market Garden

Market Gardening – Smaller Gardens

Can a family be totally self-sustaining by using between 1 and 2 acres to grow, eat, and sell food?  Yes!  As a matter of fact, families in many countries are doing it, and they often have gardens much smaller than 1 acre.  However, you should consider carefully what you are getting into.  I’ll paint a picture of the problems first, then show you how blessed you are to be using the best possible growing methods for a family garden, and finally I’ll give you some ideas as to what and how to grow your market garden.

  1. Considerations Before Beginning

Your income depends on what you choose to grow, and how well you follow through in the growing process.  It also depends on how well you learn the financial and marketing aspects of the job.  Growing corn is easy, but doesn’t produce much for the amount of space used, or pay well, unless you like to eat corn stalks.  And someone has to sell the produce and pay the bills, which take substantial time and effort by themselves!

“Self-sustaining” requires very different amounts of food and money, depending on the family size, the standard of living expected, and the debt load you expect the garden to carry.  Debt of $3,000-5,000 per month requires a much greater effort to cover than a debt-free situation.

Location is also a factor.  People in warm climates can often grow into or even right through the winter, while colder climates have a shorter season.  Both locations can improve your production by using the Mittleider Gardening Method.  Warm climates may require lots of water and even a little shade at the hottest times, while cold climates often require more greenhouse seedling production and covering garden crops in spring and fall to extend the season.

Before getting seriously into market gardening you need to understand the commitment involved, and be willing to do it right.  Our grandparents grew gardens, and also often owned animals.  They understood the necessity of working every day to feed, water, and care for their animals and plants.  Regrettably, we’ve forgotten this requirement, as 99% of us have chosen other ways to make a living, and become dependent on the 1% who are highly competent farmers to feed all of us.

You must understand and accept that there is very little respite for vacations, etc. during the growing season.  A good garden requires your attention on a daily basis!

On the other hand you, and especially your children, will benefit greatly by having a fixed and important responsibility that requires daily commitment and real effort to accomplish.  Think of it as a paper route without the 2:30 A.M hours, the driving, the danger, barking dogs, etc.

And one last consideration:  A hundred years ago, everyone used manure and compost, and it was a fairly level playing field between the family gardener and the market farmer.  Not so today!   Your competition includes hydroponic growers who have invested over a million dollars per acre in buildings and equipment, as well as dozens of employees doing the work.  And by feeding and watering their plants accurately many times each day, they’re growing 330 TONS of tomatoes per acre each year!

  1. You have a big advantage over others

Is all of this daunting?  Have you decided to just give up and forget about growing your own food?  I certainly hope NOT, because it’s important for you and your family to grow a garden for many very valid reasons, which we can’t address in this article.

Understand this.  You can produce much more in less space, using the Mittleider Gardening Method, than other small market growers are doing, so GO FOR IT!

The website at www.growfood.com, the books, CD’s and videos will teach you the gardening principles and procedures by which you will grow your successful market garden.  In studying these things, remember that this unique gardening method has been proven highly effective in thousands of situations, in dozens of countries all around the world.  It’s a recipe!  It WILL work to give you a great garden – in any soil and in virtually any climate.  But you MUST follow the recipe.

III.  Creating Your Own Successful Market Garden

How do you prepare?  

  1. The best gardening book you can have is essential!  I recommend The Mittleider Gardening Course, by Jacob R. Mittleider, as the RECIPE for a great garden of any size.  It is available in digital or paper at www.growfood.com/shop.
  2. START SMALL! Don’t plant more than you can care for properly, and sell, share or use.
  3. Determine the market or markets you will sell to: a) Wholesalers, b) small grocery stores, c) restaurants, d) farmers’ market, e) roadside stand, or f) home delivery.
  4. Learn what vegetables you should grow by determining those that: a) sell well, b) at a good price, c) that you can grow readily.
  5. Build proper facilities including a) a seedling greenhouse with tables, b) T-Frames and c) a good watering system. These are essential for success at this level.
  6. Set up a formal accounting system, including account names and numbers for every category of asset, liability, equity, income, and expense. Get help from your CPA.
  7. Stock up on tools, seeds, and fertilizers, and be sure to include all those costs, as well as your labor, in figuring your market prices.

You’ll have to meet or beat the competition to sell your produce at the beginning.  However, by growing more, bigger, fresher, tastier, and healthier produce than others, you will develop a loyal customer base, and then you can adjust your prices as needed.

