Article on Need for Reconnecting With The Land

Jan 5, 04:22 PM

A Mittleider gardener recently brought the following article to my attention. It talks about the need to update the methods of growing food worldwide. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7795652.stm

The article has some good points, especially the idea that the people of Great Britain (and everywhere else) should re-connect with their land. What they REALLY need to do is to adopt the Mittleider model as taught in this website!

Instead of doubling the world’s food output, we can increase food production as much as TEN TIMES over traditional methods.

And FAMILIES need to be taught how to do it THEMSELVES. That way control and responsibility, as well as the benefits, are all where they NEED and DESERVE to be – in the hands of the common people.

The problems of biodiversity, energy, water scarcity, and urbanization are best addressed and solved by FAMILIES taking control of their own food production needs. Let’s teach EVERYONE the system that saves more than 1/2 the normal water and is very efficient in space and energy conservation, while greatly increasing the quantity and QUALITY of their food.

The fact that the large majority of people live in urban environments only argues more strongly for the Mittleider growing system, because we teach people how to grow in the dirt OR containers ANYWHERE, and to grow VERTICALLY, to maximize the use of any available space.

A prime example of how this has worked in the recent past is the former USSR. I believe history will show that the Mittleider Method played an important role in saving the people of the Russian Commonwealth countries from returning to communism in the 90’s.

Those people were terrified of freedom and the responsibility it entailed when it was thrust upon them in the summer of 1991, but God sent Jacob Mittleider over there to establish his agriculture training program in a small college in 1989, and by the summer of ‘91 there were a cadre of teachers available, plus books, videos, and other materials translated and distributed throughout the country.

These things provided hope and a highly successful model to follow, and I’m told the Mittleider Method is now the most productive and popular way of growing family gardens throughout many regions of those vast countries.

One of these days – hopefully soon – the “tipping point” will be reached here in America, and people will wake up to the importance of growing their own food in the most sustainable and productive way possible.

Congratulations on being a part of it!

Urgent Call to Action for All Gardeners

Jan 2, 12:06 AM

Every gardener should immediately assess your needs for gardening materials and get them purchased NOW, before they become scarce or MUCH more expensive.

I’m thinking specifically of FERTILIZERS and SEEDS.

Anyone remember last year? Some fertilizers increased in price over 400%! They may do it again, or even worse.

It is SIMPLE, but don’t put off doing it! Here’s how:

1. Measure the total length of your beds or boxes (Example 5 – 30’ beds = 150’).

2. Total the amount of fertilizers you’ll need for one feeding: A. Pre-Plant – 150 ounces (1 ounce per running foot). B. Weekly Feed – 75 ounces (1/2 ounce per running foot).

3. Estimate how many times you’ll feed during the season: A. Pre-Plant Mix – 1 – single crop, 2 – ever-bearing. B. Weekly Feed Mix – 1. Single-crop varieties like cabbage = 5-6 X crops. 2. Ever-bearing crops – temperate zone = 10-12 prox. 3. Multiply ounces/feeding X expected feeding times: A. Pre-Plant – (Ex. 150 oz X 2 feedings = 300 oz). B. Weekly Feed – (Ex 75 oz X 12 feedings = 900 oz).

4. Convert ounces to pounds, or grams to kilograms: A. Pre-Plant Mix – 300/16 = 18.75# B. Weekly Feed Mix – 900/16 = 56.25#

5. Double the amounts for 1 year for a 2 year cushion.

6. Buy and mix your fertilizers, then keep them dry.

7. Calculate the seeds you will need, and buy them now as well.

I recommend every person who is concerned for your family’s food supply consider seriously getting a #10 can of heirloom garden seeds.

You can get what I believe is one of the best deals anywhere on these storage seeds – IF you want the mix of 16 seeds that are provided – either at the FFEF website at http://foodforeveryone.org/garden_ store/, or directly from the
Mountain Valley Seed Company at www.mvseeds. com.

