Vegetables Gardening - Growing Organic Vegetables

2012/2/8 Marina Nasedkina <marinakupros@gmail.com>:
Dear Jim,

My dad is a gardener. He has questions, which he tried to find answers to in the books. Though he could not. Maybe
you can help him.

He has found a different combination of fertilizer in each book, is there a unified one or the latest update sort of?

Marina & Group:

Dr. Mittleider was constantly experimenting and improving, and in addition he would adjust and change the fertilizer formulas to fit the materials that were available at the time and place where the particular book was written, so there were indeed changes between the books. However, ANY of the fertilizer formulas will work!

All of that being said, I recommend:
1) if your dad has a very large garden and he needs hundreds of pounds of fertilizer he should use the formulas in The Mittleider Gardening Course (latest book).

2) if his garden is smaller, for the Weekly Feed Mix I recommend he purchase a couple of packages of the Micro-Nutrients from the Foundation website - www.growfood.com (Shop) - and simply mix them according to instructions on the bag with 16-16-16 (or similar) plus magnesium sulfate.

For the Pre-Plant Mix simply mix calcium, magnesium sulfate, and boron in the ratio of 80-4-1. Your calcium source should be lime if you receive 20" or more of annual rainfall, and gypsum if you receive 18" or less. The least expensive mgso4 is Epsom Salts from the Dollar Tree store. Boron is 20 Mule Team Borax, available in the large grocery stores' detergent section.

The complete chemical formula for Epsom Salt is MGSO4.7 H2O, which means that it contains 7 parts of WATER to every part of magnesium. It will therefore have a tendency to make your Weekly Feed wet when the weather gets warm and/or humid. If you dad CAN find something other than Epsom Salt I recommend it - specifically magnesium oxide or another mgso4 with less water. I purchase a 35% magnesium in bulk that only has one part water in the formula.

For small gardens it is unlikely that your dad will find another source of magnesium. Therefore, his best solution is to buy a bag of Perlite and mix one pound of that with 50# of Weekly Feed. That should greatly improve the water situation in the fertilizer mix.

Jim Kennard

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