Market Farming

[Pat Meadows <pat AT meadows.pair.com>]

On Mon, 3 Jan 2005 10:32:29 -0500, you wrote:

>Seriously, Matt, food plants should NEVER be around old truck tires. 
>Cadmium and other heavy metals are available in the soil around the 
>tires (and to your hands) and it gets in the food and it is NOT GOOD 
>for anyone. I sense that you may need to buy some newer gardening 
>books. The tire idea came into vogue in the 70's but by at  the 
>mid-90s it was fairly well known in community gardening circles that 
>tires are very dangerous around food.

I don't know that this is correct.  

It's certainly not correct that the 'tire idea came into
vogue in the 70s'.  People have been growing potatoes,
especially, in tires for several generations (generations of
people, not generations of potatoes).  I'd be willing to bet
dollars to doughnuts that people were planting potatoes in
tires as long ago as the 1930s.

I did all the research that I could before I started
planting in tires.  I found references from about - oh -
maybe half a dozen studies.  I contacted the Noble
Foundation and they sent me copies of papers that they had
found on the subject.   Altogether, I gathered at least a
dozen studies.

See:
http://www.noble.org/Ag/Horticulture/Rubber/Lumber.htm

Regardless of what is 'well known in community gardening
circles', all my research indicated that tires are safe to
plant in.  

Nothing says 'it's safe'.  But everything says 'we can find
no danger'.  So I cannot categorically say that it's safe:
I can say that no danger was indicated by any of the studies
I was able to find.  

In any event, if someone is worried about it, they can line
their tires with heavy-duty plastic so that the tires do not
contact either the soil or the plants.  Of course, then they
have to worry about the plastic with which they lined the
tires.  Plastic used for mulching would presumably be OK for
this purpose.

Pat
-- 
NOW OPEN! ContainerSeeds.com - vegetable, herb,
and edible flower seeds especially selected for successful 
container growing - http://www.containerseeds.com .