Ultimate Tire Garden

This was my inspiration for beginning a tire garden on my property. I saw it a few years ago in Las Cruces, New Mexico and have been incorporating it on my farm ever since. The local tire shop gladly donates the tires as they then don't pay to dispose of them.

Here is my tire garden early in the season. I made circle rows of tires with a walkway throughout.

Here is calendula...I had an herb garden along one side of my tire garden, and grew many herbs.

This was our surprise tire as we must have sprayed a seed from the cucumber plant into the tomato plant tire!! Both are still producing!

I grew peas in February-May in my tire gardens. Sadly for Bill no pea survived the weeding as the teens and I love raw snap peas off the vine!! Yummy.

I love this picture of my sunflowers in the shadow of an impending storm...quite amazing !!

Here are my green beans. The void spaces between the tires I filled with dirt and rocked it in and planted sunflowers. You can see the leaf of the sunflower to the left.

We even grew corn in the tire gardens. I planted five kernels per tire and most survived to be eaten by the family!

This was my experimental soil. I collected the pine cones that are crumbling and falling apart near the base of pine trees. The are almost all broken apart as you can see. I wanted to see how it would be to grow things in. I will be converting most of my garden to this soil, as it was marvelous!! You can see an onion peeking through.

Our tire garden had to be fenced in because of the varmints. We had no problems because of the fencing, except when I forgot to close the gate and a hen found her way in the garden and pecked one bite out of about ten zucchini and about 20 tomatoes. I wish she would have just ate one!!
Here is a snapshot from June. Ignore the weeds...for this former Ohio girl, I sometimes will take the green where ever I can.

My sharing this post is to let others know that no matter where you live you can have container gardening. If you live in the city for ascetics you may need to primp and paint your tires to have this set up. When time and money permit, I plan on painting the tires and adding the feminine cuteness factor to my garden. For now I just wish to share success! Even though we battled grasshoppers we have had a tremendous turnout from our garden. I am prepping to plant the winter garden in the next few weeks-and have modified some of the tires to three high to make it easier to grow squash and runner plants. The height gives more room than growing into the walking paths.

I know Kymber did a tire garden- did anyone else? Oh and just thought I would mention that my growing season is not over and we still have pumpkins, watermelon, okra, tomatoes, mint, acorn squash, butternut squash, zucchini growing---New Mexico does have an agreeable growing season!!

Some Links
Backwoods home- how to cut the tires and lots of info.
The Greenest Garden-neat link and interesting way to tire garden in cities.
Sustain Lane- great link making a tree ring out of tires.
Permanent raised beds out of tires link.