If you have old car tires hanging around in the garage put them to work growing vegetables. Remove the center hub and just use the rubber tire itself.
The tires make handy plant containers and are easy to place out in the garden. Use a single tire or stack them for height. The tires can last quite a few seasons and done the right way, can be a very attractive addition to your garden.
Here are a couple of ideas to get started with growing vegetables in tires.
Grow Potatoes In Old Tires
Lay a tire horizontally on the top of the ground. It’s not necessary to cultivate the ground before doing this. If grass is growing where you lay the tire, cover the grass with a one inch thick layer of newspaper.
Mix garden soil with equal amounts compost or organic material. Fill the center of the car tire with the mixture. There is no need to pack the insides of the tire tubes with soil. Enough should spread out from the center of the tire to do the job.
Plant three seed potatoes in the soil, about an inch below the soil surface in the center of the tire. Water until the soil is completely wet.
Add another tire on top of the first one when the potato has sprouted and is 8 inches tall. Fill that tire with more of the soil mixture.
Potatoes form on the stem area that is underground. Burying the stem by adding a tire and filling it with soil means more potatoes will be formed. Continue adding additional tires as the potato grows until the stack is four or five tires high.
It is important to keep the water up, so if there is less than an inch of rainfall per week, they must be watered.
Harvest the potatoes when the plant has blossomed, the leaves turn yellow and start to wither. That’s when the potatoes are ready.
To get the potatoes, remove the tires one by one and search through the soil with a hand shovel.
If you want to try a few different varieties of potatoes, build several tire stacks the same way.
Stacked Vegetable Tire Planter
Place three tires horizontally on the ground. Over a period of time, fill with composting materials. One third green matter such as grass clippings, one third brown matter such as dead leaves and one third kitchen refuse like vegetable peelings, coffee grinds and tea bags. Water well as you go so all the ingredients are lightly moistened.
It may take several weeks to get enough composting material to do fill the tires.When the first three have been filled with compost material, add two more tires on top. Now fill the top two tires with a mixture of garden soil and compost.
Plant vegetables into the top tires that prefer rich soil and vine or trail such as cucumbers, melons and tomatoes. The stack of tires gives the vines room to grow down instead of spreading out on the ground. The compost in the bottom adds lots of organic material and provides perfect growing conditions.
These are just a couple of ideas for growing vegetables in tires. Give them a try next time you are looking for a creative new vegetable patch.