In choosing what to grow, consider a) the ease of growing, b) cost and risk of loss, c) the value of the crop, and d) varieties that are popular in your area.  Cabbage is quite easy to grow; it can be started in early spring when many other crops would die; and it only requires about 60 days to mature, so you may get 2 or even 3 crops in a year.  However, it doesn’t bring a very high price in the market, so you must decide if it’s worth it or not.

Let’s look at some scenarios of what could be grown and sold from one acre of ground, with good care and decent weather, and without losses from bugs and diseases (by strictly following the Mittleider Method you will minimize your crops’ susceptibility to those things):

Soil-Bed Garden – 250 30’-long Beds (as if all planted to one crop)

Beans-pole – 120 plants per bed, 1.5# per plant, $.50 per pound – – – $22,500

Corn – 92 plants per bed, 1 ear per plant, $.10 per ear – – – – – – – – –       2,300

Cucumbers – 45 plants per bed, 8# per plant, $.25 per pound – – – – –   22,500

Potatoes – 92 plants per bed, 2.5# per plant, $.10 per pound – – – – – –    5,750

Tomatoes – 40 plants per bed, 10# per plant, $.50 per pound – – – – –   50,000

The above examples are estimates only, and the actual results could be – and have been – much higher or lower, depending on many factors, including experience & care, weather, direct retail marketing vs. wholesale sales, etc.

If you are growing for the retail market using a roadside stand or farmers’ market booth, you will probably want a fairly wide variety of produce, to attract customers.  While corn has low value in terms of yield for a given amount of space, it is VERY popular with customers when it’s fresh, so you may well treat it as a “Loss Leader” and have it available.  But don’t try to plant too many vegetable varieties.  Ten or twelve key types are far easier to handle than twenty to thirty.  And three varieties of tomatoes are usually plenty.  I would plant Big Beef, Italia Mia, and Grape tomatoes.  One planting of Blue Lake pole beans will allow you to sell beans all season long, but bush varieties come on much sooner, and are harvested in just a few weeks.

If your customers are restaurants, you will need to grow the specific things they use, such as specialty lettuces, tomatoes, Ichiban eggplant, small red potatoes, etc.  And you may need to plant a few beds of the single-crop things every couple of weeks, to have them maturing throughout the season.

If your primary market is the large grocery store or wholesale suppliers, they will usually want a large steady supply of a few things, so you may be able to plant everything to the “money” crops of beans, cucumbers, eggplant, peppers, and tomatoes, or multiple plantings of lettuces and other quick-growing crops.

I recommend you consider this material seriously, because the day may come (and much sooner than any of us want) when your garden will be the only way you can feed your family.

Prepare NOW, and be successful no matter what the future brings!

Jim Kennard

Introducing “the Best Gardening Method on the Planet”

Introducing “the Best Gardening Method on the Planet”

The Food For Everyone Foundation’s recent 5-month humanitarian gardening training project in Armenia was a great success in helping people learn to grow their own food, and it is evidence that the Mittleider Gardening Method (MGM) is “the best gardening method on the planet” for the home vegetable gardener.

The Mittleider Gardening Method helps people in several ways.  Of greatest interest to the American home gardener may be our policy of providing free vegetable gardening information, training, tips, and advice on the internet at www.growfood.com.   People from all over the world visit the website to receive free training and advice, as well as to obtain the great gardening books, CDs and software written by Dr. Jacob R. Mittleider. 

The Mittleider Soil-Bed Gardening Basics Course ebook is free on the website at https://growfood.com/learn/.  The free FAQ section also has 365 short gardening articles that answer people’s questions and give advice on many important vegetable gardening subjects.  

In addition, the Foundation’s website provides free greenhouse plans, free plans to automate a garden watering system, and a free gardening group where people share tips and experience with thousands of other successful gardeners – .

Important distinguishing features of the MGM set it apart from other methods and make it “even better than organic” as I will explain below.

Most of the time our gardens are grown right in the soil, with no soil amendments.  We promise ‘a great garden in any soil, in almost any climate’.  From straight sand to the worst clay, we show people how to have success growing healthy, delicious vegetables the first time and every time.”

We learned that “Grow-Boxes” or containers are sometimes needed for people in urban settings.  I assure you that container gardening can be just as effective as growing in the soil, and that 3 of Dr. Mittleider’s 10 books are dedicated to the unique features of the container gardening process.

