Tire Gardening

From the Morning Sun (KS).

"I was looking at my garden the other day and it looks too small.

I love garden fresh vegetables of all kinds, and I know I have to do some work on it. In the past, March and April have demanded a lot from me. It is a time for hunting turkeys and catching walleye, white bass, crappie and black bass. But you can’t have fish stew without tomatoes and potatoes and onions and things grown in the garden. And most of my readers are country folks who know that anything you buy in a grocery store won’t come close to what you grow in your own garden. So this year, I get to thinking that with prices of vegetables rising so much, it might be a good time to haul in some more rich soil and some manure and double the size of my garden, so me and the raccoons and deer and rabbits and squirrels will have more to choose from, and Gloria Jean will have something to keep her busy while she can communicate with nature.

But a fellow visiting my place last week changed my way of thinking about gardening. Burt Blades and his wife Debbie have a different kind of garden, and it works better than mine. He goes out and gets old tractor tires, great big ones, and puts hardware cloth across the bottom, widens the top by cutting off the top side with a sawz-all, and fills it with soil and manure and has the most perfect, weed-free garden I have ever seen. In one of those tires last year he grew enough green beans to can 47 quarts. In others, he grew tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, onions, etc. And every year, he alternates what he grows in each. The lower cupped rim of the huge tires holds water, and allows the soil to stay moist with less watering.

It looks as if I need some great big old tractor tires now. If you have some, call me. I also need a dump truck full of good soil, as the dirt up here on Lightnin Ridge is a little bit thin. I might trade a boat, a coon dog, or something of that sort, or maybe some of Gloria Jeans antique dishes if you can bring the dirt when she is in town sometime. And maybe what we ought to do is get a bunch of these tractor tire gardens going and do some trading of produce as well. I might be willing to part with some tomatoes and cucumbers and fish for some good roastin’ ears. The doggone coon and her young ones get into my corn each year and I haven’t got the heart to shoot her until her babies grow up, and by that time she has always moved to some other ridge.

Folks know how I view the tire situation in our country. Our government has required that everyone pay several dollars just to get rid of old tires. So there are many who just keep those old tires and throw them in our rivers. Along many of the rivers I float, you can count 30 or 40 tires in a day. What we should do is pay for old tires and recycle them to produce both oil and rubber. But we don’t, we aren’t that advanced yet. Maybe someday we’ll get there, and if we do there will be thousands of dollars worth of tires in our Ozark Rivers to be retrieved. But if you have big tractor tires, I am in the market for some and I am thinking that I have some good things to trade, maybe some coon meat about the middle of the summer."

I see several benefits to this: elevated beds, contained edges to mow around, less chance of weed migration, and the black-ish rubber absorbs sun and can warm the soil within it, which plants like. It may not increase property values, and a real estate agent will advise you to get rid of them because they make the backyard look junky, but hey--who's eating here?