The Marie sent round a couple of chemin clearing machines and butchered my 10-metre-long privet hedge facing the chemin. The driver said he was trimming all chemins in the area that needed widening. But they didn’t clear away the mess they left in their wake. Had to do that myself! But it was good exercise.
And I bought a hedge trimmer tout suite to start putting my hedge back into something that resembles a tidy privet hedge – mine is 33+ years old.
What I’m really pleased about is the Makita battery hedge trimmer. It’s a no-nonsense powerful trimmer that cuts at 4,000 revs a minute. It is so light and quiet, and cut through the hedge this morning like nobody’s business! Effortless.
And it uses the same batteries I already have for the Makita chainsaw. I do so love tools that work, and do the job properly.
They did the same with a beautiful display of flowering bulbs, mainly iris of varying colours at the front of out house on the boundary. They only did it once
All the pots are the same size, but their contents grow to very different sizes, also one tends to use different amounts of each and the plants don’t all need the same conditions to flourish.
And is the perimeter fence to stop them escaping
OTOH you’d probably be appalled by the (apparent) disorder of my herb garden…
Actually, I wasn’t trying to convince anybody. I was just showing my alternative to an herb spiral.
I plant fewer of the bigger plants in the same size tyre and sometimes use two or more tyres for more frequently used herbs. I can vary the soil conditions in each tyre individually and can similarly change watering patterns individually.
The fence is not there to corral triffids. For some inexplicable reason my wife found tyres unattractive so it was my (less than successful) attempt at prettying them up.
I have a separate, much larger tyre garden for vegetables (hidden behind commercial fence panels). This is where individual soil and water patterns are more useful. The tyres are excellent at preventing those plants which tend to spread out of control from spreading everywhere. I have been doing this for nearly 20 years so I have convinced myself it is a useful system.
When I sold our first house 8 years ago the purchaser insisted I remove all the 250 tyres I had installed. I met the purchaser a few years later and asked how he was getting on. He said that when he got round to sorting out the potager area it was overgrown with horseradish, mint and topinambour and he was fighting a losing battle to eradicate them.
I would not be appalled by disorder in your garden. That would be the pot calling the kettle black.
I can assure you I am no Bob Flowerdew - he knows what he is doing.
I get my tyres from a local tyre garage. I just go and help myself. Wide low profile tyres are better than normal tyres. The garage owner has to pay for them to be disposed of so it suits him. I did have to sign an attestation to say that I will dispose of them responsibly.
Yes you are quite right there is always that danger. I have spent a lot of time researching articles for and against. I estimate that the risk is minimal. After 20 years of using them I can detect no degradation in my vital signs. As I am well past my sell-by date I don’t have another 20 years left to go so I will potter on in my own way.
I think there is a greater risk of particulate absorption just standing beside a busy road.
I’ve been a bit unsure of them fr this reason however I read that once they are 2 years old or something they don’t leak. We have quite a few as we chdnge our own tyres!
It seems to me a simple enough experiment to grow some veg in a tyre under controlled conditions (no air pollutants) then measure the contaminants in the bit you eat. I have been unable to find anyone who has done this. Everything else seems to me speculation depending on what point of view is being pursued.
When you think about it, food is grown beside motorways and main roads. Traffic is passing 24 hours per day with tyres wearing and releasing particles into the air where it is wafted onto the crops to be absorbed in the same way. I do not see much complaint about that (although I am sure someone somewhere is).
Most things, including tyres, degrade over time, leaching out chemicals, micro particles, heavy metals, etc. It may take a couple of hundred years, but they will degrade to dust. As I wrote, I wouldn’t use them, but if anyone does, it’s their choice. Apart from a few plastic items in my garden my rule of thumb is, If you wouldn’t put it in the compost bin don’t put it in the garden.
I kind of feel the same way, hence why they are in a pile in the garden / holding down plastic covered weed killing areas etc and not actually being used!
A further danger of tyres, as I discovered, is that wasps love to get in under the top edge and build a nest in that lovely blackbody absorbing all the heat from the summer sun. They are not thrilled when I come looking to strim round the tyre or to harvest whatever I’m growing. I no longer use the tyres.
NO, there is not - at least not in any meaningful way.
I would suggest you give the best gardening advice on the forum Wozza and also some very interesting health ideas but on this one issue I feel I have to disagree.
Your statement installed a fear worm in my head and I have spent a very long time trying to decide if I should abandon 20 years of experience using tyre planters.
There is a wealth of discussion on the subject but a huge amount of misinformation and speculation resembling some other conspiracy theories. Remember the damage the MMR vaccine theories caused? Even If it does take hundreds of years for a chemical in a tyre to get into my carrots, I do not eat hundred-year-old carrots. To be serious now, I cannot locate any scientific evidence of tyre chemicals causing any health problems from eating vegetables grown in a tyre planter. Not one single case. There is no recorded evidence of tyre chemicals having entered vegetables grown in a tyre planter. There IS some evidence that some tyre chemicals have entered green leafed crops growing besides motorways (mostly by airborne transport of particles from tyre wear) but no one stops eating those.
I do understand your “better safe than sorry” approach and often think the same way myself but I try to be sensible about it. I know for certain that people are killed in road accidents. That is very well documented but it does not stop me driving my car on the road.
Having said all that, if you have discovered anything that contradicts this, I will be most certain to pay attention to it.
If you accept that tyres are leaching toxic chemicals, would you not be safer disposing of them? Otherwise that toxic mix will wash down the plastic on your weed bed and create a poisonous circle around your garden area.
I have never had that problem. The serious problem I have had from garden pests is slugs like to take up residence in the air space ready to pounce on any shoots as they appear. I usually fill the air space with rocks and then pack tightly with earth. Finally fill the planter with earth to the very top before sowing any crops.
