Everything You NEED to Know for an Abundant Garden–Part 2

Everything you need to know for an Abundant Garden—Part 2

Mittleider Gardening Method means SIMPLICITY

Today I’m continuing with describing how the Mittleider Gardening Method met all of my criteria for the PERFECT gardening method. If you recall in yesterday’s article my first criteria was that the method I settled on had to be SIMPLE.

Simple: Let’s not kid ourselves. The U.S. is JUST as deficient in competent gardeners as is the rest of the world. Sadder still there are many who strive to make a living growing a garden but come up woefully inadequate as a result of a lack of

knowledge, tools, supplies, quality soil, etc. Whatever method I selected HAD to be able to be teachable in a simple manner and executable simply as well. Well, the good news is that this method is SO easy to implement that even an 8 year old girl can handle it. That’s got to make you feel hopeful, doesn’t it? Well, it sure did have that impact on me!

You see, Jim Kennard, who’s now the person who took over the Jacob Mittleider business of gardening education and supplies, was a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir for a couple of decades. When he wasn’t busy with his regular job or his rehearsal and performance responsibilities that come with being a member of the MTC, he was taking care of a beautiful and popular garden at Salt Lake City’s Hogle Zoo. His garden was seen by hundreds of thousands of people as it was adjacent from the giraffe exhibit at the zoo.  When it was announced that the MTC was to make history by traveling to what was then known as the U.S.S.R. to perform as a part of a worldwide tour, it meant that Jim would have to be away from his garden for an extended period of time. However, his 8 year-old daughter was confident that she was up to the task of taking care of his garden during his month-long absence. So Jim decided to trust her and after his amazing travel experience he returned home to find his garden was in perfect condition just as he had left it—with the exception of a lot of happy plants that were yielding a great deal of produce! Yup, all thanks to the attentiveness of an 8 year-old girl. It’s THAT simple.

I don’t want to mislead you; there is obviously work to get the garden set up initially, but in my opinion it’s no more laborious than I would do with other methods. And actually I find this method very forgiving. The maintenance involved with the weeds, watering, nourishing and keeping the plants properly protected is indeed simple and there are no designer dirt requirements for the success of this method. For some reason I find the Back to Eden Gardeners all excited about all of the worms that are present in their methods and how their soil took three years of love and labor to get the perfect combination.  I don’t know about you but I need my soil to be ideal now; today, while I still have the ability to grow healthy food without fear and while I can still earn an income selling some of what I’ve grown. I don’t believe for one minute that I have years and years to wait for perfect soil and perfect nutrients because as I see it, the Frankenfoods are closing in on me and I feel I’m in the midst of a nutritional food crisis NOW!  Furthermore I’m not interested in growing worms, I want to grow healthy food! While worms certainly have a purpose in creating great soil, their efforts are not exclusive to them. There are other ways to accomplish quality nutrients and soil without having to wait for the worms to attend a conference.
Moving on; while you may see many beautiful gardening set-ups associated with the MGM (Mittleider Gardening Method) such as grow boxes, etc. such additions are not necessary for the MGM. You really can be just as successful in your efforts just by working with the ground space that you’ve got.  The MGM will teach you to go against some of the methods that you’ve no doubt been practicing most of your life though. Here’s an example:

GARDENING TIP: Instead of building up the soil into a mound or elevated rows to plant your seeds in, you will want to create the mounds on either side of a flat, and most importantly, LEVEL canyon. The mounds serve the purpose of protecting the level canyon where you will plant your seeds. I realize that that’s backwards to many, but you will see how it will actually help you to use significantly less water, and it will help protect your plants. The mounds on either side of the canyon will also ensure that the minimal amount of water will be distributed to the proper place of the plant — at its roots.  Something as simple as not using water on the leaves, and instead directly putting it at the roots will dramatically cut down on the occurrences of disease on the plant. The leaves don’t need water; the roots do. The leaves exist to gather sunshine, not water.

There is beautiful simplicity in the type of media that you grow your seeds in with the MGM. The Mittleider method will literally work in any soil or gardening media. In fact I’ve seen it work in hay and even Styrofoam pellets. This is particularly attractive to me because it broadens my ability to grow unique or rare produce in my environment that typically wouldn’t be viable in my environment. In other words, to a great extent, I can actually ignore the various zone aspects of gardening. While there may be circumstances in which particular plants would be better suited in a greenhouse environment, instead of going to the expense of creating a greenhouse outside of your garden there are very simple steps that the MGM shows to create a greenhouse inside your garden on applicable plants. This “greenhouse in your garden” approach is very inexpensive and yet very effective.

