A low tech way to cut tires to make raised garden beds.

For the last few years I have explored the art of creating and maintaining gardens which are formatted and held in place by auto tires.

There's a trick to slicing the tires so that make workable rings. You'll find any DIY for that task  here among my bookmarks.

However, I've always aspired to do more with rubber than be sentenced to a succession of Olympic rings garden beds, and a design engineered by the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation -- Permanent Raised Bed Gardening: Recycled Tire Beds -- has always interested me as a tire option(pictured left).

To create these recycled tire beds you need to also cut the tire across the grain so that the rubber becomes one long strip. But cutting that way means you have to slice though the steal belt embedded in the rubber.

Since I'm moving house I soon learnt that disposal of car tires costs money (up to $5 per tire!) -- and I had amassed a good collection of tires . At that price  I began to fret about  how to handle my rubber.

So I concentrated on cutting the tires one more time across the grain.

Do not use a grinder as the exercise produces toxic fumes as it more or less sets the rubber alight. The grinder disc will also be quickly worn down by the rubber

.The best way to proceed, and for me with my low tech options, and shallow skills, the only way,   is to use a Stanley Knife to open up the rubber on the tire to expose the steal wires embedded in the rubber. Once exposed slice though the steal with a hacksaw. If you twist the tire so that the metal is  tensed directly to the file blade, you should be able to cut though the tire in 2-3 minutes of effort. That will give you a rubber mat just under 2 metres long.

Before the chorus starts up, here is an article about the main environment concerns about auto tires in contact with soil: used as a garden mulch.Also there's this aside:

But---What about food production? Creating raised beds out of used tires and growing vegetable crops.

Tires around soil as a raised bed garden has been used by many people. I  have not heard of problems from that, but the surface area in contact  with soil is small. In the short term, it may be little problem. But eventually the rubber degrades, Zn gets in the soil, and if the soil pH  is 6 or below, uptake may be too much. Again, the higher the surface  area, the more rapid the release of Zn and toxicity observation..Toxicity to plants from ground rubber used as a mulch  or a component or potting media, or burned tire residues in soils, have  killed a wide range of plant species.(ref)

My point is that using tire rubber as garden bed walls is not a massive exercise in toxicity. Over a very long time you will get break down, of course, and some leaching, but I fail to see how that is so extraordinary compared to the massive , and much larger, scale of pollutants that permeate any urban existence. Tire rubber, still integrated with the original  tire, and not desiccated or pulped, is a useful, free, generally stable material that would a mostly creates a huge disposal problem. It resists termite attack and doesn't collapse or, for that matter, rot away. When cut into strips it can be flexed and joined  into different garden bed designs.

I can afford to be smug: I don't drive or own a car. I'm just doing my practical bit so the car drivers can drive on oblivious to the toxicity generated of their everyday activity.

"Oh!" says Mr or Ms Driver," I could never put that in my mouth -- food grown in such close proximity to car tires. Imagine the harm! Imagine. I'm just so dedicated to organics. But I don't care one iota for all the stuff my vehicle pumps into the air and leaves on the road surface every day, or the complications of disposing of my several sets of car tires over my driving lifetime... I simply will not  allow that any where near my food."

I also like working with tires this way-- gardening noir.

Garden Noir: The Tyre Garden gets Retired

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.

The Tired garden in Summer

 From top left, clockwise know your fruits and veg: 

Kankong;Purslane;Ceylon Spinach;Snake beans ;Pepino;Tamarillo.

With the heavy rains -- a true 'Wet' -- the Tired Garden is waking.

The figs, mango, tamarillo, pepino, and tomato are ripening. The banana (lady finger of course), passionfruit and pawpaw are shooting skywards. The snake beans are throwing out green snakes and the zuchini has to be watched and quickly harvested so that the squashes don't get as big as footballs.

But the salad greens are struggling and we're left with Climbing (Ceylon/Malaba) Spinach and the ever faithful Kangkong for greens. But the grasshoppers love their Kangkong. But working at the chlorophyll carbon face is the much neglected purslane

The tomatoes are dealing with domestic fungal issues but the wee fruiting ones are laying down colour. Chokoes are on a growth spurt and the new papaws plantings may be -- cross fingers -- more female than male.

The Thai basil fronts for the herbs and at home in bright red , Cayenne chillies fruit once more to see out  the year of 2009 -- during which they gave so much.

Images for descriptive and horticultural purposes. The actual plants in situ look a lot different.

The Tired Garden: recycling car tires (tyres) for vegetable growing.

There's any number of DIY techniques to grow vegetables with many nowadays focusing on garden design. While design is important, I think what is often neglected is what you make your garden with.

I'm beginning to think that my answer is straightforward. The stuff from which I make my vegetable garden is made up of:

1. earthworms
2. grass clippings
3. car tires

As far as chicken and egg theory goes, I'm not sure what is supposed to come first. I began with a worm farm made out of car tires stacked one upon the other. I  then tipped the contents of my farm -- complete with "Tiger" earthworms onto what was  my vegetable garden.

