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!

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.

“Chemical” Fertilizer or “Organic” – Which is “Bad”?

Recently two questions were posed to me by a Mittleider Method gardener who came from a background of using only manure and compost. This person asked:
1. What is the difference between the Mittleider fertilizers and “organic fertilizer”? And why do some “organic-only” users say ours are bad?
2. Do you not recommend building our own compost piles?

Following is my response: The fertilizers we use and recommend are natural mineral nutrients – ground-up rocks, some of which have gone through a simple cleaning and concentration process to assure we get exactly what we bargained for, which is “the most for our money”.

On this website, and in the Mittleider gardening books, CDs and videos we give the formulas in exact detail, so that everyone can purchase wherever they want and mix their own. We are NOT trying to “sell something” with an exclusive, secret fertilizer mix.

Furthermore, every one of the fertilizers used in mixing Mittleider Magic Weekly Feed and Pre-Plant mixes have been approved by the USDA for use in an organic gardening operation. Therefore, we believe that a Mittleider garden DOES qualify as an organic garden.

However, some folks have gone so far with the “organic fertilizer” thing that they won’t use anything but manures, compost, egg shells, blood & bone meal, etc. They believe that anything other than those constitutes a “chemical” and is somehow harmful.

The truth is that – as Organic Gardening Magazine’s J. I. Rodale said – “We’ve gone too far. . . a plant can’t tell the difference between nitrogen from a leaf and that from a fertilizer bag.”

Furthermore, everything in this world is a chemical. All the elements in manure, compost, blood & bone meal, and all the others are chemicals.

So how did we get into this mess?

Years ago people began hearing that things like DDT were dangerous to fish, birds, animals, etc. (which undoubtedly had some truth) and the movement to ban those substances gained momentum until many useful chemicals were totally banned worldwide.

And the final result is that each year millions of African children die of malaria when they could be saved simply by using DDT to eradicate the mosquitoes.

We humans often allow the pendulum to swing too far, and I believe it has swung too far in the organic gardening movement, when people refuse to use ground-up rocks that contain exactly what their plants need to thrive, and instead limit themselves to the use of materials the exclusive use of which kept 20-25% of our ancestors on the farm in order to feed the rest of us (today it’s less than 1%).

I’ve also seen the substantial pictorial evidence Dr. Mittleider accumulated worldwide of the problems unsterilized manure and compost cause in gardens, with crop-destroying diseases, bugs, and weed seeds.

In addition, we are now having major re-calls of vegetables grown with manure because of contamination with salmonella, e-coli (and maybe other harmful bacteria) that are sickening thousands.

So, if organic materials are CLEAN I say it’s okay to till them into the garden. But how many of us KNOW our compost and manure ARE clean?

Unless they’ve been composted aerobically at sustained (as in 3 weeks!) temperatures over 140 degrees Fahrenheit, whatever was in them – and whatever else may invite itself into the pile in the composting process – will end up alive and well in your garden.

So, to answer the second question, If you will compost your materials at a constant temperature of 140+ for at least 3 weeks – the way the “Zoo-Doo Man” did (see Zoo-Doo Man article that follows) – you can probably use them in the garden without worry of introducing the aforementioned problems into your garden.

But that still doesn’t answer the question about WHAT GOOD your compost is doing!

Does ANYONE know which nutrients, or how much of each, is contained in the compost or manure they are putting on their gardens? I believe there’s not one in 100 organic gardeners who submit their compost or manure to an accurate soil test before applying it to their garden. And so they are all guessing as to what nutrition they’re giving their plants.

In order to try and make sure they have enough nutrition, and to avoid the trouble of multiple applications, manure and compost gardeners apply the amount they hope will feed the whole crop ALL AT ONCE at the beginning.

This creates three problems:
1) Germinating seeds and small seedlings are often burned and killed by too much salinity;
2) excess fertilizer salts are sometimes leached into the ground water;
3) the nutrition from the manure gives out after a few weeks, and the crop stops producing just when it should be at its strongest.

I believe the points I’ve covered above explain to some degree why the Mittleider Method is referred to by many of its adherents as “the best of organic”.

You will understand why even more fully when you grow and/or SEE the results obtained in a good Mittleider garden.