Cathy Isom starts this mini-series with a few helpful tips about how to start a vegetable garden using old tires. That’s coming up on This Land of Ours.
Tire gardening is a great way to save the planet, by recycling old rubber tires, and to maximize your yields and minimize the amount of work it takes to produce a successful garden. It’s also easy to do. You simply grab a tire, plop it in the garden, fill it with soil, and plant. That’s almost all there is to it!
Using tires also helps to warm and dry soil quickly, providing the perfect environment for growing tomatoes and sweet potatoes. The water drains more effectively from the tire than it does from poor-quality soil. It also allows for deeper soil if you have hard-packed ground. Clay soil is difficult for the roots of many vegetables – like carrots and potatoes – to penetrate. A tire garden is a perfect solution because you can fill it with loose, airy soil at least several feet deep.
If that isn’t reason enough, using tires for a garden means you can plant earlier in the season. Not only will you not need to worry about your tire garden flooding out in a heavy rainstorm, but the soil will stay more protected from frost and intense cold, too. You may be able to move your planting up by several weeks – or more.
Cathy Isom…