Planning your tire garden

Ready to start your tire garden? The first step is to plan it. There are three steps to planning your garden. Once you have planned it, you can start putting it all together.

The steps:
1. Measure
2. Draw
3. Organize

Measure

First decide where to put your garden. We recommend at least 9 feet wide for two rows of tires. This will give you two rows with space between for a path. Alternatively you can but the tires together, if you can get to them from each side. This later option works well for the folk that like to have their garden right in the middle of the yard.

Now that you know where you want it, measure out the space. You might want to do a rough sketch in the garden so you can be sure you get the measurements are in the right place. Sketch in everything that is currently there, and will stay.

Draw

Take that rough sketch you did and turn it into a scale drawing. You should draw the scale to 1 inch = 4 feet. If you are using semi-truck tires, they are about 40" wide. A quarter is about 15/16th of an inch wide. So the quarter will be a little bigger on your drawing that the tires, but not much.

Be sure to draw in all the features that are currently there, but don't draw in anything you WANT there just yet. If there are fences there, draw them in. This might change what we plant there. Be sure to label which way is north, so we know where the sun hits.

It is a good idea to go out there once in a while and see where the sun hits when. Mark the number of hours different areas of the garden get sun on your map. Again, this will effect what we plant there.

Now is the time to add what we want there. Have some quarters ready. Lay them out on your paper. This will show you about how many tires you can fit where. You can also re-arrange them until you get them the way you want them, without worrying about erasing things. You should have about 36 inches for your path. This will give you space to get a wheel barrow down and then turn it around.

Since your quarters are a little bigger than scale (about 45 inches to scale), you may find you have a little more space than you thought, but for most gardens this will not be much. You also want to draw in a couple of inches space, because the tires will not fit as snugly up next to each other as quarters do, so you really only have a difference of 2-3 inches per quarter. If your garden is larger than about 15 tires in a row, you might consider using paper cutout at .9 inches diameter.

Once you have it all set the way you like it, it is time to draw in the tires. Remember that the quarters are a little bigger than scale tires. You should also measure the tires you have collected to make sure they are about 40 inches in diameter. Once you have verified that, draw them to scale, leaving a couple inches between each tire. If you don't care about it being perfectly to scale, you can use the quarters to draw around, otherwise use a compass.

Organize

Now that the garden is drawn, we need to start saying what we are putting where. Think about succession planting, companion planting, and other organic techniques that cut down on herbicide/pesticide use as well as get you more food in your space.

Number each tire. I like to start at one end of a row and number left to right, top to bottom, just like you read.

Take another paper (or a spreadsheet). On the top put the following headers:
Tire Number
Plant Name
Plant Date
Harvest Date

Under tire number you will put the tire you are planting in. Since you kept track of how much sun hit which spot when and you researched what plants do well living together, you can start planning out what goes where. For each tire, keep a full list of what you will plant when and when you will harvest it. This allows us to do succession planting as well. Lets take an example.

We have a space with 3 rows of 5 tires, in full sun The three sisters (corn, beans, and squash) is a good crop for here. So, we get some good sweet corn, various beans and various squash. We know that we want to plant the corn a few weeks before the beans, this will give it time to grow, and act as the support for the beans. The squash will be planted in the neighboring tires.

Some plants (corn) you need to pick fairly close to the harvest date. Others, like your lettuce and peas, you can keep harvesting throughout. The harvest date is "maturity" based on what the package says under "days to harvest" or whatever it says. This just gives you an idea of when you should be out there looking to pick them, and when you will be able to reclaim the space for another crop.

We have a long growing season here, so we start early. If you cannot start as early, you may not be able to get two crops in a single space, but play with it, and you might find out you can. I would probably like to do another late season crop as well. Peas, Lettuce, Carrots, Spinach, etc all do well with a late summer crop. You can also plant your seeds for one crop before the other crop is harvested. You have a week or two before germination, so you can overlap slightly, if harvesting will not disturb your seedlings. This would not be good with carrots, but planting shade loving lettuce around your about to be harvested corn is a good idea.

You may want to stagger your planting and harvesting more as well. If you plant your carrots every week, you will have fresh carrots for a longer period.