A HUGE Garden Planter From a Combine Tire

Raised gardens are far easier to deal with than ground level gardens. If raised enough, there is no bending over to weed, plant, trim, fertilize and remove old plants. In fact, ours seem to have fewer weeds than our ground gardens.

Too, they can reduce losses you'd, without them, suffer because of nibbling rabbits.

Tire planters made from used tires will outlast us and any wood planter many times over.

Some will express concern about chemicals that might leech from tires. I cannot say how much of a problem that actually is, because I have no clue and, without testing, it's anyone's guess as to if there is contamination leeched from the tires into what is being grown. However, I can say food grown in tires is not going to have the pesticides and herbicides contamination common to commercially grown food, unless you add them.

Making this tire into a planter was fun on a comical level, per the photo of the tire in the back of our little Ford Ranger. That's a WHOLE lot of tire in a small truck and it was as far into the truck as I could get it, unless I stood it up.

For reference, I loaded this by myself. Keep in mind, I'm a tubby 74 year old. Still, loading the tire onto my truck wasn't too bad. In part, because I wanted it badly. In part, because I did it in steps.

To load the tire into my truck, I flipped it onto a couple truck tires laying side by side. Then I flipped it onto a double layer. That raised the tire up quite a bit. It's, kind of, the same method I've used to load my 300 pound table saw into my cargo van, at least three times.

Once on the two double stacked truck tires, I stood the combine tire up, backed up to it, the tipped it on into the pickup.

I secured the tire with about four ratcheting straps, so everyone behind me was safe from harm. And I took the back roads home, about five miles away.

Once home and with the straps removed, the tire tipped out fine. True to the nature of heavy walled tires, it rolled to its future spot without too much trouble or effort.

[MATERIALS]

(1) You're going to need a tire. Or several of them, depending on which tires you choose to build your planter.

I chose a combine tire because they are huge. Weeding, trimming and so on is all done at waist level. And a friend had a couple. As you can see, it looks pretty impressive, being toted around in my little Ford Ranger pickup.

You could use truck tries too, but to get the height the combine tire gave me would require at least four of them. Likely as many as two more.

I've used truck tires in the past and stacked at least two of them. When I did. I packed the first one with dirt before adding the second.

(2) There is that pesky matter of what to fill this thing with. I had a compost pile with a lot of grass clippings and a few 40 gallon bags of sawdust, so used that for some of the fill.

SIDE NOTE: I try to only throw pine and fir sawdust in my compost pile. I try to keep free of exotic wood dust, walnut and cedar.

In addition to compost, or instead of it, you could use branches, rocks and such to raise the bottom too. In the end, a combine tire is a lot of tire to fill with dirt.

SIDE NOTE: About two years in and the fill I used settled about 10". That's actually less than I expected.

(3) If you want to alter the appearance of the tire, you can consider covering the tread portion of the tire with cedar fence boards. For my combine tire, a 6' board cut in half would work fine for those purposes. Lower truck tires may even allow you to get 3 each 2' boards.

(4) To secure the boards to the tires, use screws made for exterior work that are, approximately, 1-1/8" to 1-1/4" in length. One per board may be enough.

[TOOLS]

(1) To cut out the sidewall of the tires you'll be best served using a reciprocating saw, like a Sawsall or Tigersaw, and a bi-metal blade. The combination will make quick work of the project of cutting the sidewall and it's pretty easy to stay about 2" off the edge.

(2) If you choose to dress up the tire, such as by hanging wood down the sides, you'll need a drill and bit to drill holes in the wood. Possibly a second, smaller bit to drill the tire for the threaded part of the screw. Do a test and you may be able to save yourself a lot of work (drilling the second hole in the tire).

For the wood, use a bit just big enough to fit the screw body through (snug is okay). Don't use a bit so large the head can't hold the wood to the tire.

You may be able to use the bit you used to drill the hole in the wood to drill a fraction of an inch into the wood, to give the screw a starting point.

If that doesn't work, go to a bit just a smidgen smaller than the thickness of the threated part A second, smaller bit, just a bit smaller than the threaded portion of the screws will make running the screws into the tire far easier.

(3) A hand saw, circular saw or jig saw will allow you to cut the boards to the length you need to cover all or part of the tire treads.

(1) When cutting the side wall, leave at about 2" of it, to maintain the shape and strength of the sidewall.

To start the cut, you can pull the trigger and ease the blade down into the sidewall. Alternately, you can start on the inside and word toward the treads, but that will require you to cut through metal wiring used to stiffen the sidewall. Once past the wire, things will go smoothly and quickly.

If using several tires, I'd cut the lower tire sidewalls too, again, keeping in mind you want to keep some of the sidewall to keep the tires from loosing their shape.

(1) Once the side wall(s) is/are removed, it's time to fill your tire planter. As noted, above, this can take a lot of dirt, so you can use other things as filler. Keeping in mind, it will settle, as will even the dirt, and you'll be best served by adding more dirt from time to time.

(2) Once I got the bottom raised up to within one around 1-1/2' from the top, I filled the remainder to within a couple inches of the top with soil from around my property.

SIDE NOTE: I had several gallons of pure charcoal for which I had no other use, so I mixed it in with the soil. Charcoal and enhance water retention, and release it slowly. Improving irrigation attempts. It can attract and hold needed nutrients, keeping them from leeching out, while still leaving them available to the plants. It can reduce acidity. And it can support beneficial microorganisms.

(3) I added a few bags of potting soil and mixed it in with about 6" of the sand and nearly unavoidable rocks from our property. If you have good soil around your property, you could use that, instead of potting soil. Farmers around here grow thousands of acres of crops and don't add potting soil and such.

(4) If desired, you can add wire racks and/or posts for things like peas and other climbing crops. How hard that would be would depend on what you used to fill the tire.