Now even more vegetable friendly!
When last I posted on tire gardening -- my garden held together by old car tires -- it was December and the rains were upon us. In fact they never seemed to leave.
January and February were so hot and wet that the garden and its burden of vegetables cooked and steamed for two months, and the plot was more of less unproductive as most of the annuals died off, went to seed or suffered from fungal undermining.
Like the vegetable kingdom I too suffered...
Then as recovery was quickening -- March -- the garden was invaded by green leaf eating insects with a huge appetite.
Now, I'm renovating.
I layed out the garden originally while under the influence of a sort of au naturel Permacultural schema But now I've been moving tires around to create a more formal potager -- one ruled by the laws of bed access, sun shine aspect, and ease of watering.
________________
0000000000000000
0000000000000000
Walkway
* 0000 8 0000 8 0
Compost Bins
You have to imagine that the 0 represents a car tire and that the top of the diagram faces west. At the bottom resides a suburban house.
After a few years tire gardening it would be my ruling:
- that access has to rule your layout design
- that you need to keep the beds up font and sunnyside
- that when tire gardening in the sub tropics, high heat conductors like rubber tires are not the best edging medium during very hot and humid conditions.
But re-arranging the garden design is like shifting furniture: just pick up an embedded tire, re-locate it and shovel, cut and paste the original soil contents into the new address.
I call it worm transport.
So my edging is car tires; my compost bins are car tires; and my dirt is neighborhood lawn clippings and composted kitchen scraps.