Because the costs are very low, the Mittleider Method is sometimes called “the poor man’s hydroponic method”, because it borrows from greenhouse growers such things as vertical growing, feeding plants accurately with natural mineral nutrients, and extending the growing season in both spring and fall, all of which greatly reduce costs and increase gardening yields.

The Second major element in the Foundation’s mission is teaching, training, and assisting people directly.  One way we do this in America is by conducting free ½-day group gardening seminars.  These can be arranged by contacting me by email at jim@growfood.com.

The third leg of FFEF’s global mission is conducting humanitarian projects, such as the above mentioned training project in Armenia.  From February to mid July we created a gardening training center in the village of Getk, with housing, classroom, greenhouse, and a 3/4 acre garden. We taught a concentrated college-level gardening course to several students, who became the gardening experts in their own villages, and then we assisted those student graduates in working with 200 families in their villages.  The training center and garden were left in the able hands of an Armenian couple, and we expect the work there will continue.

In Armenia, as in other places we’ve worked, we grew many kinds of vegetables the locals thought couldn’t possibly be grown in “their region”, and often have many non-participating village families coming to our garden for advice, coaching, and free produce”.

Humanitarian projects sometimes take the form of training others who are becoming missionaries for their churches.  One example is Howard (a retired dentist with little previous experience in gardening) and Glenice Morgan, from Southern California, who completed a 2-year mission to Zimbabwe.  They were sent to teach Mittleider gardening to their church members throughout the country, and they did a fabulous job. 

After some study and nominal training in FFEF’s garden at Utah’s Hogle Zoo, the Morgans “had the time of their lives” as they created 84 large gardens and taught over 10,500 people throughout Zimbabwe and three other countries to feed themselves by growing their own healthy vegetables.   And the only teaching material they used was the simplest and most basic of Mittleider’s books, called 6 Steps to Successful Gardening.

I promise that whatever level you are currently on, you too can experience this kind of success – whether it’s in your own home garden, a community effort, or as a humanitarian missionary in some distant country.

The foundation welcomes tax-deductible donations to help extend our efforts.  Gifts can be made at https://growfood.com/non-profit-organization-donate/

Jim Kennard, President

Gardening by the Foot – A Container Gardening Treasure

I have said nothing about this book for a long time, for just one reason. Our inventory of books had brittle binding glue and the pages would fall out at the least provocation.

We’ve finally solved the problem! We purchased a machine and re-bound this great gardening book ourselves, using a Plastic Comb Binder.

Now that we don’t have to worry about them falling apart on you, let me tell you why those growing in containers need to consider getting your copy NOW, while they are available (Grow-Box Gardens, Let’s Grow Tomatoes, and Grow-Bed Gardening are all out of print).

Gardening by the Foot is filled with almost 250 pictures illustrating 140 pages of Jacob’s great how-to instructions on every aspect of growing in containers.

Following are the chapter headings:

1. Introduction
2. Why use Mini Grow-Boxes?
3. What are mini Grow-Boxes?
4. Choosing a Location
5. preparing the area for Mini-Frames
6. Tools and Materials
7. How to Make Mini Grow-Boxes
8. Filling Grow-Boxes with Soil
9. Pre-plant Fertilizers
10. Starting Plants from Seed
11. Planting Seed in Mini-Boxes
12. Transplanting into Mini-Boxes
13. Making markers and Marking Mini-Boxes
14. Fertilizing Crops in Mini-Boxes
15. Common Garden Problems
16. Increasing Yields in Ever-bearing Crops
17. Transplanting Gallon-Size Plants into Mini-Boxes
18. Installing an Automated Watering System
19. Harvesting
20. “A” Frames and Greenhouses
21. Installing Strings to Hold Tall Plants
22. What To Do With Trouble
23. Soil Maggots
24. Nutrient Deficiencies and Corrections
25. Units of Measure

Are you serious about growing your own food? Get Gardening by the foot and SEE how the best gardener in the world did it – in his own backyard garden and in 27 countries around the world.

For a paper copy you can mark up and take to the garden with you, go to
foodforeveryone.org/gardening_by_the_foot/.

Or you can get the digital download instantly and save a few bucks by going to
www.howtoorganicgarden.com/products_pdfs.htm.

Be patient, you have to scroll down the page past several other books.