Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm if you've tuned in for any of my videos
you may have seen this field of what looks like green painted tires in the background
i've been asked some questions about why did I do this? This is a Q&A to answer
some of the common questions about why i've planted my stock field of roses in used tires
well the main reason is because we've planted these in an area of lawn
that when we come around with the ride ride-on lawnmower or the string trimmer
we don't want to destroy the bases of these roses it also provides a convenient kind of
an area to exclude the weeds we have lots of buttercups to the lawn here and left on their
own devices they would creep into the base of the rose and provide some pretty robust
root competition so this is to protect it from weeds and also to protect it from the lawn mowers
no it's not quite like a raised bed because the bottom is open and the roses are planted directly
into the garden soil beneath so i guess what you'd say is it's like a bottomless container maybe
or just like a small garden bed with edging around it and some mulch on top and we do
place a sandy mulch on top to help to provide some protection for the crown of the rose
Yeah, I get it. I wasn't in love with the look of them at first either wasn't sold on that
but then we compared them to all the other options and we looked at edgings and containers made of
wood plastic metal ceramic and none of them came even close in terms of the functionality for
cost they all fell short in terms of either the cost or the durability or the longevity
some of them will rot after a period of time uh and of course you know it just does come down to
that thing of if you're reusing something that was for another purpose and it suits this just
fine then why not in fact my wife actually got a neat little discount on her tire changes when
she offered to load up the back of the van with some of their used tires because they otherwise
have to pay to get rid of these so for us it just turned out to be a very practical solution
that could be quickly implemented at minimal cost while reusing something that was otherwise waste
i'm going to say so far so good we've had them in place or started putting them into
place about three years ago and we've been progressively moving our stock roses into them
they have provided a really good barrier to that lawn mowing when you just
bounce against them and there's no damage or harm to the roses in addition to those
benefits it's actually wrapped up being a pretty convenient place a way to target the
mulch and the fertilizer applications around the top of the rows and has even provided a nice spot
for us to mount our id tags for the roses as we want to identify them for shoppers on the farm
in terms of weeds it hasn't turned out to be a perfect barrier because you're not actually
digging it into any depth you're more or less removing the grass and then just laying it on top
so there are creeping grasses and creeping buttercups that can bridge that six or eight
inches underneath the tire and get in there but i will say it has been generally pretty
effective on all of the annual weeds and because we have that mulch in there it's pretty easy for
us to pull out those ones that creep underneath i'm going to say it's given us about 90 to 95
weed control i'll give you some footage here so you can have a quick look at how it's doing
yeah a couple of unexpected advantages we had a colder than usual winter for our area here
and having the tire around the crown and a mulch underneath actually provided some additional
protection to the base or the crowns of these roses snow would accumulate in there and it
just sort of held up pretty good over the winter so even though as i showed in the video earlier
we had some pretty substantial top damage to the roses some blackening off of the stems
just about everything in the field here with the exception of say one weakling everything else
has shot back up strong shoots from the base by now so i'm pretty happy with the way it's
offered winter protection the other thing that's been kind of an unexpected advantage is that it's
helped with moisture retention on the roses i obviously can target my waterings fairly
easily into these tires but because of the tires themselves and the mulch at the base of the roses
it actually holds on to that moisture really really well between waterings so i'm not having
to be out here every day watering it's usually even in the heat of summer like once a week
well the only specific disadvantages i've heard of so far came from viewers have told me
that they tried something like this previously and found that uh there would be rodents or small
animals that would find and shelter in the base of these tires kind of makes some sense it's kind
of a warm sheltered place for the roots well i guess if you had some rodents like mice or
or voles that got in there and made their nests in there that could pose a risk to the plants
that you have in there because hey plants and something to chew on right if food gets scarce
so that's one disadvantage i've heard of i haven't seen anything like that in
my garden here but it probably just goes to show that not every garden solution is
perfect for every garden and you just have to take these things situation by situation
okay let me show you here as i dig in a new one basically it's just
that i take an edging spade and dig around the outside rim of the tire
