“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” — Marcus Tullius Cicero

I found the idea for planting potato tires in the excellent book The Urban Homestead, by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen. Their potato tire instructions are also available here.

Planting potato tires in your garden is great for a lot of reasons. For one, you are putting old tires to good use and keeping them out of the landfill. Secondly, you are growing some of your own food, which is a rewarding and educational experience. I didn’t even know what a potato plant looked like until I planted potatoes myself! Thirdly, potato tires allow you to grow a lot of potatoes in a small space. And finally, since you are planting the potatoes above ground in tires, when it comes time to harvest you won’t have to break your back digging into the ground to pick your potatoes. Instead, you can just pull off the topmost tire and sift through the soil to find your yummy taters.

This is a low-cost, low-maintenance project which can be undertaken almost anywhere with adequate sunlight. We hid our stack of tires in the hedges in our front yard… on a city street! We had a bountiful harvest from our single, three tire stack. We were able to make plenty of homemade, homegrown mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, and oven fries, and I must admit that these fresh potatoes were the best I’ve ever eaten.

Potato Fact: An Englishman named Eric Jenkins grew 370 pounds of potatoes from a single plant in 1974.