HS 209 - Growing Food in Urban Areas with Jim Kennard

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I'd like to welcome Jim Kennard to the show. He is the founder of a website called growfood.com and he has been involved in the writing of books. And we are talking about gardening and gardening efficiency today. Jim, welcome. How are you?

Thank you, I'm great. Happy to be here. Jason.

Yeah, I always like to give our listeners a sense of geography. Where are you located?

We are in northwestern Missouri.

Fantastic. Well, urban gardening especially has been a topic of great interest to me and I have seen just amazing things on the Internet about how people are getting incredible food yields out of little gardens on their balconies. I mean, I mean, it's just amazing what can be done nowadays and what are some of the things that people can do, Jim, to increase the output and yield of our gardens?

That's a question that has a big answer. How much time do we have?

Well, you know, enough time to go through a few good tips, for sure.

Let's start with some of the basics. Jason, most people don't understand the laws of plant growth very well. In our society, we've gotten away from farming and gardening a lot. And so people many times don't remember or realize the importance of having full, direct sunlight on your garden. That's what I would call the first law of plant growth. And it's so critical if you expect to have vegetables that are fruiting, to have success with those, that you get six to 10 hours of direct sunlight per day. So that's the first thing beyond that, of course, removing the weeds, growing those plants fast and healthy by feeding them properly. That's another area that most people don't really understand much about nowadays. And that's one of the areas of expertise that the Food for Everyone foundation really feels is very important. And we like to help people with that.

Okay, good, go on. So those are two big areas, of course.

Yeah. The plant spacing is important. So many times people will sprinkle seeds in the ground and they'll come up and they either be too far apart or much too close together. And so you end up then with pulling out plants which damages all of the plants, not just the ones you're pulling out. So that's something that a gardener needs to learn how to do properly. We teach that also growing vertically, particularly in confined spaces. If folks will pay attention to the best methods, for example, such as hydroponic growers do, they will grow many plants vertically, growing them up, baling twine type strings, polypropylene string. And we do that and we increase people's yields anywhere from three to five times the amount in a given space just by that. One thing by itself is growing vertically.

Right? Right, yeah, fantastic. Well, tell us about your method and what is the name of it and what makes it unique.

The Mittleiter system of growing was developed over the course of many years by Dr. Jacob R. Mittleiter. He actually was a commercial grower in Loma Linda, California back in the 40s and 50s into the early 60s.

He then @ that time made all the money he needed, I guess, and determined he wanted to devote his life to helping other people. And so he spent the next 40 years pretty much going around the world conducting gardening training, humanitarian projects, he established agriculture schools. He changed the economies of several countries and the lives of millions of people by teaching efficient, highly effective, healthy gardening procedures and.

Principles. That's fantastic us about his, his method then. I mean you mentioned a couple things at the beginning and I really like hearing more about the vertical growing opportunity. And also I want to ask you with some of these, you know, you also mentioned initially direct sunlight. And what does one do if say I'm particularly interested because so many people are living in urban settings nowadays, in high rises, in high density living. What can they do if anything, if they don't have the opportunity to all day sun, if they're Working with a balcony, for example, in a condo or apartment, just particularly interested in that area. But start wherever you.

Like. Certainly the use of containers is a big element in the urban growers gardening arsenal. And we help people to do that. No matter what size space they have, we want to make it most efficient. And so we show them how to grow in containers of any size. And we do a in lightweight materials that are clean, without disease. And you can put them on a patio or a flat roof or a driveway, anywhere. And then of course the feeding becomes critical. And so the foundation and Dr. Mittleider created a natural mineral nutrient mix called Mittleider Magic that gives plants everything they need for healthy growth. And so we feed small amounts of these natural minerals to our plants during the peak growing season and they grow healthy and fast. That's of course another element that's rather unique to the Mittleiter method is the way we feed and the specific materials that we use to feed the.

Plants. So Jim, tell us how we can apply some of this stuff, particularly in that urban setting. Because again, like I mentioned, so many people are living in that setting and I think these people are most susceptible and most vulnerable to interruptions in food supply and in general civil unrest and things like that that are probably bound to come our.