 I had  always covered  the garden with a mulch of grass clippings  and used the standard newspaper underlay but what always frustrated me was the way the beds I planted were so cumbersome to administer. I'd build up walls from old bits of concrete and found bricks and planted my veges within the perimeter. But the size of these beds were about that of the double bed I sleep on.

Car Tires turned inside out

Gardening with Circles

Since I used tires to  build my worm farm, I did some homework and noted that you can use old car tires to make garden "beds". While the standard approach with old tires is to simply fill their middle with soil and plant, I thought that was wasteful of space as the tire itself curls in and lips. So I trimmed the tires and turned them inside out.

When you prepare them like this you get a straight vertical  circular wall 20 centimetres (or 8 inches) high . This rubber rim is easy to embed in the soil so that it is anchored, sticking up from it as much as you prefer. I wanted to sink the tires so that their sides didn't get to hot, I was keen to mulch them on their exterior rim while I filled their centre with soil, compost and a blanket layer of grass clippings.  It's like layering a  birthday cake where the mulching layer is  the thick layer of icing on top -- right up to the rim.

Since with tires cut like this you are working with circles, there are many patterns you can use to create your garden. Generally  a garden "bed" is two tires wide as that's the limit of my reach between paths. However while you have space within circles you also have the space between circles. And since the walls are so thin, despite your circle pattern, you are still making great use of available space such that your space loss quotient is hardly significant compared to  creating garden beds in rectangular shapes.

So if  we consider the sketch at right you see that instead of one garden bed six are available plus two inner spaces . The knack with tire circle gardening is that you treat the space within each circle -- within each tire -- as its own micro garden. By that I mean each circlular micro garden  is treated as a separate and individual growing unit such that it has its own identity determined by its location, relationship to other circles, its soil and biomass contents; micro-organism activity and soforth.

Furthermore, since you work in complex patterns made up of seemingly independent units, there is more compulsion to grow a mix of plantspecies within each circle as planting in regimented monocultural rows isn't an option. It's like treating each bed into its own geodesic dome.

Worm Farming First and Foremost

But here's the trick: when you divide up you garden like this and have  vermiculture in mind that's how you treat the circles -- as worm beds; and raising earthworms in these beds is what you try to do. You're a worm farmer first and foremost. What that means is that each bed's value is determined by the richness of its soil life measured not only in soil texture  but overwhelmingly by the amount of earthworm activity you can sponsor  within each circle.

The worms aren't (Vermiculture)Tigers of course -- at least there's few Tigers active and alive in this soil -- but you  act as a  benevolent landlord for the earthworms that take up residence.

So when creating a circular bed, I turn over the soil  and scrpe it into a central mound so I can sink the cut tire into the soil (usually about 10-15cm deep) around it, then spade the scrapings back, add some new soil, compost (created in my compost bins made from tires) and a topping of grass clippings at least 3  inches/ 7 cm thick and layered on  unevenly so that there's a lot of topography to the surface of the bed.

I measure these beds' 'health' by digging with my fingers, pulling back the compost and turning over the soil to feel the moisture level but most of all if I cannot locate an earthworm or two I'm thinking I need to put the bed on an enriched diet of customized attention.

I haven't given each bed pet names -- not yet anyway!-- but the relationship is indeed personal.

You'll note that such personalized attention presumes that I will water regularly as almost a daily chore and unlike the habits preached by  the gardening gurus,I work to ensure that that layer of compost and soil within the tire's full depth is kept moist and my soil activity is kept in adequate hydration. It's like treating it as a pot plant.

Watering  the tire circles is always light and of short duration.  After a time there's enough stuff happening within the soil/mulch  that a lot of the moisture is retained within the tire's soil volume and you don't have to drown the bed at all. The size of circle also approximates the diameter of a flower jet on a gardening hose so you water one bed at a time with very little or no spray falling outside the circle.

However, because you are earthworm farming you must attend to all beds whether they are planted or not because earthworms and soil activity don't take a vacation .

Walking Circles

My plot also includes fruit trees -- a 20 year old mango tree among them. Because of ever present tree roots I was keen to raise  the garden beds up so that I separated as much as I could tree activity from the growing of annuals. While this was my intention, this conceptual separation also meant that I could treat each circular bed as something I could move around, like an ice hockey put.

By lifting up the tire circle, which peels away like a cake sponge mould, I can walk the bed to another place by first instaling the tire and lifting  the soil  with  a flat spade from the original location and spooning it into the new address. So I do indeed treat the cicles like pot plants -- broad bottomless pots.

The Urban Tire Garden

I was challenged physically these last few months and with a limited capacity to do stuff I relied a lot on gardening to keep me active when I was able to be even a little bit mobile .So in dribs and drabs of activity  I've been refitting my permaculture garden which takes up the strip of land in front of the house.

And my refit is based around recycled car tires.