Instructions for Creating & Planting Your Garden #1

Dec 24, 10:48 AM

Preliminary Steps – Lesson I (Using Jim Kennard’s 2009 Alabama garden as a model)

1. Determine how much space you want, then how much you HAVE that receives all-day sunshine. We wanted 30 beds, but only have a 35’ X 58’ sunny space, so that is our limiting factor.

2. Measure and stake the outline of your garden, keeping in mind the space required for rows and aisles (18” or 4’-wide beds & 3’ to 3 ½’ aisles). We chose 4’ beds with 39” aisles, in order to get 16 beds in that space.

We have only 2 ½’ end aisles, but we have 30’ of grass beyond that on one end and sidewalk on the other. And outside aisles are nothing on the East (a wall), and a hillside on the West, which we will keep mowed short.

3. Clean the garden area and remove everything, down to the bare ground. Two types of lawn covered our back yard, so we began by using an 8 HP Troybilt and tilling the top 2” of soil thoroughly. We then raked up and removed all grass, including roots, rhizomes, and runners.

4. Level the garden area as much as possible. Remove hills and valleys, and till high sections, using a long board to drag soil from high areas to lower areas.

Beyond general shaping, don’t worry too much about making the whole garden area level. It’s just the soil-beds themselves that must be level.

5. Measure, stake, and apply strings to soil-beds. Make sure you run your beds in the direction that is the most nearly level, and plan on having the water source on the high end of the beds.

Use 18” 2 X 2 stakes and drive them at least 6” into the ground. Use heavy nylon string, tying the ends before connecting to the posts.

Tie one end to the post and do not tie the opposite end, but pull it tight, loop it around once, then lift the string over itself. It will hold, and will be much quicker to remove when you need to till or weed, etc.

The Zoo-Doo Man & The World's Best Compost

Nov 7, 07:06 PM

For 20 years I have owned a 3/4 acre parcel adjacent to Utah’s Hogle Zoo, where I have grown a vegetable garden using The Mittleider Method as taught in many of the developing countries around the world by Jacob R. Mittleider. Because Jacob was satisfied that my garden represented him well he let me put his name on it, so it is known as The Mittleider Garden at Utah’s Hogle Zoo.

During that time I was privileged to help Dr. Mittleider on a few projects, and during the past 7 years, with his blessing, I have conducted 9 projects in 6 countries myself.

The Hogle Zoo garden is always extremely productive, beautiful to look at, and a very popular unofficial “exhibit” with the 850,000 annual visitors to the zoo.

Over the years many people asked, as they visited over the fence, if I used the zoo animals’ manure, and I always told them no, that I used natural mineral fertilizers. But one day a lady piqued my interest when she said the Seattle Zoo sells their
composted animal manure to the public as “Zoo Doo.”

I decided to check this out, so I talked to the Seattle Zoo people and found they pile the manure in win-rows, turning them occasionally. And after about a year, they dry, bag, and sell it.

I decided I could make a lot better compost than what Seattle got by leaving manure out in the rain for a year. So I first bought a Compost Tumbler and learned the best procedures and mixes as I tested small batches. Very soon I had constant 140+ degree heat for 3 weeks, and produced beautiful, black, sweet-smelling compost.

I then acquired a full-size 10-yard cement truck and began doing large batches. With loads this size, they maintained temperatures of over 140 degrees for 3 weeks, and then cooled down for one week. And You’ve never seen such beautiful material – I really felt like I made the world’s best compost!

I obtained the right to use the Zoo-Doo name, bought bags, T-shirts, banners, cart, etc. and began selling at the Zoo gift shop and in the local nurseries. I ended up on TV and in the local newspapers, and became known as “The Zoo-Doo Man.”

Whenever I had more Zoo-Doo than I could sell, I would drive the cement truck down to my garden and off-load the batch over the wall. I then put it into several soil-beds and grew vegetables with it – to compare which was better – compost or the Mittleider natural mineral nutrients, which I’d been using all along. And I grew good stuff with my Zoo-Doo.