GARDENING TIP: While it’s not necessary to do it this way, one of the favored media suggested by Jim Kennard is a mix of sawdust that’s not been chemically treated in any way (75%) and sand (25%) in lieu of soil. Where I live we have all kinds of large rocks underneath a shallow bit of soil. So when I’ve tried to grow in the past it’s meant that I’ve had to purchase bags of dirt. (And of course I would spend the money for the most expensive dirt available because I was such a horrible gardener.) But I can get the sawdust for FREE just by calling the local furniture builders, hardware stores, or woodmills. And I got the sand for less than $5. The reason why this method is excellent is that the sand and sawdust help to maintain moisture while the sand also helps to regulate the temperature which makes it viable even to use in raised garden boxes. Sand stays cool longer in the heat and stays warm longer in the cold. (That’s one of the reasons why we have sand on hand as we use it for root cellar purposes so that we can preserve our veggies and such for 4 to 6 months after their harvest.)

Bottom line is that the simplicity involved in the MGM is so clear and so minimal when compared to other gardening methods. But don’t let that simplicity fool ya into thinking it’s TOO simple. At the very least gardeners can expect to see a yield increase of 30% at the low end, but a ten-fold increase is much more common. You see, that which is easy TO do is also easy NOT to do and yet it’s these easy principles that the Mittleider method focuses on which make all the difference in the world.

My next criteria for the perfect, foolproof gardening method was that it needed to be universally applicable:

When Jacob Mittleider first began educating others about the simple gardening method that he created, he realized the potential, early on, that this gardening method had to change the economies of countries everywhere in the world. He took that epiphany very seriously and self-funded a worldwide, lifetime, tour to more than 27 countries that struggled to have enough food—quality food—available. He taught the willing students all over the world how to grow quality, healthy, marketable food. Before his reputation began to spread, he was received by government officials who were full of skepticism, and perhaps even on guard, trying to protect themselves from any air of condescension.

As an example, when Mr. Mittleider traveled to Okinawa, Japan, the skepticism towards his method of gardening was made manifest by the Japanese government greeting him with a cement parking lot which they had designated would be the location where this American would teach them how to grow food. Without missing a beat, Jacob Mittleider accepted the challenge given to him by the Japanese, and turned a lifeless dry cement parking lot into a beautiful oasis full of food that the community could provide for themselves amidst the aftermath of a war torn nation. After that experiment, Jacob Mittleider began ASKING the officials he worked with if they would purposefully give him their most desolate plots of land to work with so that he could show them unequivocally how applicable, adaptable, and yet successful this method was. To Jacob, his accomplishments weren’t just about providing food for a community; it was about providing hope for the future of health, well-being, security, and peace to every peoples he came in contact with. After all, how secure can one be if they have to rely on someone else just to survive?

It might be difficult right now, but try to imagine a time in the near future in which YOU and your loved ones have a desperate need for QUALITY, NUTRITIOUS, BOUNTIFUL FOOD. NO method is going to seem to applicable if you’re void of the emotional and physical energy necessary to grow food using exorbitant amounts of water or designer fertilizer or special lights and temperature gauges or any other myriad of “must-have” supplies to be a successful gardener in a “society down” environment, right? That’s why whatever method I chose to use myself and to share with others HAD to not only be universally applicable to any nation, but also for any TIME—such as one of civil unrest.  I don’t know about you but it was easy for me to look at other gardening methods and realize that they were just too complicated and unrealistic to implement in a “society down scenario” in a first world country or even in everyday life scenario in Third World countries. And yet the Mittleider Gardening Method has been successful in all of those types of scenarios. That kind of universal application is only possible when there is a simplistic, true foundation at its core. In my opinion, that’s the “secret sauce” that enables the MGM to teach people to garden and increase their yield ten and even twenty fold all over the world.

Not only can Jacob’s labor of love still be manifest in gardens all over these countries and in the U.S. but his legacy can also be seen in the lives of several enterprising students who “caught the vision” of Jacobs mission and went on to teach others how to properly grow food—some even earning 10 times the standard salary of their homeland. Yes, that’s just HOW important and RELIABLE this system is to nations, such as Armenia, which relied on all of their needs to be imported before they learned how to grow their own food. Clearly, that’s a result of it being a simple and a universally applicable system.

Tune in tomorrow and I’ll cover the rest of the Ten Critieria that I had for the PERFECT method to provide me with an abundant garden.

Until tomorrow…