Tire & Conatiner Gardening

Since it's Earth Day and I'm not ready to launch my Etsy shop quite yet (I was excited to put all the recycled and upcycled products up for sale today but I guess it can wait) I thought I'd post about my tire and other container gardens!

Since we're renting and almost all the soil around our house is orange clay, we decided to do container gardens this summer. We also live in such a wooded area that very few spots get more than a couple hours of sun each day which makes the back porch one of the sunny spots!

The spaghetti squash below is one of my few seedlings started in a tray that seems to be thriving.

A cheap plastic tub and my sister's old rain boots make the perfect planters for swiss chard, spinach  carrots and beets. now I just have to figure out how to keep the squirrels from digging in there!

I bought these pots from a garage sale in Anderson, IN a few years ago and I have used them every summer since. This year, they have cilantro and basil and I'm waiting for my chives to sprout.

Swiss chard sprouts- I can't wait to start harvesting the never-ending chard!

And now, the tires...

I knew we needed more space than all the containers we had and as I was trying to figure out where we would plant everything around late winter (I still thought we'd put stiff in the ground) I drove past a neighbor's house with a stack of 3 tires in the lawn and a sign that said "free." 

After giving the neighborhood a few hours to jump on the tires if they wanted (to me, this was too good to be true so I thought I had to share!) I went back at night and fit all 2 huge tires in my little Honda Civic. Then, just a few weeks ago, when it was nice enough to start planting, my sister and I got to work on these bad boys!

With the rims on the tires, I realized most of the soil we would have to buy would go to waste considering the relatively small surface area we would have left. So, we decided to cut it off!

1 Old Jeep Tire....

 Plus A Whole Lotta Hand-Sawing...

...Equals 1 Old Tire With The Top Cut Off!

Below is the before and after shot of Tire #1 with mostly peas and lettuce an, as an experiment, an old garlic clove that started to sprout in our kitchen. Maybe we'll get a whole bulb!

And Tire #2 is below (before & after) with peppers, strawberries, onions, radishes, beets, carrots and spinach. There's a lot in there and it's just about time to thin those little guys! We'll see how many go to harvest in such a small space...

 I can't wait to see how all of these containers do in the long run. So far, everything has been growing better than I expected but I'm still anxious for our first real harvest...

HAPPY EARTH DAY AND THANKS FOR READING!