Vertical Gardening

A while back I wrote about my grey water garden.  It has gone through several incarnations, I think since Hubby got involved each has become less successful than the last, but we will get there.  Along the edge there was a cut or slipped wall of earth.  It looked dreadful, but was a fairly good spot for a garden.  It faced North and East, was sheltered from the South and West and was near where the grey water came out.

I came up with the idea of building a stepped retaining wall type thing along there with tyres.  Inside the tyres I would grow veges.  It would be a great place to move some of the strawberries that were threatening to take over every available spot in my other vege garden.  I would also fill some of these tyres with the large amount of stones we have and make them into steps leading down to this area.

Hubby couldn’t ‘see’ it.  I drew a picture, he kind of got it, but not really.  He’d brought most of the tyres he’d found up to a spot very close to where I wanted to do it, so I just started to do it.  I’ve spent months on and off, working at it.  I’ve filled tyres and gaps beneath the tyres with weeds, lawn clippings, pig and chook poo - every organic scrap you can think of.

 

 

I didn’t realise just how many stones are needed to fill a tyre.  That’s been quite a mission.  It took a few tyres before I realised that I really needed to make sure I also filled the rims of the tyres.  It can be quite disconcerting to have them move under you when you step up or down.  It got to the stage where anyone going down the paddocks would pick up an armload of rocks and stones on their way back up to toss into the tyres.

We opened up a new patch for the pigs and for some reason they dug this bit over - something they hadn’t done anywhere else.  This gave us plenty of easily accessible rocks and stones, but also a great patch to plant spuds.

 

The tyres I hadn’t used yet - although I haven’t finished building my wall - were getting to be a nuisance, so I made three ‘pyramids’ from some of them.  A 3 x 3 square on the bottom, 2 x 2 on the next layer and one in the middle on the top.  I filled these with pig poo and the fallen oak leaves from their paddock and threw a handful of pumpkin seed in each tyre.  In one I used watermelon seed.  Only two plants have come up in that one, but (I’m guessing through the pig poo) we have a couple of tomato plants popping up there too.  They’ve been simple but effective.  The pumpkin plants have been doing reasonably well, we have more than we expected so Hubby is keen to start more. 

 

He pointed out that (when we buy it) a bag of pig nuts is between $25 and $30.  This seed has cost us nothing as it came from last year’s pumpkins and the pigs love pumpkin.  The cattle will also eat it.

He also now loves the tyre wall and is helping me to work on it.  I noticed that I keep getting big healthy grass and weeds come up along the front at the bottom.  They can be quite a challenge to pull out and they drop seed all through my tyres.  So I decided we needed a path in front of the tyres.  We’d found plenty of weed-matting in all the crap piles and sheds and there was probably a couple of trailer loads worth of small rounded stones in a paddock.  I found that quite by accident - it was overgrown with sorrel and grass.

The hard thing about that is the soil we’re digging up for the path.  It’s clay with a disproportionate amount of stones.  It’s taken at least 6 hours so far to get about 4 metres along.  First it needs loosening with a pickaxe/grubber type tool.  Then I’m screening what we’ve dug.  The soil and small stones are going into tyres for veges, the weeds are going into a compost drum and the bigger stones are going into step tyres.

 

Pumpkin Pyramid

All the organic material that has been going in is settling too.  It’s an ongoing thing to top up the tyres with fresh soil and compost and try to keep them going.  I don’t think this is a project that will be finished any time in the near future, but we’ll get there eventually.

Although chances are, by the time it’s nearly finished, Hubby will have a new grand scheme and want to pull it all down and start again!