Way. Yes, I certainly hope that when the stuff hits the fan that somebody can get out of the big cities because it won't be a safe place to live. But in the meantime, we garden wherever we are. And if all you have is a patio, a flat roof, a driveway, then I encourage you to build yourself an 18 inch wide box, preferably out of treated two by eights. And if it's going to be on the soil, then you can leave the bottom open. If it's going to be on a patio or a roof or otherwise, you need to put a bottom on it with many holes drilled in that bottom so that it will drain properly. Then we suggest that you fill it with something like sawdust, sand or peat moss, perlite, vermiculite, rice hulls, those things that are clean, lightweight, they hold water, but they also drain well. And the instructions in the book of course tell you that you can use any ratio that you want, anything from 50% sand up to 75% sawdust or these other materials so that sand is no more than 50%. That adds weight and helps the drainage. And then we show people how that they can grow most anything in straight sawdust and sand. The thing that a person really wants to do is they want to choose wisely and carefully what it is they're going to grow. For example, if a person just say they have 10ft of space in which to grow and they want to maximize their yield, I would strongly recommend they do something vertical. For example, tomatoes. We would plant our tomatoes 9 inches apart, one row in an 18 inch wide box like that. And we would grow them vertically, put what we would call a T frame that would have strings, these bailing twine, polypropylene strings attached. And the tomatoes then would go up 7, 8ft tall and in 10ft, let's see, that would be about 14 tomatoes. So you could grow.

5 or 600 pounds of tomatoes in.

10Ft. Wow. And in one season, I mean, what's the turn rate? What I'm looking for is how we get to the equation where take for example, you have a single person or a couple and they're apartment or condo dwellers and they've got a patio and maybe the entire patio space is 5ft by 10ft, just for example. So you've got 150 square feet. Of course, if you're smart, you're going to store some food. But what can you yield from a garden that's sustainable? How fast can it recycle? So that's all the stuff I kind of want to get in to with you, as far as we can. Yeah. So go ahead. That's very.

Interesting. We really encourage people to start their own seedlings if they're serious about growing. That way they can get them when they want them, they know exactly what it is they're growing, it can be healthy and done correctly. So growing seedlings is kind of another subject, but it's very much related because if you start, for example, in the early spring and you get tomatoes started, it takes them about six to eight weeks from seed to a garden sized nice transplant. That means that if you've done it in your house under grow lights, you can have a healthy transplant out in your garden when other people planting seeds. And so then you've got seven or eight months of the yield from that crop instead of three or four months again depending on where you live. So let's say this 5 foot by 10 foot section that you describe. I would suggest that someone, for example, a couple living, they might want to have say four or five feet of tomatoes on one side of that five foot section and that's going to produce them 250, 300 pounds of tomatoes. Then they could have cucumbers. A couple of cucumber plants can produce many, many pounds of cucumbers. Grown vertically, the same as the tomatoes, and then squash, the vining squash so that you could take up 10ft with three or four different varieties like that and get several hundred pounds of fruit. Now, on the front side of the garden, you want to make sure that those tall plants, of course, are north or east so that they don't shade the shorter plants. But let's suppose then that they're going to be planting shorter plants south or west of the tall plants. And things like, shucks, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, lettuce, beets, all of those kinds of things can be grown again most of the year. If you'll grow your own seedlings and put healthy plants out into that space, most places you could be growing for eight or nine months. And what most people don't realize is that those greens have tremendous value. For example, kale is one of the healthiest plants in the world. And you keep those greens picked and you can eat them every day in smoothies, in salads, on sandwiches, in soups. And quite a few of the other greens are the same, even something like turnip. The turnip tops are very healthy and very tasty beet tops. People think of them as not having great value. And yet you can eat beet tops, one or two leaves a week off of a single beet and live on it for months. Do you see what I'm saying? So that small 5 foot by 10 foot space can really produce a tremendous amount of food. And as a matter of fact of fact, the book that I helped publish called the Mittleiter Gardening Course Book, talks about how a family can live on very small space just by doing the things that I'm describing. And so you need to choose wisely the kinds of things that you will eat, but also choose what's healthy and then learn to like it and learn to live on it. Because when the stores aren't available, you'll be amazed at how healthy you can be if you're eating the right.

Foods. Maybe a lot healthier. Exactly. Our corporatized Monsanto food.

Supply. Yeah, most of us will lose some weight, which will be healthy. And most of us, if we're doing green smoothies or munching on the raw greens, we'll be a lot better off than we have been with all of the processed foods that we eat so.