However, the most important thing I learned in that two-year experiment was not how to make and sell Zoo-Doo. I learned for myself that I could grow better vegetables more consistently, and with a lot less time, cost, and hassle, with just a few pounds of inexpensive natural mineral nutrients, than I could with truckloads of “the world’s best compost.”

I therefore continue to put good, clean organic materials back into the soil when they are available, but I KNOW that highly productive vegetable gardens are not dependent on improving the soil with organic material.

"Chemical" Fertilizer or "Organic" - Which is "Bad"?

Nov 7, 05:36 PM

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 I believe 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.

A Sustainable Gardening Epidemic is Needed Now!

Nov 3, 08:07 AM

Knowledge of the Mittleider Method of sustainable gardening makes you one of the “vital few,” and with that knowledge comes both opportunity and responsibility.

In The Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell describes how a few people can make a tremendous positive difference for everyone else, which he compares to an epidemic.

You need to help Start An Epidemic of Family Gardening – Why?

Because your garden can FEED you—even when:
• Your car won’t run because there’s no gasoline (or you can’t afford to buy it) ...
• There’s no food to buy in the stores … or
• There’s no money (or not enough) to buy food for whatever reason.

This is the overriding reason why the message YOU carry is so vital for everyone.

And gardening should be sustainable, using true, proven principles and the best methods and techniques, so it will yield the “most bang for the buck,” and be worthwhile and enjoyable for the long term.

The Mittleider Method can feed you and those around you! It can give you “the garden you’d want if your life depended on it.” And it very well may.

The best growing principles, methods and procedures have been the closely guarded secrets of the large field and hydroponic growers, meanwhile, the large majority of gardening families are back in the 19th century, using only manure and compost, scared into believing that ANY use of “chemicals” will threaten their health, or even their
lives.

What makes the Mittleider Method so unique – and so vitally important – is that it teaches the best principles, methods, and techniques used by large commercial and hydroponic growers, but adapted to the small family garden. It works in any soil, and in almost any climate. The procedures are easy to learn, simple and straightforward.

In addition, the Mittleider Method eliminates the problems so often associated with large-scale commercial food production, such as overuse of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, high cost, and lack of freshness and flavor.

Now here’s your opportunity … and my challenge to you!

Great changes have always been initiated by just a few people who knew what they wanted, were focused, and were willing to share their knowledge with everyone they could influence.

I challenge each of you to be among the “vital few” who help people around you improve their lives while preparing for the uncertainties of the future.

How?

By promoting, teaching, and demonstrating what you’re learning about the Mittleider Method of sustainable gardening, and getting others to do the same.

Choose a group of people with whom you have a genuine, social relationship. Your church group, email list, gardening club, voting district, family, or neighborhood association are all good places to start.

Show them your own garden. Tell them of your own success. Loan them a book or CD. Offer to teach a seminar. Point out the benefits of learning and doing it NOW, before their need is urgent and it’s too late to learn or prepare.

Share articles, tips and advice from the Food for Everyone Foundation Website.

Even if you do nothing more than persuade people to buy a can of vegetable seeds and a couple bags of fertilizer, you’ve done tremendous good. A triple-sealed #10 can of 16 heirloom vegetable varieties, from which you can plant more than ½ acre, that can be stored for many years can be purchased at the Foundation website www.growfood.com or at www.mvseeds.com.

Do something NOW! Make your voice heard, and your influence felt. You CAN make a difference for good in the world around you.

It’s time to spread an epidemic … (Not bird flu. The gardening “bug!”)

We can do it. And remember: “out of small things proceedeth that which is great.”

Thanks for your interest in gardening, your willingness to do it right, and your courage to share.

Plan Now For The Best Possible Garden Next Year

Oct 20, 09:30 AM

Have you arrived at the end of the gardening season and wished you had planned and worked your garden better?

