Container Vegetable Gardening – Size, Soil Materials, and Recommended Fertilizers

First off, you must have full sunlight and adequate water to have a successful vegetable garden, so find an all-day sunny spot with a good source of clean (not necessarily drinkable) water before you do anything else.

The next issue you’ll face is the details of how to build, level, fill and fertilize your containers.

Opinions differ widely regarding the answers to the following key questions about creating a container garden. The right answers, if followed, will go a long way toward assuring your success in growing a bumper crop of healthy and tasty vegetables.

1. Should top-soil be used, either by itself or mixed with other materials? 2. Should manure and compost be used for the planting medium or soil-mix? 3. What is the best ratio of materials to use for a container vegetable garden? 4. Is it important to use organic fertilizers in addition to the soil mix? 5. What size is best, in order to maximize yield in the minimum amount of space? 6. How deep does the container need to be to provide adequate space for roots?

  1. First of all, top soil is NOT recommended for use in containers, because it 1) is heavy, 2) is difficult to work with, 3) does not drain as well as other options, and 4) often contains one or more of the 3 “baddies” – disease, weed seeds, and bugs.
  2. Every gardener should also consider the following three issues very carefully before using manure and compost in containers, raised-beds, or any other type of vegetable garden, especially as the only or even the main ingredients in the soil-mix.
    1. As much as 95% of the composted materials available to the typical family gardener have NOT been sterilized, or even heat-treated in the composting process. And yet in order to have clean materials they must have been composted at 140 degrees or more for about 3 weeks, which is the time it takes to thoroughly compost organic materials aerobically, and that’s the only sure way to remove diseases, weed seeds, and bugs.
    2. In addition to the great potential for problems with disease, weed seeds and bugs, using manure and compost, even just for fertilizer, leaves you guessing as to what nutrition you are giving your plants. You never see the list of plant nutrients or their percentages on a bag of manure or compost, because no-one KNOWS what they are.
    3. And the third reason you need to be cautious about using manure/compost is that using them can often lead to a salinity problem and burn your plants. For example, applying 2″-3″ of manure to the planting area of a soil-bed or container adds 10#-15# of fertilizer salts all at once to the soil in a 30′-long bed or box. That’s more salt than the soil should have in an entire growing season! Imagine the effect of applying that much manure to the entire garden or worse yet, making it 25-50% of the entire soil mix, both of which are often done by enthusiastic organic gardeners!

3. Rather than using manure and/or compost in your container garden you will be wise to use two or more CLEAN ingredients for your soil-mix, including 30 to 35% sand (by volume) mixed with any combination of the following – sawdust, perlite, peat moss, ground-up pine needles, coconut husks, coffee hulls, rice hulls, or vermiculite – depending on cost and availability.

4. Plants cannot “eat” or even use animal excrement or compost. Both must fully decompose and their organic parts must revert to water-soluble inorganic minerals before plants can access them. Plants need small, measured and balanced amounts of 13 natural mineral nutrients dissolved in water and absorbed through the root hairs over the entire course of their growing cycle, rather than a large application of salts at one time.

For real success in your garden you must give your plants exactly what they need for sustained healthy growth. I recommend applying only about 7 OUNCES of mineral salts per week to a 30 foot-long bed or box, which is the amount applied weekly in a Mittleider garden.

Get the Mittleider Gardening Course book at www.growfood.com/shop to discover how to do it yourself – instructions and natural mineral formulas are all there.

5. Now briefly, let’s discuss ideal sizes for your containers. Any length is fine, depending on available space. But the width of both the container and aisles is important. You do not want to waste precious space in your garden, but plants need light and air, so the ideal width is beds of either 18″ or 4′, and aisles of at least 3′, and preferably 3 1/2′. Here’s why:

An 18′ width allows two rows of most plants, with room for light and air, plus feeding, watering, weeding, and harvesting between the rows. And a 4′-wide bed allows 4 rows of most plants or 2 rows of very large or climbing plants. Details on growing vertically are the subject for another article, but suffice it to say that you can at least double or triple your yields by growing vertically.

6. And you only need container frames 8″ high. If possible it’s good to set them on existing soil, so your plants’ roots can go into the native soil and get additional nutrients, but it’s not necessary. You can even grow healthy plants on a driveway, deck, or even a flat roof! Remember you’re feeding them everything they need with the natural mineral nutrients.

Good Growing!

Mittleider Gardening Magic – Advice and Tips for Your Vegetable Garden

Welcome to Mittleider Gardening Magic advice and tips! I’m excited to be sharing the wisdom of “the world’s greatest vegetable gardener.”

