Final Report - The Grand Tire-Gardening Experiment
August 31, 2003
This season's garden continues, of course, and will until really cold weather (December probably), but the season is far enough advanced that I can now make this Final Report. Also, we are probably moving soon, so I thought I'd better write this before we get involved in moving and I have no spare time.
I'm going to use footnotes, so that those who want more details can refer to the footnotes. I've written this in a fairly informal and personal matter because that's how I write. I'm sorry there are so many first-person pronouns, but after all - these are my/our experiences - so there's no way around this.
- What is tire-gardening?
Using old tires, usually with the sidewalls cut off, for planters (creating an effect much like that of raised beds). There are refinements on this basic idea.
- Where did 'The Grand Tire-Gardening Experiment' take place?
We're in the Appalachians Mountains in Pennsylvania's Northern Tier. This is theoretically within Zone 5, but our local climate is much more like Zone 4 because of the altitude.
Last expected frost date is theoretically May 31, but has been in mid-June (!!!) two of the three springs that we've lived here. First expected frost date is in the first week of October. Nights are often chilly here even in July and August: often going down into the 40s and occasionally lower.
- Why tire-gardening?
I wanted to switch to raised beds or raised planters of some sort for a variety of reasons, as covered very well by many modern gardening books [1]. In addition to the more general reasons, I cannot garden comfortably flat on the ground (arthritis) and our topsoil here is horrid: almost 100% heavy clay, laced with rocks. Also, I knew from prior experience how much more productive and easier container gardening can be.
- Why tires, rather than conventional raised beds?
Simply because they are both free and permanent. It's nice to remove them from the waste stream, too, it's ecologically sound to reuse an existing item.
All other alternatives of which I'm aware were either too expensive for us, or too labor intensive. My husband and I both have major health problems that limit the amount of physical work we can do. It would, for example, have cost about $300 for lumber (planks) to create the raised beds, and about the same for concrete blocks. 'Organoponicos' [2] as used in Cuba, would probably be cheap to make, but more physical work than we could have handled.
The first step, of course, is to obtain the tires. We found that local tire stores were very pleased to give us their used tires - even helping to load them in the car. They need to pay to dispose of each tire otherwise.
About mid-way through the acquisition phase, my husband had a stroke of really good luck and found one tire store in our town that will give us tires *with the sidewalls already cut off*. They sell the sidewalls (which are in a ring shape) to farmers who (presumably) use them to hold down tarps covering piles of manure, or compost, or silage. This was really great and saved a lot of work.
We cut the sidewalls off when necessary [3] to increase the surface area contained within each tire, then placed the tires in rows in our garden. We started by turning each tire inside out [4] - they look marginally better that way. We soon tired of this and used the rest of the tires right-side out.
The next step was to have the garden tilled. Once the garden was tilled, we took extreme care to step only in the future paths and not where the tire-planters would be placed, to avoid compacting the soil. The best way to do this would be to mark off the paths with strings and stakes - we did it by eye and it worked out all right.
We set the garden up with wide paths (about 3 feet wide) for easy accessibility. I bought a 'rolling garden seat' [5] that enables me to sit in comfort and reach each tire to plant in it, weed, harvest, etc. I have joint problems and pain (a form of arthritis) and this was a major reason for going to raised planters. The combination of the raised tire-planters and the rolling garden seat has worked very well for me, and I think it would enable a whole lot of elderly people or people with joint problems to garden in comfort.
We set the tires up in the following pattern.
single row path double row path double row path single row
Each row has ten tires, for a total of 60. The rows run east to west. I don't know if east-west rows are ideal - it was dictated by the shape and morphology of our property.
Each tire contains roughly three square feet of surface area
- we were not able to obtain any very large truck or tractor tires.
We put a row of 8' tall metal fence posts at the north side of the garden and hung netting [6] from them to support the vining crops. I'll rotate sugar snap peas, pole beans, cucumbers and a cover crop through this row.
We started off by filling the tires with a mixture of heavy clay soil shoveled from the paths, spent-mushroom compost [7], peat moss, and about a cupful of lime.
We quickly tired of the hard physical labor of digging the heavy and rocky clay soil and switched to filling each tire with 100% spent-mushroom compost, removing only the largest rocks first. (We can purchase the spent-mushroom compost economically from a local nursery here in northern Pennsylvania.)