Did you grow things you didn’t eat? Did the weeds get ahead of you? Was valuable growing space wasted?

Begin planning now for next year’s garden. Make sure you get the MOST for your efforts, the space devoted, and the money spent on your garden.

Nature provides most of us only 6 months to grow food for all 12 months. They are precious and must not be wasted!

First – what is your garden’s purpose. Are you just growing a few things for fun, or do you depend on it as a major source of your family’s food?

Next – decide what kinds of things are best to grow – fresh tomatoes and other summer crops, food for next winter’s storage, or both.

Then – decide on how much of each vegetable you will grow and the space required.

How you use your garden and the success you enjoy depend on:

1) Whether or not you’re willing to devote serious time and effort to it,

2) Whether you expect to feed your family just during the growing season or for the entire year,

3) What garden produce your family likes or can be taught to like,

4) Whether all your food needs to be grown or there will be supplementation from other sources, and

5) Whether or not you expect to supplement your income from the sale of produce.

An excellent database of commonly grown vegetables, with when, where, and how they can be grown, as well as how much they will produce, is contained on the Garden Wizard and Garden Master CD’s. These resources for the serious family gardener can be found at www.foodforeveryone.org under Software.

To maximize your results with the least space, cost and effort, grow high-value and ever-bearing crops, such as tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, pole beans, zucchini, etc.,

Following are examples of what can be grown on just 1/8th of an acre, using thirty two 30’-long by 18”-wide soil-beds, with 3 ½’ aisles and 5’ end aisles.

By growing vertically – whether in the soil or in containers – you can produce the following amounts of fresh, healthy vegetables:

Five beds of indeterminate tomatoes -2,000-4,000#
Two beds of sweet peppers – - – - – -—500-1,000 peppers.
Two beds of eggplant – - – - – - – - – -—500-1,000 eggplant.
Two beds of indeterminate cucumbers 750-1,500 cucumbers.
Three beds of pole beans – - – - – - – - – 400- – 800#
Two beds of zucchini – - – - – - – - – - – - 400- – 800#

From only 1/16 acre you have more than enough vegetables to feed the family during the growing season, with excess to preserve, sell, or give away.

And doubling the space of these 6 crops could provide significant income to buy other food staples, and/or provide sufficient to preserve them for the winter months.

Growing easily-stored food in the other half of your garden, such as potatoes, cabbage, beets, onions, turnips and carrots can provide your family with ample fresh food during the winter.

Sixteen beds can produce the following amounts from each crop, and by growing two crops – one early and one late – you can sell most of the first crop, then with proper cold storage you can use the second crop for the 6 cold months.

Two beds of carrots – - – - – - – - – - – - 200- – 400#
Two beds of cabbage – - – - – - – - – - – 200- – 400#
One bed of beets & turnips – - – - – - – 100 – 200#
Two beds of onions – - – - – - – - – - – - 200 – 400#
Five beds of potatoes – - – - – - – - – - – 500-1,000#

And you still have four beds left to plant. Small vining squash grown vertically, plus Swiss chard, and multiple crops of spinach and lettuce can add substantially to your production and your diet.

Corn, large squash, and watermelon should only be grown if you have ample EXTRA space, because they take too much space for what they produce.

For example one bed of corn will give you only 90 to 100 ears of corn – all within 2 weeks, while a bed of tomatoes can produce 400 to 800 POUNDS of tomatoes, spaced over 4 months.

Plan now for next year’s garden. Decide what you will eat and what you’d like to sell, then determine the quantities of each vegetable needed, and plan your space to grow at least that much in your garden.

Good Growing!

Best Nutrition for Vegetables - A Letter to Mr. Courier

Sep 22, 10:56 AM

The following response to a letter I received is important, I believe, in explaining some of the background as to why we do things the way we do. I invite all to study it, and appreciate any feedback (to jim@growfood.com).