Much. Yeah, no question about it. Okay, so can we drill down a little bit more on this equation? So how much, with what you just mentioned, and that sounded like a great mix, how much space did that take and who will that feed? And because you've got the like, if it's sustainable, if you never want to go to the store again and you have this garden and that's it, can that feed one person indefinitely or you're.

Talking. Let me give you the extremes, Jason. Some of the traditional growers and the quote unquote experts say that a family needs a hectare of ground to be self sufficient in their food production. Now that's two and a half acres and of course that would include some animals. Obviously the urban dweller is not going to come close to that because a five by ten space is one, what, not much more than a hundredth of an acre. Let's see, that's.

40. Yeah, well, 40, 42,000 square feet for. I remember this from real estate school, of course, yeah, for an acre. So you've got, you've got like a hundred thousand square feet there, probably in a hectare.

Right? More than.

100,000. And here you've got 150 square.

Feet, this 150 is a thousandth of it or something. So a person cannot expect to really feed themselves exclusively out of a tiny space like that. But what they can do is they can supplement their food with very healthy fresh things. I think that's the key for the urban dweller is if they're going to grow things, then choose wisely and choose things that are very healthy, that will grow in a very small space. That's why I suggest greens and I don't care much for lettuce just because it is not as healthy, you know, dense, nutrient dense as things like kale and beet tops, Swiss chard, turnip tops, collards. So it's not a matter of being self sufficient out of a 5 by 10 space. That is not a practical idea. And we don't want to give people the idea that they can continue living in the city and live out of a 5 by 10 foot space, but they can supplement their food substantially during the extended growing season if they will do these things I've mentioned, if they will then replant whenever a crop gets finished, mature and no longer producing, well, get it out of there and put something else in so that you always have something growing. So grow the healthy things, grow the nutrient dense things, of course, grow those things with the greatest value and grow vertically whenever you can and then continue growing throughout the growing season. So those are the kind of the generalities of what a person needs to do. And the Mittleiter growing system I believe is the best on the planet to teaching that and really guaranteeing success. Because using the natural mineral nutrients that plants need exactly in the ratios that they require means that you can grow healthy food even in sawdust and.

Sand. Midlighter is obviously your favorite, as you mentioned. What is the competitor? What is the second best system or you know, maybe another popular system just because. And I just want to do that for the listeners to give them another option so that they can look at two or maybe even three methodologies and come to their own conclusion. If you just shove one down their throat and say this is the best one, period, they're not as likely to give it.

Credibility. Well, you have to understand, Jason, that I started out as a boy growing using manure. I was in charge of the cow and the chickens and the pig and all of the animals and the family garden. And so I grew a garden using organic materials. And I got prizes at the state fair for my pumpkins and things like that. So I know a little about it. Over the course of the last 40 years, I have gravitated toward this particular system. But other methods are many, as you know. There's one called the French intensive double digging method that requires people to dig 18 inches deep. There's one that's called Back to Eden that suggests that the ground up parts of a tree when they're composted will feed a garden. There's one called the lasagna method that suggests that people layer their growing medium with compost, then manure, then newspaper, then forgotten what all of the layers are but five or six different layers. What my experience shows that those other methods fail to address properly is proper plant nutrition. You see, this is a subject that we could talk about for a while, but it's such an important subject that I've got to keep coming back to it. Because if somebody puts manure or compost in their garden, they do not know what they're feeding their plants. And so they're guessing and they're hoping. And if the compost was done properly, then it's likely to have some nutrition. If it sat out in the rain for a year while it was composting, most of that nutrition has gone leached down into the subsoil and into the water supply rather than being available for the plants. So Dr. Mittleiter saw this all over the world. You see, he taught people in the developing countries and he saw them starving and dying from diseases because of lack of nutrition. And so he brought them correct nutrition, exact nutrient mixes so that they had no guesswork whatsoever. They knew if they used this method, they could have a healthy garden. And I see these other methods all the time. And as a matter of fact, people are constantly coming to the Food for Everyone foundation with, please help me. I've been doing such and such a garden method, and we can't really get much production out of it or we have these problems. So I can't recommend those others. And if anyone has more time, I would be thrilled to tell the particulars about the nutrition. Why this is sometimes called the best of organic. And yet on the other side of the spectrum, it's also called the poor man's hydroponic.

