Vegetables Gardening - Growing Organic Vegetables

I've had the 1975 edition of "More Food From Your Garden" for about 25 years but have never started a Mittleider garden (although I got lots of good ideas from it) from fears about using "non-organic" fertilizers. Most of those fears are concentrated around the idea that typical "chemical" fertilizers are all "salts" which will build up in your soil like at the Kesterson Reservoir or alkali deserts and eventually kill all your attempts to grow there, as well as run off into the rivers and kill everything there too.

I'm stating this in a somewhat extreme fashion (!!), but you are probably familiar with people asking about this. Presumably Mittleiderins do not think that this will happen to their gardens. Could you explain your view or point me in the right direction?

My other concern is that many of the chemical fertilizers are derived from petroleum or other perhaps unecological sources. What about that?

Thanks,

Fred in coastal Northern California

Fred & Group:

The mistake often made is in thinking that fertilizer from manure or compost is NOT "salt", when in fact it IS.

In response to a similar, but very public and vitriolic challenge to Dr. Mittleider's feeding regimen we enlisted the help of two of the best soil labs in the Mountain west - BYU's soil lab and the Stukenholtz lab in Twin Falls, Idaho - and conducted an extensive testing procedure in Mittleider gardens of 4, 10, and 20 years existence.

Those tests - which included many drill holes in each garden with samples taken at 1', 2', and 3' depths - showed NO toxic buildup of salts, nor any evidence of salts sufficient to leach into the ground water.

You're right to be concerned about how MUCH salt you are putting on your soil for sure, but I submit that the typical "organic" gardener puts much more salt into his soil than the Mittleider grower does, for example:

Typically the organic grower applies 2" to 4" of manure/compost to his garden. A three inch application of manure would weigh 200-300# per 18"-wide by 30'-long bed. This would contain between 2 and 6 pounds of actual nitrogen, and similar amounts of phosphate and potash, plus many other nutrient salts â€" even including table salt. Assuming the low-end estimate,the organic grower will apply upwards of 10# of salt to a single bed before planting. This is TWENTY times the amount the plants need at that time, and there is substantial risk of burning your plants with excess salinity, as well as having the salts leach into the sub-soil and ultimately the ground water.

And many times the organic grower applies the manure/compost to the ENTIRE garden, not just the actual planting area. Doing this multiplies the problem by a factor of 3 or thereabouts.

In addition to starting with far too much fertilizer salts, the nitrogen is volatile, and most of it will return to the air before it can be used. Also, both phosphate and potash become fixed, or unavailable, and so your garden - if it gets past the initial phase of too much fertilizer â€" will peter out by July, because it then has too little available nutrition. Additionally, no-one knows how much of the other 10 nutrients the manure has in it, so various deficiencies could develop at any time.

By contrast, the Mittleider Method grower applies just 7 OUNCES of actual fertilizer salts to the soil before planting. And then we add that much more at weekly intervals several times during the plants' growing cycle, so that they are fed just WHAT they need WHEN THEY NEED IT.

Regarding your concern about fertilizers coming from petroleum, may I point out that petroleum is the result of God's own composting system - the result of pre-historic plant and animal life composting for millennia under the earth's surface. And nitrogen, including urea, is the only nutrient that results from petroleum refining to my knowledge; meanwhile organic growers recognize urea as "organic" if I'm not mistaken.

One more "argument" for using commercial fertilizers: Twelve of the 13 elements plants get from the soil are available to us as ground-up rocks that are mined from huge deposits all around the world, and the supply is sufficient that EVERYONE in the world can be fed. On the other hand, the supply of manure is finite and small indeed, with enough available to grow food for a small fraction of the world's population. I personally like God's plan of providing ample natural mineral nutrition for ALL His children, and recommend you go and grind up some rocks to feed your plants - or buy them already ground-up and concentrated, so that all the impurities, heavy metals, etc. are gone and you know exactly what you're feeding your plants.

Jim Kennard

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