Pro-Mix [8] or a similar mix would also be a good basis for filling the tires, although it would need the addition of something such as aged manure for nitrogen as it's a soil-less growing medium. Micronutrients would probably also need to be supplied in that case.
People fortunate enough to have half-way decent top soil could fill their tires with that, although I'd recommend the addition of peat moss or Pro-Mix or similar to lighten it.
I started almost all my seeds indoors under fluorescent lights, planting only the green beans directly outside. I have found that I get much better results with transplants than direct-seeding.
We had two major gardening disasters this year:
- A catastrophically wet and cold spring, including a more-than-six-week period without one single sunny day. The tire planters really paid off during the spring. Through most of the spring, the garden was a sea of standing water with little raised round beds containing thriving plants! All or most of the plants would have died had they not been in some kind of raised bed. I can do a lot with plants, but I cannot teach them to swim.
- I was ill and unable to garden at all - unable to even walk to the garden - during all of June and the first half of July - six weeks in all. My husband kept things going as well as he could, but he's not knowledgeable about gardening and had his hands full with other work in any case.
I had to curtail my gardening plans drastically because of this long illness. Nevertheless, we grew a total of seven perennial herbs [9] and 29 different vegetables/annual herbs [10] in tire planters this year. I would have grown more types of vegetables had I not been ill and - in fact - I wound up giving many 6-cell packs of started seeds to a gardening friend.
Getting the tires, cutting the sidewalls off when necessary, and filling the tires also slowed us down - these would be one-time only jobs in most cases.
I used floating row cover and nylon net for insect control, mainly for the brassicas (cabbage-family plants), as they are very subject to damage by the cabbage butterfly (which lays its eggs on the plants, then they hatch into worms that eat the leaves).
I made chicken-wire cages (circles) to fit just inside each tire I wanted to protect, then covered the cage with either floating row cover or nylon net, using ground staples to fasten it down. I sprinkled the plants with diatomaceous earth before covering them, to kill any insects already in place. This worked very well. I used no other insect control except (organic) slug bait [11] during the very wet cold spring.
We used buckwheat for a cover crop in temporarily vacant tires during the summer. My husband just scattered it by hand - he didn't even turn it in. It grew and thrived and kept out the weeds very well. We'll use oats for a fall/winter cover crop. We bought the oats and buckwheat at a local feed-and-farm supply store (Agway) for $0.57/lb. We bought three pounds of each, and this will be about right for the 60 tires.
We spaced the plants within the tires according to Mel Bartholomew's book, 'Square Foot Gardening' [1], except for the Asian greens. I used Joy Larkcom's very informative book 'Oriental Vegetables' [12] to assist me in guessing at spacing for the Asian vegetables. By the way, I recommend this book very highly to anyone interested in growing Asian vegetables. It's (annoyingly) type-set with double columns (newspaper style) throughout but once I got over resenting that, I learned a great deal of invaluable information about the Asian vegetables. The author is British and therefore doesn't really understand the USA's climates (although she has made an effort to get American input) but the book is really terrific, even to American gardeners, in spite of this. I don't know of any other comparable source of so much information on Asian vegetables.
We used no fertilizer or plant food other than the spent-mushroom compost, which is a complete fertilizer in and of itself, adequate for at least the first season.
I never got around to mulching anything this season, but the intensively planted vegetables pretty much created their own living mulch and shaded out the weeds quite well.
We caged the tomatoes, putting the cages and their rebar stakes within the tires. This worked well, except that the tomatoes managed to collapse their cages (again!) even though each one was braced with two or three iron bars (the rebar). Next year, I'll either prune tomatoes and grow them on a trellis, or use rebar (rebar mesh) for the cages.
Results/Conclusions/Recommendations
- Everything grew very very well - without a single exception. The yields were those of a much, much larger conventional (row) garden of the same area, probably at least an order of magnitude better.
We've had enough to supply the two of us with fresh veggies since early May, preserve a lot of veggies for winter (by freezing or dehydrating), give a lot away to neighbors and friends, and sell a considerable amount too.
I didn't keep track of the harvest, but I wish I had. Next season, I will try to keep track.
- The tire planters really weathered the cool rainy spring very well, and in fact, most people around here lost everything they had planted during the 'spring monsoons'. We didn't lose anything - our plants were high and dry in their tire planters even though our garden was a sea of standing water for weeks on end in May and early June.
