Round Foot Gardening - or - the Re-Tire Garden

If you are like me and refuse to be defeated by your failures at gardening you automatically seek knowledge from the experts. That almost always includes internet searches and reading books about how to garden. There is a lot of information out there, and some of it is totally false. Luckily you can use the internet to find out what other people have to say about books and information before you invest your time and money in books and DVDs. So, after our first couple of years of unproductive to marginally productive gardens I began my quest for wisdom from the experts. Let me narrow down the vast field of available information to the ones which I found most useful. Notice how I said useful, not interesting, because there is a large amount of interesting but ultimately unhelpful information out there as well. The first should be Mel Bartholomew's latest book, All New Square Foot Gardening: Grow more in less space!. Mel is a retired engineer who decided to start a garden. His failures lead him to rethink gardening in an engineering sort-of-way. Like the designer of the Glock pistol, he took something people have been doing traditionally for centuries and breathed fresh new life into it. I am not ashamed to say that I copied his concept, I just executed it differently. The next is The Vegetable Gardener's Bible by Edward C. Smith. Edward's book is forewarded and endoresed by John Storey, of Storey Publishing. That is a clear indicator that his book falls into the category of pure enduring wisdom and zero hyperbole. Edward and Mel both hit upon the same truths: wide, raised beds, successive planting, companion planting and crop rotations. Mel uses square and rectangular raised beds and Edward uses long, wide raised rows. The idea is the same, deep soil for your plants to grow in and separation from invasive weeds. Mel's book gives us a great concept, Edward's book a similar concept, both books have more merit than these concepts with good, useful planting info for specific plants, using composts and soil, and like I mentioned, companion planting and crop rotation ideas. I took their concepts and combined them with another idea I found for planting potatoes: using recycled, old tires as planting beds. Again, not a new idea. People have been using old tires as planters for decades, I just combined Mel's concept with the use of recycled tires instead of more costly, less durable materials like wood, and Edward's concept of raised beds by raising them into rows of tires. Thus we dubbed our garden the re-tire garden - or - in deference to Mel, Round Foot Gardening. We also decided to combine the innovative with the traditional in an attempt to maximize the positive features of both. That means I planted traditional Native American "Three Sisters Gardens" in our tires, successively. A Three Sisters Garden consists of corn, beans and squash (or pumpkins, melons and gourds). Native Americans were successfully feeding themselves and their families with this mutually beneficial companion planting concept before anyone ever arrived from the Old World with gifts of blankets and many centuries before the phrase "companion planting" found its way to the internet. I won't bore you with the scientific details, especially since I don't fully understand them myself, but suffice it say that the plants feed each vital nutrients through the soil. You start by planting corn as soon as you can, according to climate/planting zone, etc. If you plant different strains of corn you must be careful that they do not flower simultaniously or you risk cross polination and harvesting your own less than ideal "experimental hybrids", which sounds so much nicer than "mutant" corn. Once the corn is up about six inches or so you plant the green beans. The corn will provide the stalk for the green beans to climb. Once the beans are up you plant or transplant your squash/melons/pumpkins/gourds (I'll plant all this year) and those broad leafed plants provide shade on the base of the other plants and deter weeds while also providing vital nitrites into the soil. I'll plant them successively to provide for a continual harvest, the hope being that any overage will be canned for storage.

The tires were free and will be in place in a thousand years when future archeologists discover my garden and declare it a religious temple for the ritual sacrifice of car parts. Having a good relationship with my mechanic shop/Goodyear dealer helped me to convince them that I would carry away their old tires and they would not 1. have to pay someone to haul them away to the landfill, or 2. have to haul them away themselves. They also appreciate the fact that I am a customer and I will keep coming back to them many years after I have fulfilled my desire for their trash. I took the old farm truck (which sounds much cooler than "my battered 1979 Ford F150") down to the tire shop and picked up the tires from beside the dumpster, making two trips and coming away with a treasure that amounts to 40 odd otherwise worthless tires. 40 seems like a lot, but once we finished the plan that is what it amounted to. That includes tires for the bases of our fruit trees and for our blueberry and raspberry bushes. Once we placed the tires on the ground to get a visual of our plan and made our changes accordingly we cut the side wall of of the side of the tire that faces up. That gives us plenty of space for planting. At first we cut the sidewalls off with a folding combat knife, because it was handy. Then, my brilliant wife asked if we could do it with the electric saw. Turns out you can, and very well, with much less grunting and sweating. We covered the ground beneath the tires with a liberal amount of old newspaper, which will deteriorate and cause no harm to the ground we grow our food in while stopping the growth of weeds and grasses from below the tires. We filled the tires with our own compost made from last year's horse, chicken and goat manure and clippings and all things compostable. We then planted, fed and watered our seeds and seedlings. Wish us luck! If I went through all this for nothing I will be closer to garden defeat, but I have more strength left - and a heck of a lot more confidence this time.