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It was a meeting of great female minds. Dori and Tammy created a
monthly publication, Country Family Magazine, aimed at working farm moms
like themselves (soon to be reborn as a quarterly newsletter since
they realized how much work went into producing an issue monthly). The
two went to small livestock sales and "when we came home we'd just
divide up whatever we bought." Mostly bunnies. Tammy can't
raise goats now, though her landlord has given her permission - just not
enough space. Tammy's desire for goats will have to wait for the
move to Pinnacle. Both Dori and Tammy sew and Tammy has made children's
dresses a feature of her many enterprises, as the entity Menagerie Farm
Dress Shop. Until the big move, she sells mainly through the
website
http://menageriefarm2.tripod.com. Claire's dresses were the
inspiration for this wing of Tammy's business.
One notable difference
between the two women is that while Dori is careful to proclaim that
everything that leaves her charge is "on the hoof, on the hop, or on the
wing," her comrade Tammy will eat her rabbits once production is up, and
can sell them butchered. "I grew up on a farm. We kids used
help with butchering and packaging for the family freezer." Tammy
is tough.
Basement Bunnies
What has Tammy turned on
right now is the Mittleider Method.
She tells me her plans as
we take the garden walk and gander at her small but thriving veggie
plot and the smaller but thriving better plot belonging to Claire.
"Claire's is doing better because she waters it more.
Once she starts something, she's very focused," Tammy tells me with
maternal pride. "She waters for maybe 45 minutes every morning and
every evening." Claire isn't old enough yet to compete for a 4-H
prize, so she'll be getting a ribbon in the mail Claire is already
planning her garden for next year.
Tammy's plan for the fall
growing season (Tammy, like Claire, is a planner), is to prepare one
traditional bed grown with bunny manure and bedding for compost, and the
other "strictly Mittleider". Tammy tells me
this experimentation will be precise, scientific, and suggests I come
back in a month or so and see how the two beds are coming along.
Jacob R Mittleider
(1918-2006) is noted for developing a "grow-box" system of agriculture,
distant cousin to hydroponics, that method much touted in sci-fi space
exploration movies but not greatly embraced by the farming mainstream.
His method is sometimes referred to as "poor man's hydroponics".
Jacob R Mittleider is
sometimes called Dr. Mittleider, though evidence for his having a
doctorate that is other than honorary is unavailable through my many web
searches. I did learn that he sojourned in post-Communist Russia
helping to establish an agricultural program at a college founded by the
Seventh Day Adventist Church. Mittleider was a devout member of
the church and he and his wife reportedly spent years in foreign climes
setting up experimental stations in self-sacrificing efforts to test and
promote their agricultural methodology. It was not an
overtly evangelistic mission, but church members were proud of the
Mittleider's presence overseas and felt it had a positive impact for the
religion. Whilst at the college in Russia, Mittleider was referred
to in the prospectus as simply Jacob R. Mittleider. Had he
had advanced degrees one assumes they would have been underscored.
Later, it seems, "during the time he was teaching in the developing
countries, Dr. Mittleider was honored with two Doctorate degrees - one
from Florida Beacon College, and the other from Timorazi University in
Moscow, Russia (reputedly the most prestigious school in the Russian
Commonwealth)." This quote comes from a biographical sketch
at amazon.com, from an un-credited source.
Mittleider was born in
Idaho and later went to live in California. The one
biographical blurb I was able to find, partially quoted above, states
that in California, Mittleider "concentrated on a scientific and
practical study of agriculture, which he mastered." I am reserving
my judgment about the extent of this accomplishment, assuming that the
hubris implied was contributed not by Mittleider himself, who seems to
have been a modest person, but by his enthusiastic acolytes.
The best-known Mittleider
booster is Jim Kennard, a Mormon who heads an organization called Food
for Everyone (his baby, not Mittleider's). Before he became a
Mittleider gardener, Kennard was a businessman and CPA. Kennard was
given rights to many of the books of Mittleider, whom he met in Russia
and who later became his gardening guru in the U.S. Kennard is now
referred to as a "master gardener." Mittleider's books include The
Mittleider Gardening Course, Mittleider Grow-Box Gardening, and
Gardening by the Foot. These three and others are published by Food for
Everyone. Jim just returned from a gardening visit to Armenia.
According to Tammy, he pays for most of his travels out of his own
pocket.
Try as I did, I could
find almost no references to Mittleider which did not loop back to
Kennard and Food for Everyone.
It should be noted that
the Mittleider devotees don't try to sell you grow-boxes or
specially-charged water molecules. FFE is not apparently selling
much except books (though mind you, there is good money to be made in
the perennial sales of glossy gardening books). They do market
nutritional soil supplements for a modest cost on the FFE website,
ostensibly to save you a lot of trouble mixing them yourself. The
main goal is to make you a happy super-productive gardener. And to
spread the gospel of good growth to the entire world.
Here's Kennard's spiel on
tomato production by the Mittleider principles, often reproduced on
websites that tout the Mittleider Method:
"Just a
quarter-acre of tomatoes grown properly, and selling for only $.50 per
pound, would yield $25,000 per year! Have I got your attention?
Let's see how it's done.
"A quarter-acre, or
10,390 square feet, will accommodate 78 30-foot rows of plants, grown in
4' X 30' Grow-Boxes, with 3 1/2' side aisles, and 5' end aisles.
Planting 9" apart gives you 41 plants per bed or 3,198 total. Of
course this requires growing vertically with T-Frames, and pruning your
plants. By growing a tomato that averages 8 ounces (some
varieties are even bigger), and growing vertically, each plant should
produce 16# of fruit from July through October. How? Good
varieties produce a cluster of 3-7 tomatoes every 5-7" up a 7' stem in 4
months of production. Using 4 per cluster and 12 clusters gives 48
tomatoes, and at 8 ounces each, your yield would be 24# per plant. Let's
reduce that by one third, to be conservative.
"This amounts to 51,168
pounds of tomatoes (16# X 41 X 78) - or $25,584 at $.50 per pound. Who
said you couldn't live out of your garden!"
Because this reads like
an ad, I kept looking for the hook, the sales gimmick, but found none.
Yet still it reminds me of the old blurbs you used to see on the inside
flap of matchbooks: "Learn to play the piano in 10 easy lessons!" "Grow
mushrooms in your basement for fun and profit!" "Don't be a ninety pound
weakling!" "Learn to draw and make millions!" One wonders if the
good Doctor Mittleider would have agreed wholeheartedly to the marketing
of his books, had he known they would include catch-phrases like "mini
grow-boxes for maxi yield."
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