that's just scoring the grass around where the tire would be pulling off the tire then i cut
across it to get it into smaller sections and dig out the soil on the top just just the grass and
a small layer of soil as i can dropping the tire into that impression now all there would be to do
now for to plant a rose would be to dig a hole in the center put the rose in backfill and then add a
mulch and the mulch that i'm using is more or less just composted wood bark plus some sand this comes
from a local topsoil supplier and this is just going to serve as a mulch that covers off the
the crown of the rose and protects it a little bit and helps to retain moisture inside of the tire
well this is an interesting topic and i'm not going to address it from scratch here or at
any great length but i did come across an article written by robert pavlis from garden fundamentals
which is a channel i appreciate a lot and also his writing about garden myths is fantastic he
talked about the effects or the expected effects of the leaching of heavy metals off of rubber
tires into your garden and how much of a concern you should give that ultimately the studies are
a little bit scant on this but where they've studied it has been basically on crumb rubber
where they've taken and made a rubber mulch ground it all up and put it into the into playgrounds
and such and checked the soil afterwards to see how much of that is coming in aside from a small
amount of zinc that's getting into the soil over a length of time the first three months or so then
the leaching starts to drop off here we're not dealing with crummed up rubber we're not dealing
with something that's been ground up to create tons of surface area these are tires that have
been used on the road they've had a significant amount of weathering and wearing on the road and
by the time they're hitting my garden here they're more or less as stable as they're going to get
i've got the paint on the outside to protect it from sun damage and the amount of rubber that's
actually attached or touching the ground is very very minimal so i'm going to say that my
risk on this is relatively low especially since i went and looked at that article
i feel pretty comfortable with this it would be interesting in a couple of years to go and take
a soil sample in and see if there's any elevated levels of zinc just to see how much is coming out
but for now i feel pretty comfortable there are plants that live on roadsides as weeds that are
dealing with all of the wear and tear off of these tires including oil and spills and asphalt and
everything else and they're doing just fine so i'm not terribly concerned about health the plants and
i'm not eating these plants they're not for human consumption i'm just using them as mother plants
to produce other roses so not such a big deal as far as i'm concerned but i guess time will tell
yes the paint well it's not really intended to be camouflaged i'm under no illusions that placing
green paint on this will make you not see them but it does reduce the jarring effect of it when
they're tires and recognizable as such and they're immediately black and they're out in the field
they can look a little trashy i've had you know some people tell me they like the looks of these
in the garden when they're painted up like this but at least i find it less jarring than the tires
unpainted somebody's asked me a couple of times if i can tell them what color it is it's just
a basic exterior latex paint that we got at the home depot and i'll see if i can find a can and
show you a picture of uh of whatever paint coat it is but but i'm not exactly sure as i stand here
yeah most farmers would take the traditional approach of creating a hilled up row of soil
and planting the roses as their stock plants in that area much like next door here we have
a blueberry farm that has done the exact thing with blueberries the problem that i had with that
approach just came down to a couple of things first of all you have to dedicate a heck of a
lot of space to that i mean a dedicated space for tractor access on either side of this hill
and then maintaining it weed free i mean to be to be just blunt about it most of the blueberry
growers handle that by heavily spraying herbicides through those alleys between the rows every year
maybe twice or three times a year so it's not something i want to engage in it also does
take it from the landscape here these are in the landscape of the yard and my customers can come
here as they visit the farm and they can view these rows of plants and they can look at the
roses and decide which ones they want it's kind of a park-like setting but if i had to dedicate
them out to a separate area that's more or less a production area in uh in you know agricultural you
know hilling or tilling i'm not sure it would be quite as attractive to visit for my customers so
it's a it's just a judgment call that we made and as i say there's lots of different approaches to
this kind of thing but this is something that suits our farm and what we want to do with it
all right that's all i had for you today on this topic i hope it answered all your questions
any questions you could have had about the tires that we use for our mother stock plants for roses
if you do have any other questions about this or anything else related to our business
please go ahead and drop those into the comments of the video and thanks again for watching