I’ve been a Mittleider gardener ever since the mid 70’s when Jacob Mittleider moved about a mile from my home, and I became his student – patterning my own garden after his prolific backyard masterpiece.

We became friends as I worked with him over the years, and after assisting him on a major teaching project in Russia in 1993, I continued working with him on several other projects. And finally in 1998, after 20 years of study and work under Jacob’s tutelage, I was given the responsibility and privilege of carrying on his work. I accepted this full-time non-paying job with the proviso that he would continue to stay involved and answer any and all questions, to which he readily agreed, since gardening was his life’s greatest love (just ask his wife, Mildred). Sadly, Jacob died just one month after his 88th birthday, on May 23, 2006. Therefore anything you need to know that Jacob hasn’t already taught me, I will research from his prolific writings.

So, just who is Jacob Mittleider, and what’s his Method all about? You may have seen a neighbor’s beautiful and highly productive Mittleider vegetable garden, and wished yours looked and produced like that. Or perhaps you’ve heard of the great work he’s done around the world. Maybe you even have one of his books and have experimented with growing your own vegetable garden this way. If so, then you may know Jacob’s history, but for those who don’t know him let me tell you very briefly why he’s so famous, and why he promises you a “great garden in any soil and in any climate.”.

For the last 43 years of his life Dr. Jacob Mittleider quietly and without fanfare dramatically improved the lives of multiplied thousands of people, and even changed the economies of countries, by teaching people how to better feed their families by growing healthy and highly productive vegetable crops – both personally and commercially. He created 75 teaching and demonstration projects in 27 countries – and documented his experiences and the great lessons he learned in 10 books, 9 manuals, and 86 video lectures.

To help tell the world’s families about this great gardening method, we have established a 501©(3) Public Charitable Foundation, and created a website at http://www.foodforeveryone.org, with a section for free Gardening Techniques and one for frequently asked questions (FAQ’s). The Mittleider Gardening Basics book is there for you free, with Dr. Mittleider’s best wishes for gardening success. There is also a page where you can buy any or all of his books and CD’s, as well as his Mittleider Magic natural mineral Micro-Nutrients, from which you can make his Mittleider Magic Weekly Feed fertilizer mix, also known as “the poor man’s hydroponic mix,” because it is a scientifically balanced and complete plant nutrient mix.

So much for introductions! Let’s get down to learning about growing better vegetable gardens, shall we?

What problems or questions do you have? I will teach you the principles of successful gardening, but I also want to resolve any concerns you may have. There are many conflicting ideas, methods, and procedures out there, and we will do our best to give you factual “works every time” advice and counsel. A few topics we’ll discuss, about which you might have some concern, include:

1. “My soil is terrible, and nothing will grow. What must I do with my soil so that it will grow a good garden?”

2. “I hear that chemicals are poisoning our waterways, and that organic growing is much healthier, how do I grow a healthy, productive garden without hurting the environment?”

3. “It seems like so much labor-intensive work, with little reward. Is there a way to have a garden that makes financial sense?”

4. “Weeds just take over our garden, and the vegetables don’t really have a chance. What’s the answer?”

5. “Bugs, diseases, and critters get most of our produce! It’s hardly worth growing for the little bit we manage to save – what can we do to minimize our losses?”

6. “We want to be self-sufficient in food, but we’ve heard it would take 2 ½ acres in order to be truly self/sufficient. We live on a 1/3-acre lot – what practical chance do we have to accomplish that?”

7. “I hear using hybrid plants will only make us dependent on the big seed companies, and I want to use heirlooms, so I can save the seed and be assured I’ll always be able to have good plants, is this something I can do, and how do I do it?”

Exciting stuff, don’t you agree? Join me for real, practical advice and answers to the hard gardening questions. You may also pose your own questions, and you’ll find many answers by going to http://www.foodforeveryone.org and looking in the Posts or FAQ pages. Until next time – Great Gardening!

Understanding Salinity & Osmosis for a Sustainable Garden

The physical law known as osmosis affects plants and animals alike, and it is important to understand how it works, so your garden can benefit, rather than be harmed by its universal effects. You will also be healthier if you pay attention to salinity and osmosis in your own body.

The principle of osmosis states that where there are two saline solutions separated by a semi-permeable membrane, the solution with the lower salinity will migrate across the membrane to the saltier solution until the two solutions are equal in salinity. I recommend you re-read the foregoing statement and really understand what it means, because it is VERY important.

In humans, animals, and plants mineral salts are essential to life. They are taken into the bloodstream of the body by mouth, or the sap of the plant through the roots, and are then used to build the cell structure and maintain the health of the living organism.

