Tires, Big and Small

Though I lived on a hundred acre farm with irrigation, I had a garden for the home.  I'd stack truck tires and take all but a few inches off the top sidewall, then fill them with dirt. Obviously, drainage was good, and the dips of the bottom sidewalls held some of the water dumped on them.

The tires made weeding and harvesting a cakewalk - NO bending over.

A few days back, I left my buddy's place and noticed a front combine tire leaning against one of the grain silos. I asked him if it was dead and, if it was, if I could have it. Long story shorter - it's home.

A SawsAll, TigerSaw or the equivalent, with a bi-metal blade, makes short work of the sidewall.  I leave a few inches to help the tires keep their circular shape.

This one was fun to load. It's not a lightweight. I rolled it on a flat tire, then on to one with rim, where it balanced fine. Then I backed the pickup to it and it flipped over on to the bed fine.

Once home, I flipped it out and rolled it to its new home.

A ways away is a place where we've been dumping the lawn grass for thirty years or so. Into that I mix LARGE bags of sawdust and shavings from my sanders, planers and jointer.

I'll fill the last foot and a half with dirt from our sandy soil, mix in a bit of compost and call it the start of a growing day.  

Any suggestions as to what I should grow in this one.

I was doing this too but the tires attracted massive amounts of black widows. It was too dangerous so I had to get rid of them.

Curious about where the black widows were making camp. I pack dirt in under the lip on top, so there is no place for them there.

The worst widow crop I ever saw was the year my buddy screwed up the setting on his planter and planted forty acres of watermelon in five acres. He grew them anyway and family and friends [and cattle] had a great watermelon summer. That said, it seemed nearly every other watermelon had a widow living under it.

elle sagenev wrote:I was doing this too but the tires attracted massive amounts of black widows. It was too dangerous so I had to get rid of them.

So if anyone wants to make an informed decision...most vegetables grow in an acidic soil, which helps to break down the tire.  In general things are breaking down in the environment on their own, sunlight, acidic rain, fertilizers...

It seems like tires would be good containers, but they are made up of toxic materials that are breaking down in the soil inside them and underneath them, which the roots of the plants are going into.   The chemicals are dissolvable in water, and that's the water the plant roots uptake.   Most tires contain heavy metals, including copper, cadmium, chromium, lead, nickel, and zinc. These metals are harmful to your health.  Solvents often used to produce tires are benzene, styrene, toluene, and xylene.

Here's an article about how the run-off from degrading tires from roadways is killing salmon....

Oregon Public Broadcasting
May 7, 2022
Scientists point to chemical in car tires that’s been killing coho salmon
By John Ryan (KUOW)

Coho salmon returning to freshwater each fall often die, gasping for breath and swimming aimlessly, before they are able to spawn. Scientists now know why.  After years of chemical sleuthing, scientists have pinpointed the toxic substance that’s been killing large numbers of coho salmon in Northwest creeks.

It’s 2-anilino-5-([4-methylpentan-2-yl]amino)cyclohexa-2,5-diene-1,4-dione, or 6PPD-quinone for short.

The mysterious substance — purplish-pink when concentrated but invisible when dissolved — was absent from chemical databases that researchers consulted to try to identify the poison lurking in creeks near busy roadways.

“It’s almost like you’re trying to catch a killer,” University of Washington Tacoma environmental chemist Zhenyu Tian said. “Now you have a fingerprint, but the fingerprint just doesn’t match off your criminal database, right?”

Through round after round of painstaking chemical analyses, Tian and his colleagues figured out that a tire-rubber stabilizer called 6PPD degrades into the highly toxic coho killer as tires wear. “You put this chemical, this transformation product, into a fish tank, and coho die, like, really fast,” Tian said.

Nearly all tires worldwide contain 6PPD and shed the toxic 6PPD-quinone.

“It’s used to prevent degradation and cracking of the rubber compounds, which is critical for tire safety,” said attorney Sarah Amick with the U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association.

Runoff from pavement carries a stew of thousands of different, mostly unidentified, chemicals into nearby waters: from motor oil, antifreeze, brake linings, tire dust and more.  That runoff is the main source of toxic pollution in Puget Sound, where fish in urban bays often have tumors and lesions.

As y'all might imagine, using tires for planters is controversial in Permies circles. We've discussed it many times before.  I am something of a fan, myself.  I don't think there's any real clear science that examines the hazards of whole tires in the living environment (as opposed to ground up tire chunks, or tire dust, both of which are quite bad).  But I'm beyond the days when I was interested in rehashing old arguments.  Here's  a sort of roundup post I did more than five years ago, summarizing many of the previous threads and discussions here on the forum.  Notable is Paul Wheaton's opinion:

5 years ago: Big tires for "Keyhole-ish" design

Highlight:

paul wheaton wrote:
2)  My mission with these forums to gather knowledge about stuff far beyond organic.  I don't want to publish discussions on GMOs, herbicides or petroleum fertilizers - that's for other forums.  The use of tires is something that might be considered organic, therefore I will allow it.  but just barely.  And I do want the resulting discussion to strongly favor NOT using tires.  

