Question about tire gardening

Another reader posed the following question: "I have been following your tire garden adventure since the beginning and have been really impressed with how well it worked for you on your previous property. I would like to try them out where I live (outside of Houston, TX), but my only concern is if the black tires will soak up the sun and get too hot for the roots. I would be curious to know if any of your readers in the southern U.S. have tried tire gardening and if it was successful for them. Thanks!"

 

Unquestionably the black color of the tires played a factor in our garden's success at our last home. In North Idaho, extending the growing season by even a little bit – by having raised beds to capture heat – is an advantage.

However the opposite is true in hot climates such as Texas. The first solution to come to mind is to paint the outside of the tires white, to reflect sunlight.

Has anyone in southern climates gardened in tires? If so, please let us know your experiences (good and bad) with this resource.

Winter's a-coming!

 Whoo-whee, do we have a cold snap on the way!

Not only is nearly seven inches of snow predicted for Friday, but then temperatures absolutely plunge to 1F late Sunday/early Monday. Whee.

To this end, Older Daughter and I have been frantically harvesting the garden. We tucked the potatoes, peppers, and carrots indoors so they won't freeze.

Dried beans are out in the barn. The cold won't affect them.

The cold snap isn't supposed to last long, and with luck all the snow will have melted by Wednesday or Thursday of next week. But wow, temperatures like that this early in the season? Are we in for a hard winter?

Garden update

Despite the cool wet start to summer, the garden has actually done very well this year. Here's a walk-through.

Grapes. They're not ripe yet, of course, but show a lot of promise. There's just nothing prettier than grape vines.

Herbs. I grow parsley, thyme, sage, oregano, basil, rosemary, spearmint, and horseradish. Here's the parsley, starting to go to seed. I'll save some of the seeds for our next homestead, but in the meantime it will seed its own bed for next year's crop.

Oregano.

Spearmint. This is my garden candy. I actually don't care for mint tea in any form, but I simply adore the smell. This lush bed started from one small plant I impulsively bought a few years ago at a local hardware store, and it spread to fill an enormous tire with perfume. (One of the advantages to gardening in tires it it's easy to contain things that like to spread, like mint.)

Rosemary and basil.

Raspberries. The fruit season is past, but I have a freezer full of berries.

Blueberries. It's blueberry season, so I'm picking about every other day.

Peas. Their season is also done, of course, and all the peas are in the freezer awaiting cooler weather so I can can them up. These vines are about ready to pull out.

One of the strawberry beds.

Onions. Goodness I love onions.

Carrots.

Garlic. It's definitely ready to harvest.

Tomatoes. Lots of green fruit, and a few ripe ones.

I planted lots of dry beans this year -- Navy and pinto.

The orchard is doing very well.

Plums.

Apples

Peaches.

(No hazelnuts yet. They take a few years to mature.)

Okay, I guess I'm done with excuses, I really need to go harvest the garlic.

[Bonus feature: Here's an article on the therapeutic power of gardening.]

In like a lamb, out like a lion

Forget the old adage that March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb. We've had the reverse this year.

In fact, March started out rather nice and I was able to get a bit of early garden work done.

I also started some seeds in the house: tomato, cayenne peppers, Anaheim peppers, basil.

Some have started to sprout.

(I have a feeling it's going to be a heavy gardening year.)

But then the great celestial powerhouse of weather reversed itself, and we're getting a late blast of winter. We've had wind. Rain. Hail. Sleet. And of course, snow.

Spring is around the corner -- the daffodils are doing their best to tell us that.

But it sure ain't here yet.

Buried in beans

At the moment, I am buried in beans. Specifically, dry beans.

I prefer to grow bush beans as opposed to climbing beans, and this year I planted eight tires of Jacob's cattle beans and six tires of calypso beans (both heirloom varieties, of course).

This year the Jacob's cattle beans outdid themselves.

The day I chose to pick them was windy, with rain in the forecast. I decided it wasn't such a bad task to pick a couple thousand rattling bean pods on a blustery day.

Rather than yank up the plants and then later remove the pods, this time I stripped the pods directly from the plants.

I got two bushel baskets of bean pods.

The Jacob's cattle beans were so productive that I held aside one tire's worth of beans to weigh the result.

From that one tire, I got almost 2.25 lbs. of beans, which is actually a decent amount for dry beans.

In theory, then, I should end up with about 18 lbs. of dry beans. We'll see. Shelling is slow work, but it's peaceful. I shell a few beans here and there between other tasks. [Update: Total came to 13.25 lbs. of Jacob's cattle beans. Meh.]

Here's an interesting anomaly: a hole bored into a pod...

...resulting in a hollowed-out bean. Must have been one hungry bug.

Here are the calypso beans. There were not as fruitful this year as in years past.

Since I was late picking these beans, a couple of the pods had already popped...

...and spewed the beans on the dirt.

Fewer tires as well as less production resulted in just one-third of a basket of bean pods.

Most of these beans -- both varieties -- will end up in a ginormous post of end-of-the-world chili.