Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Rebecca Terrill" <murien@earthlink.net>]

Thought I would share our experience with the potato/tire method, which was
not too successful I am afraid. In my opinion I believe that our hot, humid
summer and the sporadic heavy rains did us in. We dug the soil beneath 10
tires, planting the seed potatoes in the soil and then stacked another tire
over the site. As the potatoes emerged, we mulched with hay and kept adding
tires as the plants grew. We began to notice in July, when the stacks had
reached the fifth tire in height, that the heat and moisture in the tire
stacks began to increase and the plants began to rot. When we dismantled the
stacks we found, in the three stackes where the plants survived, that only a
few small potates had formed at the soil level and no higher. 

If you live in an area of high humidity I would suggest that wire columns
might serve you better, vice the heat and moisture retaining black tires. 

That was our experience, anyway .....

Rebecca
Zone 7, VA    


-----Original Message-----
From: livingontheland-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:livingontheland-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Greg Bell
Sent: Sunday, June 25, 2006 8:56 PM
To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [Livingontheland] Potatoes in tires


i'm planning on growing potatoes in car tires this year.  free containers 
for container gardening!  sort of a white-trash look, but it allows me to 
stack more tires on top and fill with leaf litter and compost as the 
potatoes grow.

basic question - these are average sized car tires... how many seed 
potatoes can i/should i plant in one tire?  spacing recommendations on the 
package are obviously geared towards machine-based growing.

thanks,
~gb
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