  We exhibit the method for obtaining non perturbative quark and gluonic vacuum
condensates from a model truncation of QCD. The truncation allows for a
phenomenological description of the quark-quark interaction in a framework
which maintains all global symmetries of QCD and allows an 1/N_c expansion.
Within this approach the functional integration over the gluon fields can be
performed and therefore any gluonic vacuum observable can be expressed in terms
of a quark operator and the gluon propagator. As a special case we calculate
the mixed quark gluon condensate. We investigate how the value depends on the
form of the model quark-quark interaction. A comparison with the results of
quenched lattice QCD, the instanton liquid model and QCD sum rules is drawn.
