Market Farming

["Gloria Anderson Haswell" <gloria AT world-net.net>]

I am a member of another group where we had a discussion on tires being
harmful but no one was able to find a study proving that new tires leach
chemicals into the soil.  Do you have links to any information that you
could please send me? Yes I have read in numerous garden sites that the
tires were bad but nothing scientific to back up the claims.

Thanks
Gloria







Message: 10
Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 10:32:29 -0500
From: Allan Balliett <igg AT igg.com>
Subject: Re: [Market-farming] Application Rates for Poor Soil
To: cheselka AT theriver.com,      Market Farming
        <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Message-ID: <a06110416bdff13ad06df@[10.0.1.4]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"

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.

The 2nd thing I wanted to say to you is that it is very easy to get
broadacre farming confused with market farming when you are starting
out. There are many techniques of economy of labor and equipment and
materials that are necessary when you are farming acres of something
that are not pertinent when you are only doing a few 100ft beds of
it. I have come to think of my 100ft beds as containers rather than
as fields. DOing it this way, I don't feel bad about MAKING SOIL to
fill that bed. If you do that, you can use peat or community leaf
mold or ? to get the texture you want fast and you can do that 12inch
nutrient balancing that you are apparently interested in doing
easily, if you board your beds (30ft white oak 12inch fence boards
can be fairly cheap from a sawmill. Maybe not in your area. You can
even do this "Chineese Style" and just make mounded beds). I still
advise you to work from soil tests. We built several hundred feet of
boarded salad beds mid-season this year. I have to admit that I'm
fairly disappointed with how they have performed, but I'm getting
them re-tested and will work to balance nutrients better before this
season begins. My point: it is NOT too much work to build soil - just
like a landscaper would do - for beds. Texturizing with a cover crop
is going to take you a lot of months to accomplish.