Mittleider Gardening Magic – Fertilizing 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 other projects. And finally in 1998, after more than 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 past 43 years Dr. Jacob Mittleider has 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 has created 75 teaching and demonstration projects in 27 countries – and has 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 fertilizers, 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?”

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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 Gardening Techniques or FAQ pages. Until next time – Great Gardening!

Hybrid Seeds – Good Or Bad?

Many people are fearful of using hybrid seeds. Some confuse them with GMO seeds, and the two are entirely different! Some folks feel they should always be able to use the seeds from the plants they grow for their next crop, and that because seeds from hybrid plants do not produce the same as the parent they are being robbed of that on-going benefit. I submit that hybrid seeds are well worth using, and following are a few reasons why.

We are all hybrids! And most of us can reproduce, just as plants from hybrid seeds can reproduce. But our progeny will be different than we are, just as the progeny from hybrid plants’ seeds will be different from their parents.

In humans it makes for uniqueness and diversity and is wonderful. In vegetables and fruits it isn’t always so great, but hybrids ARE a great blessing by providing greater yields, better appearance and taste, and better disease resistence, among other benefits.

Honorable dedicated growers spend their lives painstakingly cross-breeding multiplied thousands of plants, in order to find the parental match that gives you and me the tastiest, healthiest, fastest growing, and most disease resistant fruits and vegetables possible.

And even after they have found that match they must work HARD and CAREFULLY to assure that each desirable female blossom is pollinated with the exact desired male pollen. Imagine the work involved with tomatoes, for example, where the blossom is tiny and EACH BLOSSOM CONTAINS BOTH MALE AND FEMALE PARTS!

That means they have to use tiny tweezers and magnifying classes to REMOVE the male anther BEFORE it is mature, and then introduce the CORRECT male anther to the female pistil at the exact time they both are mature, and hope pollination occurs – all the while making certain that no OUTSIDE pollinators, such as bees, get to the blossom.

The cost of producing great hybrid seeds is tremendous, and what do the seeds cost you and me? Let’s compare the best hybrid seed with a well known heirloom seed and see what it means in your garden.

Ace tomato seeds can be purchased from MVSeeds.com for $4.50 per ounce. That’s 10,000 seeds for next to nothing! How many will you plant in your garden – 10? 50? Either way the seed cost is nothing. What will it produce? Probably a few pounds per plant, but the size, taste, and other qualities we want in a great tomato may not be the best, or just what you want.

Big Beef tomato seeds, on the other hand, cost $582 per ounce! The smallest quantity MVSeeds.com sells is 10 seeds, and they cost $2.99. So, each seed costs 30 cents. That’s terrible, isn’t it!?

Or is it, really. Let’s compare what you get for your 30 cents with what you get from your virtually free Ace seed.

The Ace is a determinate plant and produces a crop of medium small tomatoes for 3-4 weeks, whereas Big Beef is an indeterminate plant and produces great yields of large, juicy, tasty tomatoes for MANY months – even longer than a year in the tropics – until frost kills it.

Big Beef also has the best disease resistance of almost any tomato variety known to man. That single fact often means the difference between great success and total failure in your garden. How many times have you lavished MONTHS of time, energy, and money on your tomato plants only to have some disease wipe them all out about the time you finally started to harvest a crop. It’s common. Just last year disease wiped out a substantial part of the tomato crop in the entire USA!

I figure that each tomato plant in my garden produces between $30 and $60 in tomatoes. If I grew Ace tomatoes each plant would produce between $10 and $20 in tomatoes that are not as juicy and tasty. How important is the cost of seed?

For my very limited budget Big Beef, and the other hybrids I use, are worth their cost MANY TIMES OVER!