Dear Mr. Courier:

What a detailed letter! You’ve obviously thought much about this subject, and I’ll try to give you Dr. Mittleider’s thoughts on the subjects you raise. If I understood you correctly, you are growing in 25% clay soil, 25% blow-sand, and 50% cottonwood chips. You are certainly wise to be concerned about adding proper nutrition to that mixture!

First, millions of field trials, in 75 projects conducted in 27 countries around the world for 37 years, which followed 19 years of experience as a commercial nursery-plant grower, have taught Jacob what he knows about feeding mineral nutrients to vegetable plants. You will have to judge for yourself whether or not that is sufficient to qualify his results as scientifically accurate. Universities on four continents think highly enough of his work to have awarded him PhD’s.

Knowing from this experience that the plant can best tell you what it needs, he has not been concerned about the cation exchange ratios, but has adjusted the Mittleider Magic formulas to produce optimum yields of healthy, disease and pest resistant crops. And yes, the formulas have been adjusted numerous times since the writing of More Food From Your Garden in 1975.

For the past two years Jacob (who lived in Assisted Living digs at the time) has been growing wonderful, healthy crops using the Pre-Plant and Weekly Feed formulas in a container garden with nothing but sawdust, perlite, and sand. And the roots cannot reach the ground because Jacob placed roofing tar paper everywhere to stop the nematode infestation. And he uses the exact same amounts as if he was growing in the ground.

We apply 2# of Pre-Plant mix, with the largest ingredient being calcium, to an 18” X 30’ soil-bed or Grow-Box, and do this one time per crop. On rare occasions we have found that more calcium, magnesium, or boron, or combination is needed, but not often enough to increase the amounts we recommend the home gardener apply at the beginning.

We apply 1# of Weekly Feed with the Pre-Plant mix before planting the crop. Thereafter, we apply 1# as a top dressing 4” from the plant stems along the row, and water it into the root zone of the plants each week until 3 weeks before maturity. This amounts to feedings of 3-5 times for such things as spinach, lettuce, and cabbage, and for ever-bearing crops we continue feeding until 8 weeks before expected frost, which amounts to 10-12 times in our temperate climate. I haven’t discovered where you got the idea that we apply Weekly Feed 22 times.

Our application of gypsum or lime is determined by the soil pH, with gypsum only used in drier climates with pH above 7. Calcium is always applied as nutrition for the crop, and applying it to the surface of the soil below the box before filling a Grow-Box assures plant roots a supply of nutrients as they extend beyond the Grow-Box soil mix into the native soil, which is almost always deficient in water-soluble calcium, etc.

Jacob has, as I mentioned in a previous paragraph, changed the amounts of nutrients, including calcium and magnesium. On occasion he has found improvement by increasing the amounts of these things, especially on ground that has been gardened for extended periods of time. However, the need for more ca and mg has not been general enough to warrant having all family gardeners change the application rates, or for us to change the formulas.

Jacob does not consider corn to be a very good representative for determining the needs of all vegetable crops, as it is a cereal – more like wheat or other grain crops. Our studies have shown that many vegetable crops use N, P, and K in close to a 110-60-110 ratio, and that is why the fertilizers use that ratio.

Regarding your concerns about leaching of excess minerals into the soil water, and eventually into streams, rivers, and lakes, we have had thorough independent tests conducted, by two highly respected soil labs, on Mittleider gardens of 4, 10, and 21 years’ duration. In no case was there a problem with either a build-up or leaching of mineral salts.

Consider that we apply less than 1/2# of actual fertilizers (including all nutrients, not just N, P, and K) to a soil-bed 18” wide by 30’ long, consisting of 3,000-3,500# of dirt just in the top 12”, and we do this between 5 and 10 times per year.

On the other hand, the “conscientious” organic gardener, who mixes 2”-3” of manure into his soil before planting, applies MANY TIMES more mineral salts to the soil than our average total application, and they do it all at once, making it far more susceptible to being leached into the ground water, etc.