In plants, so long as the salt solution in the plant is stronger than the solution outside of the plant, available water will continue coming into the plant. A plant is more than 80% water by weight, and so plants need water constantly. In hot weather it’s especially important, since as much as 95% of the water that enters a plant is used to perform transpiration – like human sweating – to keep the plant cool.

Most everyone understands that if water is withheld from a plant it will quickly wilt and die. What most folks don’t understand, however, is that even if ample water is available to the plant roots, if it is as salty as the solution inside the plant, the plant CAN NOT absorb any of that water. And if the water being applied is saltier than the water inside the plant, water will LEAVE the plant.

How can something like that happen? Who would be so foolish as to water their plants with salty water? Actually it can happen fairly easily, and it does happen more than people realize. Let me mention two ways that are probably the most common, so that you can avoid having it happen to you.

First, many people apply 2-3″ of manure to their growing beds, in the desire to fertilize the plants and improve the soil structure. The problem is that many times manure – especially feed-lot manure – is quite salty, containing from ½ to 2% each of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, in addition to other elements, even including such things as sodium chloride or common table salt because of salt-licks provided to the animals.

Applying 2+ inches of manure to a 30′-long soil-bed requires 200-300# of manure, and can add several POUNDS of these various salts to your soil. The salinity this creates will often pull water out of your plants, “burning” and even killing them. By contrast, the Mittleider method of feeding your garden adds about 7 ounces of salts to the soil in a 30′ bed a few times over the course of the growing season.

The second way saline water can get into your garden is if you use water that has had some kind of salt added upstream from your garden, or from a well with saline water. This almost happened to me just this morning.

I was watering the Armenia Project’s model garden I’m using to demonstrate and teach the Mittleider Method in Ashtarak, a small city near the Armenian Capital city of Yerevan. The water comes in a small canal, and it was clear when I began, but as I started to water a bed of eggplant, the water suddenly became very cloudy and dirty. Luckily, I noticed what was happening and stopped watering immediately.

If you ever find yourself with saline water in your plants’ root zone, you should flush the salts out as quickly and completely as possible. This requires heavy watering several times with clean water. Sometimes it’s fairly easy, and sometimes it’s difficult or even impossible to accomplish before your plants have died.

As with most everything in life, prevention is much better than cure, so avoid the conditions that can lead to a salinity problem, and you’ll help assure yourself of a sustainable garden with healthy, fast-growing plants.

Soil Tests for the Family Garden – Necessity or a Waste?

The question is often asked if the family gardener should pay for a soil test before planting his garden.  Our advice is to not pay for a soil test.  However, a few students have discovered a statement by Dr. Jacob Mittleider in the book Food For Everyone (P 137) wherein he states that “The soil test is the beginning of operations…”.  Following is my response.

The book Food For Everyone was written in 1972, and at that time Dr. Mittleider was having soil tests done wherever he went, including numerous developing countries. However, over the ensuing years he learned enough that by the time most of his GARDENING books were published Jacob no longer used nor recommended soil tests, and here’s why.

Two reasons for soil tests were (1) to determine the soil pH, because plants are best able to take nutrients from the soil and use them when the pH is between 6.5 and 7, and (2) to determine any nutrient deficiencies in the soil.

Through long experience and field testing in gardens all over the world Jacob learned that whenever annual rainfall is 20″ or more the soil pH is below 7 (acidic), and the simple solution is to use lime – to raise the pH and to supply essential calcium.

When annual rainfall is 18″ or below the soil pH is above 7 (alkaline) and the solution is to use gypsum as the calcium source. It will not raise pH because it contains almost equal parts calcium (raises pH) and sulfur (lowers pH).  And Jacob learned that this was usually all that was necessary to grow successfully in high pH soils.

If the high pH in the soil continues to be a problem simply apply sulfur to lower the pH.

Furthermore, Jacob’s long experience with soil tests taught him that they often did not accurately predict the availability of the nutrients to the plants. The natural state of the many mineral compounds in the soil is to be “fixed” or adhered to the soil particles, and in order for the plants to use them the minerals must be water-soluble and pass in the soil water into the plant through the root hairs. That availability changes quickly, and a test taken last month, even if accurate at the time, may not be accurate today or tomorrow.

Jacob also learned that soils throughout the world were almost universally low in available nutrients, and he created a balanced formula containing all 13 essential plant nutrients that he applied everywhere in the world with great success.  And they are applied weekly throughout the growing season so that they are available to the plants as needed.

This knowledge allowed Dr. Mittleider to eliminate the need for soil testing, thus saving time and costs for everyone.  This is a tremendous boon, especially for the family gardener, because they have neither the time, the money, the knowledge, nor the patience to order and wait for soil tests.