The History of the Mittleider Method
As a boy in rural Idaho, Jacob Mittleider vowed he
wouldn’t be stuck in poverty on the farm, with constant dawn-to-dusk chores,
and seemingly little hope of anything better.
He therefore attended a boarding school run by the
Adventist Church and learned to be a baker.
Then, soon after graduating, he moved to Loma Linda, California, married,
and got a good job as a baker in a large store.
He also bought a home on 2+ acres of land, and in his spare
time he began growing flowers for sale. After
just a few years, Jacob got in an argument with the store manager, quit his job,
and discovered he had to once again depend on growing things to provide for
himself and his family, which now included 2 daughters.
The story of Jacob’s work and study to become a highly
successful nursery grower deserves much more space than we have here, but let us
just mention that he became highly successful. Because his plants were so beautiful and healthy, he shipped
plants thousands of miles across America to stores as far East as Louisiana.
He earned 11 plant patents, and he prospered financially in the
process.
However, after 20 years of living on 4 to 5 hours sleep
each night, Jacob had lost most of his stomach to ulcers, and he decided things
had to change. He made some
promises to his God, sold the business property, and began devoting his life to
helping others. He was less than 45
years of age at this time.
For the next 40 years Jacob Mittleider devoted the same
intelligence and energy, along with the great knowledge and experience he’d
gained as a baker and greenhouse grower, to learning and then teaching and
demonstrating the very best, and most productive and sustainable principles and
procedures for family vegetable gardening throughout the world.
He began by living for 3 years in VERY difficult
circumstances, in Papua New Guinea. While
there he increased the food production of two Adventist school and hospital
gardens by TEN TIMES, and taught the people to grow and eat 18 different
vegetables where they had previously grown only four. His agriculture students became the best growers in the
country, and even his yard boy, Silas, grew up to become His Excellency, Sir
Silas Atapari, President or Governor General of Papua New Guinea.
Twenty two years, twenty six countries and 70 major
gardening projects later, Jacob went to Communist Russia in 1989.
His work there, and the phenomenal results – as seen from Kiev to
Vladivostok – are the stuff of legend!
At first the government Agricultural agents stole his
beautiful green plants, trying to prove that he was misusing chemicals and
causing toxicity. However, after
finding the cleanest and healthiest plants they have EVER seen, the Russian
government gave Jacob an honorary PhD from the most prestigious university in
the USSR; they made him the keynote speaker at the Yalta Conference of
Agriculture Ministers; and the Russian Agriculture Minister went on national
television to announce that “The only food grown in Russia that’s fit to eat
is grown in a Mittleider Garden.”
Recently it was reported to us that the nearly 1,000
Mittleider Method-trained college students who’ve graduated from his 3-month
intensive agriculture training program in Zaokski have made the Mittleider Method of family gardening
the most productive and popular method of growing family gardens in the
post-Soviet Commonwealth countries.
Not satisfied with demonstrating, teaching, and training
people everywhere he was invited to go, Jacob devoted every day he was not
working on a gardening training project to writing books and producing training
videos, in order to expand the number of people who could learn these things.
And he was constantly learning, and improving his methods
and procedures to incorporate those which gave the very best results in every
conceivable location, condition, and situation.
The Mittleider Method is different than any other method
you’ll see! It can be done in the
dirt or in raised beds or containers. It’s
been called “the best of organic” and “the poor man’s hydroponic
system”, and uses principles and procedures from the best commercial growers,
but sized and adapted to the family gardener.
It is sustainable, and is highly intensive, producing as much as 5, and
even 10 times the quantity of healthy vegetables traditional methods produce.
The first book written was Food For Everyone – a 700-page college-level agriculture text with
over 1,000 pictures and illustrations. Written
in 1970, it is still in use in many countries, and the true foundational
principles and procedures contained in it make it as valuable today as when it
was first published. It is
available at www.growfood.com.
Other books, less on theory and more devoted to family
gardening methods and techniques, followed.
More Food From Your Garden,
which teaches container or raised-bed gardening with wonderful illustrations,
was first published in 1975. Known
today as Mittleider Grow-Box Gardens,
it is one of the most popular and truly usable books on family vegetable
gardening available anywhere.
Gardening By The
Foot teaches container and raised-bed gardening with hundreds of pictures of
actual gardens; Let’s Grow Tomatoes
teaches seedling production and vertical growing of America’s favorite
vegetable/fruit; and Grow-Bed Gardens, also
using hundreds of pictures, teaches how to have a GREAT garden in ANY soil,
without soil amendments, and in almost any climate.
The three-volume Garden
Doctor set is unique in all the world!
As a baker Jacob learned accuracy and record keeping, and added long-term
persistence to earn his 11 plant patents. All of this helped train him to document the deficiency
symptoms he saw in many vegetables as he gardened all around the world.
And it schooled him in patience to learn how to correct those
deficiencies. The result is the
only place anywhere that you can actually see the deficiency symptoms on your
favorite vegetables, and learn how to correct them and have healthy plants.
Every serious gardener should own this set!
And last, but certainly not least are the
Mittleider Magic natural mineral fertilizers.
Jacob was always an experimenter, and everywhere he went he
worked to improve the nutrients he fed his plants. Each book contained the best information he knew at the time,
and minor changes are evident during the course of the 28 years he was writing
books.
Today’s formulas for the Pre-Plant Mix and the Weekly
Feed Mix are available to the world in the Mittleider Gardening course (www.growfood.com),
and they are available pre-mixed in the Store.
And by changing between lime and gypsum, depending on average annual
rainfall in your area, they work in any soil, in sawdust and sand, or in no soil
at all, and in any climate.
Purchase
the digital Books and Manuals.
Start using the Mittleider Method now.
As those who use it say “the proof is in the plants.”
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