Minimal Land? Use Tire Potatoes to Utilize the Ungardenable Ground!
Do you live on property with minimal land usage, ground with roots that are ungardenable (is that a word?) or a lot of concrete?
This is a great self-sufficiency and gardening technique that Cheyenne and I use to grow potatoes and make use of old spare tires at the same time! I will show you the step by step of how we are starting and steps on continuing our tire potato garden:
Step 1- Find a tire and put it on that ungardenable space
Any tire will do, the bigger the better, but the following instructions will be based on the common old unusable car tire. With this technique, you can place the tire on grass, rooted ground and yes, even cement. The tire that we used is being put on soil with many surrounding trees which have roots that make it ungardenable. This is why you will notice the plastic we placed down to prevent anything from taking up the space of our potatoes:
After this step, we gathered some soil that is rich in nutrients, which was composted from leaves and mixed with our rabbit's manure, which, by the way, can be directly applied to any vegetable without composting time needed:
Then load up half of the tire with the soil you have mixed:
Make sure to smooth out the dirt evenly, making sure you pack it into the inside of the tire's inlet. This is the area that soil will need to be utilized to assure maximum productivity:
Another trick I frequently use is to dump egg shells and coffee grounds into the soil. The nutrients in both adds to the quality of the soil. And us farmers know, the soil is the most important element.
Once all that is done, it's time to place your taters. I used Russet potatoes in this example. Each tire stack can house 4 potatoes, which will vine up.
Dump some dirt n those taters and make sure to take a garden spade to fill in the edges with dirt so that can be utilized:
Dump a half a gallon of water on them:
Now the waiting game starts. Once the potato buds grow up to half the width of the tire above the top line, add another tire and repeat the process (not adding any more potatoes of course!). You can do this for 5 to 6 tires worth tall:
When the 5th or 6th tire is done growing, or if the potato plants go to flower, simply kick over the tires, and you are ready to go!
Videos of potato plants going to flower:
Wow this is very interesting and innovative @tee-em. Using discarded tyres I guess is a win win like situation . It helps rhe environment in a big way. In these times of global warming concern we need more solutions like this!
That is a wonderful use for old tires. I'm growing potatoes..for the first time...using trash bags. Hope it works and I wish you much success with yours.
Thanks for the post and the great idea!
Thanks! I did it before in a raised bed, and another time with tires. Tires is definitely much easier to harvest with a nice side kick. lol
Sweet idea! I may try that this year. Thanks for sharing.
It totally works. Only problem is you get like 50 lbs of potatoes out of that, if you could consider that a problem. lol
Sweet idea! I have an old tire lying around and would love to grow potatoes intensively. I was thinking about building a potato box of sorts, though this method seems intriguing. The one downside I could foresee would be harvesting...might have to do it all at once?
Well, you could harvest at 3 tires. I just wanna try 5 tires for once. (Only did 4 but a shitload of taters)
That's a great idea! Suddenly less tires going into landfills and more abundant food!
Yeah, definitely a win-win! Chey is going to love kicking ove those tires in two months. She said we will kick them over together. Such a sweetheart. Last time I got about 50 lbs of potatoes out of a 4 tire stack, before she was old enough to know what I was doing. lol.
Very cool! Have to try this myself! Thanks for the tip @tee-em!