- The tires filled with mushroom compost drain quickly and they do need more frequent watering than the same plants would if planted directly in the ground. On the other hand, since we are only applying the water directly to the growing area (not to weeds or paths), we probably use no more water in the long run. I know from container gardening that the mushroom compost drains much more quickly than topsoil, so this effect may partly be due to the mushroom compost.
- It's easy to pull a hose around the garden - the tires act as buffers and protect the plants. We used a handheld hose for watering and this is fairly time-consuming. In the future, I would like to have an automatic system: a length of hose for each row, with emitters leading to each tire [13]. If I can't afford to do this, I'll at least use milk jugs as water reservoirs [14] - 2 or 3 jugs per tire should do quite well.
- I question whether the tire-planters would be beneficial in extremely hot and dry places, such as the deserts in the American Southwest, or even in extremely hot (but not dry) places (Florida comes to mind). There's no question that the soil in the tire-planters gets warmer than it would on the ground. This is an asset in our area but would be a disadvantage in very hot places. Mulch could probably go a long way towards alleviating this, as would painting the tires white.
- I want to stress again how easy it is to plant, weed, and harvest from the tires using the 'rolling garden seat' or other means of sitting comfortably while gardening. This is ideal for elderly people or those with joint problems.
- In the future, I'd like to make one or more 3- or
The book also has directions for various methods of using upright supports with the tire-planters, some of which I'll probably experiment with for vining crops. The book is small, and written in cartoon-style (mostly illustrations). I'm glad I bought it, although the price is high for such a small book. Farber self-published it, and I was not able to find a used copy or obtain one on inter-library loan.
- The chief disadvantage of tire-gardening - as I see it - is aesthetics. The tire-planters look like...well...used tires.
Our garden is fenced, so a border or edging of long grass has grown up around the fence line (which we can't mow, because it's too close to the fence) and completely hidden the tire-planters from view. This is fine now, but they'll look like used tires all winter.
Square or rectangular raised beds with wooden planks as edging would look much nicer. I'd be somewhat hesitant about using tire-planters in my front yard unless I had painted them or otherwise made them look less like used tires. In our current location, they're in the back yard and not really visible to anyone else except one neighbor, so they're fine.
And here ends the Final Report on the Grand Tire Gardening Experiment. I consider tire-gardening - on the whole - to be smashing success and I plan to continue it.
Pat Meadows
[1] A good example is 'Square Foot Gardening' by Mel Bartholomew, Rodale Press, Emmaus, Pennsylvania, 1981. However, if you read an older edition of the book (like mine), please be sure to also consult Bartholomew's website-
Bartholomew (like most garden writers) can be dogmatic about his system, but I was able to adapt many of his ideas to tire-gardening.
[2] 'Organoponicos' are raised beds made of concrete as used in urban areas throughout Cuba. A fascinating description and photos are available at:Basella rubra (Malabar spinach) Basil Beet 'Burpee's Golden' Chard 'Bright Lights' Chard 'Fordhook Giant' Beet 'Early Wonder' Bok Choy 'Hybrid Green Boy' Bok Choy 'Hybrid Summer Boy Choy Sum Hon Tsai Tai Komatsuna 'Summer Fest' Small Pai Tsai Broccoli 'Small Miracle' Bush Bean 'Masai' Bush Bean 'Purple Royal Burgundy' Bush Bean 'Yellow Pencil' Carrot 'Danvers Half Long' Carrot 'Short n'Sweet' 'Tyfon Holland Greens' Chinese Cabbage, Fluffy Top Chinese Cabbage, Loosehead, Shirona Cucumber 'Marketmore 76' Zucchini 'Black Beauty' Pattypan Squash 'Early White Bush Scallop' Yellow summer squash 'Sundance' Eggplant 'Shoya Long' Eggplant 'Rosa Bianca' Lettuce 'Tom Thumb' Lettuce 'Black Seeded Simpson' Lettuce 'Mesclun Mix' Lettuce 'New Red Fire' Lettuce 'Pinetree Mix' Lettuce 'Pinetree Winter Mix' Lettuce 'Plato II' (Romaine) Lettuce 'Redina' Mibuna Mizuna Parsley Peppers, Sweet (variety unknown - I bought the plants and forgot the variety) Shungiku, Garland Round Leaved Tomato 'Sweet Million' (Cherry tomato) Tomato 'Better Boy' Tomato 'Early Girl' Mache Vitaminna Kale, Early Dwarf Scotch
Most of the (non-Asian) seeds were purchased from Pinetree Garden Seeds,