3)  When I first started gardening, I really sucked at it.  But I quickly learned that I needed more soil.  And one of the things I did was use a big tractor tire and fill it with soil.  It worked awesome:  the rhubarb planted in it was HUGE!  It was about a year later that I started to feel uneasy about the tire and the potential toxins.  And a year after that that I started making plans to get rid of the tire.   And now I am adamantly against the idea of using tires in gardening.   Therefore, i cannot fault this path - I've done the same thing.  And I hope that folks coming to this site and reading this thread will come to the conclusion of not using tires in their stuff - thus avoided my past errors.

I'm seventy-two. How much time do I have left?

Seriously, I have ZERO doubt there is merit to what you say. However, the alternative may be doing nothing at all, whether because of budget constraints or because our ability to repeat a process grows less each year.  Building gardens we don't have to bend over for from regular lumber means they'll require rebuilding in a couple years. The dirt may have to be moved twice. Concrete may be too  expensive, and so on it goes.

An alternative is to rely on an increasingly suspect (availability, chemical treatments, . . . .) food chain.  Another alternative is to add a lot of charcoal, which is a good thing for any garden.  Toss in a bit of zeolite and things only get better, both for water conservation and because of the "magnetic" properties of the zeolite with regard to heavy metals.

In the end, it's an all or nothing thing for me. I could improve on the tire by building a barrel on the inside, leaving the huge dead air space. The contact with the tire would be minimal for the decades the tire will give service.

I wrap five gallon buckets with cedar strips I make with my bandsaw. If the buckets were left to the sun, they'd be brittle and dead in a couple years. Four years in, with the cedar as a shield, they're cute, going strong and not in a landfill somewhere.

Cedar around a tire might well have the same effect on tires as it does on the buckets.

In the end, a lot of food for thought from either direction.


I should add, that cars and roads affect the environment is easy to see, here, in the desert area of Eastern Washington. A drive down the road revels something only a few think about - bright, green foliage a few feet off and all along THE road northwest of the Tri Cities, when, just a few feet farther, everything is brown and dead on the surface. The water rolling off the sparse cars traveling that road is enough to keep tumbleweeds and other plants thriving deep into the summer.

Cristo Balete wrote: [S]o if anyone wants to make an informed decision...most vegetables grow in an acidic soil, which helps to break down the tire.  In general things are breaking down in the environment on their own, sunlight, acidic rain, fertilizers...

Kelly Craig wrote:Curious about where the black widows were making camp. I pack dirt in under the lip on top, so there is no place for them there.

The worst widow crop I ever saw was the year my buddy screwed up the setting on his planter and planted forty acres of watermelon in five acres. He grew them anyway and family and friends [and cattle] had a great watermelon summer. That said, it seemed nearly every other watermelon had a widow living under it.

elle sagenev wrote:I was doing this too but the tires attracted massive amounts of black widows. It was too dangerous so I had to get rid of them.

I didn't have huge tires so I stacked them. Widows in every crevice.

Kelly Craig wrote:
I wrap five gallon buckets with cedar strips I make with my bandsaw. If the buckets were left to the sun, they'd be brittle and dead in a couple years. Four years in, with the cedar as a shield, they're cute, going strong and not in a landfill somewhere.

I would really love to see photos of your cedar-armored buckets!  Or even more, shots of the strip-making and assembly process.

I use a lot of buckets, mostly upcycled from roadside litter.  (Oklahoma's litter laws aren't taken very seriously and people who let five gallon buckets blow out of the backs of their pickup trucks rarely stop and go back for them.)  So they come to me in various stages of pre-decomposition from UV exposure and they move on to the landfill when they start falling apart as I handle them.  Anything that extends their life and beautifies my container garden is of interest.

Just went out and snapped a photo to show the simplicity of the buckets.  They aren't anything remarkable, since they are just prototypes.  I cheated and used my pneumatic stapler to secure the wire to each piece, which may be obvious from the rust stains.

The strips are just from ends of a fence job [or something]. I cut the pieces to length and ran them through my bandsaw to give me three from each strip. I picked a width and went for it.

The could be improved on and a lot of buckets that would end up as trash can be used for planters or what have you. The tipped one (thanks, again, doggie critters) is just holding treasured tumbled rocks from my wife's dad.  The other is obvious.

I believe you can see a piece of wire on the inside, where I ended the run.

Dan Boone wrote:

Kelly Craig wrote:
I wrap five gallon buckets with cedar strips I make with my bandsaw. If the buckets were left to the sun, they'd be brittle and dead in a couple years. Four years in, with the cedar as a shield, they're cute, going strong and not in a landfill somewhere.

I would really love to see photos of your cedar-armored buckets!  Or even more, shots of the strip-making and assembly process. . . .

Thank you!  I simply could not visualize it, and the photos help enormously.  That's really clever and a huge attractiveness upgrade.

Those buckets are pretty awesome! The wood protects the plastic buckets from the sun, and the plastic buckets protect the cedar contact with the moist soil, which would of course rot the wood eventually. Plus they are really pretty!