We applaud you for trying to obtain the best information you can regarding the fertilizers you use to feed your vegetable plants. Very few people have the experience of William Albrecht in the things he studied. Dr. Albrecht very wisely determined that acid soil conditions were the result of nutrient deficiencies – as rainfall washes out the base elements including calcium, magnesium, and potassium. And he recommended replacing the nutrients as the solution to the problems of acidic soil.

Dr. Jacob Mittleider’s, experience taught him the same lesson, but the application was geared specifically toward growing healthy crops by applying proper amounts of nutrients, and backed up by real gardens in every conceivable growing situation. We believe this experience is unmatched by any individual or institution of which we are aware, in determining what is best as a single fertilizer formula that can be applied with confidence by all family farmers anywhere in the world.

Best wishes to you in your own gardening efforts. We hope you will give the Mittleider Method, including the Mittleider Magic fertilizers a chance to give you a great garden.

Sincerely,

Jim Kennard, for Jacob R. Mittleider

Is the Mittleider Method of gardening organic?

Sep 14, 07:21 PM

Opinions on whether or not the Mittleider Method is organic run the gamut. Some organic enthusiasts poo-poo it (Pun intended) as not being “pure” because something other than manure and compost are used.

On the other hand many people consider it “the best of organic” because it IS pure and does NOT put animal excrement and ground-up body parts into the garden, but instead uses natural mineral nutrients – all of which are approved by the USDA for use in organic gardening – and applies just what the plants need throughout the growing cycle, instead of manure all at once at the beginning.

In addition to the manure user not knowing what nutrition his plants are getting, applying everything before planting often burns germinating seeds and tiny seedlings, and then within 6-8 weeks the garden is starving.

The reason the garden is often hungry by summer in a manured garden is that rain and irrigation leach out the heavily applied fertilizer salts from the garden soil. They then take them to the downstream water supply, often causing a toxic buildup of nitrogen and other chemical salts.

Another reason we believe the “pure” Mittleider Method enjoys natural advantages over those using manure and compost is that manure and compost are almost never sterilized before being applied to the garden. Therefore, weed seeds, bugs, and even diseases are often brought into the garden with the manure and compost.

You are invited to compare a Mittleider garden with a garden that uses manure exclusively, and choose. We happily promise the world “a great garden in any soil, with NO soil amendments.”

There are several articles in the FAQ section of this website that discuss these issues in more detail.

Consider carefully, because the day is fast approaching when you may NEED to live on what you can produce from your garden.

And I for one am getting NEXT YEAR’s fertilizers NOW.

Jim Kennard

Are tomatoes your favorite garden crop? Grow the best!

Sep 12, 06:14 PM

We believe the ideal book for teaching you how to grow the best and most tasty tomatoes is Let’s Grow Tomatoes by Dr. Jacob R. Mittleider.

It’s available two ways, either as a part of the Mittleider Gardening Library, which is available in the Store section of this website, or as a digital download at www.howtoorganicgarden.com.

Let’s Grow Tomatoes has turned black thumbs into prolific tomato gardeners, and hobby gardeners into successful commercial growers.

Most importantly, it takes the guesswork out of growing tomatoes and makes it enjoyable as well as rewarding!

To promote this great book we’ve set up websites specifically for this important topic, featuring the book we think should be owned by every tomato grower.

We invite you to learn more about growing tomatoes by visiting one of the following sites: www.tomatogardening.info, www.tomatogardening.net, www.tomatogardening.org, www.growingtomatoes.info, or www.growingtomatoes.org.

Learn for yourself how to grow tomatoes in places the locals think are impossible, and harvest 4-6 weeks earlier AND later than your neighbors – it’s only $10.95 for the digital download at www.howtoorganicgarden.com.

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Best Nutrition for Vegetables - A Letter to Mr. Courier A Sustainable Gardening Epidemic is Needed Now!