Method. Yeah, well, you know, can you tell us quickly about that? I mean, you know, our time is limited, of course, but if you want to just take another minute or two, that would be.

Fantastic. Yeah, okay. Well, one of the reasons that it's called the best of organic is because the natural minerals that we use are in fact approved for use by the certified organic growers. The certified organic grower, however, has to start with organic materials. Then when they see deficiency symptoms and problems with their plants, they soil test, and then they're able to add zinc, manganese, boron, whatever the nutrient is that they see the plant needs. I'm saying the family gardener, the home gardener, can't take the time nor the money, nor the risk of doing that, and then waiting for the soil test results and then trying to get those individual plant nutrients to solve its problems. Most soil has deficiencies, and so we give the plants exactly what they need and we avoid all of that time, effort, expense that the organic grower has to go through in order to jump through the hoops of the USDA to be certified. So that is why we sometimes say that it's the best of organic.

Poor man's hydroponic method really has to do with growing vertically and again, feeding the plants what they need on a regular basis, because that's what the hydroponic growers do. However, we can grow yields that approach hydroponic yields for a tiny, tiny fraction of the investment cost that a hydroponic grower does, because we can do it right out in the yard. We don't have to have big, expensive greenhouses and all of the temperature controls and all that.

Stuff. Fantastic. Very good points, Very good points. Well, give out your website again, if you would. I announced it at the beginning, but just. And any other resources you want to share where people can get your books.

Etc. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. The foundation website is www.growfood.com G-R-O-W f o o d.com and we have free gardening groups. The Yahoo groups website is mittleitermethodgardeningahoogroups.com we also have a Facebook group on Facebook. It's Mittleiter.

Gardening.

Fantastic. Those are all free, of.

Course. Yeah, yeah. That's tremendous. Well, Jim, thank you so much. This has been very enlightening. And I just gotta tell you, everybody needs to just at least start engaging a little bit in this stuff if not doing it fully, of course. And many of our listeners are gung ho. They're way past this whole conversation we just had and doing incredible things. But, you know, at the very least, just dip your toe in the water, get. Develop some familiarity, subscribe to the Facebook page and look at it in your newsfeed, if nothing else. And you know, read an article once in a while. And just so there's some. I mean, it is amazing how detached we've become as a society to all of this very basic stuff. You know, on one of my other shows, the Creating wealth show, which is a personal finance and investing show, I've had Jim Rogers on the show a couple of times. And I'm sure you're familiar with Jim Rogers. He's a finance guy and a hedge fund guy and he says, forget about becoming an investment banker and going to work on Wall Street. Learn how to be a farmer and do something real with your.

Life. Good for.

Him. That's where the growth is going to be. And I agree. We are so detached from just simple, basic realities of existence nowadays that this is very important. So, so thank you so much for sharing this and maybe you had a comment on.

That. Well, yeah, if you've got just another minute. You know, the very fact that we are so detached and unfamiliar with gardening as an example, makes us vulnerable to the inaccuracies and the misrepresentations that are out there. For example, people are afraid of chemicals because the organic growers say, oh, chemicals are bad, they're dangerous. But, but people fail to understand that everything in this world is a chemical. And so if people can get over that fear and just jump in and feed their plants accurately with the natural minerals that God intended the plants should have, then they won't have to have the unhappy experiences that are so common when people are guessing, when people are trying to figure it out. Follow somebody that's been all over the world and done it for millions of people and you're guaranteed success. I think I promised the world on my website a great garden in any soil, in virtually any climate with no soil.

Amendments. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Well, that's fantastic. Well, Jim Kennard, thank you so much for joining us today and really appreciate it. Keep getting the word out.

There. Thank you, Jason. It was good to visit with.

You.

Thank you for joining us today for the Holistic Survival show, protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Be sure to listen to our Creating wealth show, which focuses on exploiting the financial and wealth creation opportunities in today's economy. Learn more at www.jasonhartman.com or search Jason Hartman on itunes. This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company, offering very general guidelines and information. Opinions of guests are their own and none of the content should be considered individual advice. If you require personalized advice, please consult an appropriate professional information deemed reliable but not guaranteed.