Selfsufficientish.com

Has anybody else been charged around £5 for "disposal" charges of their car tyres when they've been to the garage? Well, pay £5 no more! They are useful!!!

1. Holding down weedproof matting
2. Potato tub (stack them high - although I'm yet to try this one!)
3. Compost tub (stack 'em high - although yet to try this one too!)
4. Big, rugid, post-apocalyptic planters
5. Build an earthship
6. Build a shed (if your not adventurous enough for the full earthship treatment!)
7. Hang it from a rope from a high point, preferably over a river, and let the kids muck around on it (you don't see that much these days!).
8. Build a giant wheelbarrow around your ex-car tyre
9. Make them into shoes

10.Use a big one with a pond liner or the like to make a paddling pool ,pond or sandpit.
11.Half and use for edging for the plot .

12. Use like in the throw a hoop game you see at funfares.
13. Hoola hoop for slim people with extreamly good muscles..

Andy Hamilton wrote: 13. Hoola hoop for slim people with extreamly good muscles..

Would that be you, then? Photo, please!

14. weighing down silage cover
15. use as anchor for polytunnels

16. make a huge table out of a big tyre (think I've posted about this before with a pic to boots!)

17. Build raised beds

18) There are one or two companies that reproccess them into things like roof slates.

19) I believe they are also used in the new type of 'quiet' road surface.

20) Earth rammed foundations for a strawbale building...

...which, as it happens, I took part in some earth ramming of car tyres for some foundations of a strawbale build a couple of weeks ago. Gunners and Stonehead would have enjoyed it - never ending physical labour.

21) Cut out sides, cut across top, turn into kid's swing (note: you need the old rag tyres for this, unless you really want to hack through the steel reinforcing they use these days).

Far out. I have only just seen this, and my mate laughs and says tyre recycling is the reason I have been sent to earth...

Not really - but I do use a heap of them, and collect them straight from the tyre joint because I live in a retarded part of the world where they are dumped into big pits and burned weekly Yes... I did say burned, and yes it is illegal, but somehow our council doesn't seem to bother with that law...

Here goes...

Food and water troughs - (You can use small laundry tubs in the small ones and the animals can't tip or wreck them, or you can concrete the base and they hold fantastic, or cut the huge ones through the middle for two big feeders)

Engine stand - when you have it out.

Retainer walls

Steps - fill with soil and tier

Contours - Used to catch and create natural terraces in sloped areas where erosion is a problem

Round Yard - for horses (Google this one, I saw this a while back and thought it was brilliant, but am yet to create anything with tyres placed this way)

Movable Animal Enclosure - By stacking normally, or like bricks you can enclose small animals and relocate them to work different areas, once they have grazed it down. Anything from Guinea pigs to goats.

Nests / Laying Boxes - Ducks

Caravan Jacks - Whip the wheels off permanent vans and reuse on trailer (or whatever) and lower van onto sets of old tyres instead.

Water butt - Fill inside with compost or use old spud tyres. Line with a couple of very heavy industrial bags

Loading dock - Build and fill your own dock for loading your animals onto trucks, utes etc.

Hay Seats - Keeps hay up off ground, or anything else you want to raise... bins, stored boxes etc.

Livestock tunnels - Create moveable pathways between pens or yards to protect plants (Good if you have goats who will always nibble on your favourite whatever)

Tree Sheilds - Pile to protect young trees and wire top with mesh if necessary

Artificial reef - (...not that I have one of these! LOL)

37. (I think) Dog basket. Our shepherd has tyres in the shed for his dogs - size according to dog size, and lined with straw.

Um... I have a sad one.

Today I had to bury our big old milking goat, because there was just no way we could bring ourselves to burn her on a pyre and we are in off fire season.

Our soil here is rugged and after digging for about 2 hours, I was still only about a foot and a half down. Calcium was a huge toggenberg and I had no idea how I was going to get a hole dug for her, but the 3 of us weren't prepared to consider any other sort of disposal. She had been a dear old thing and this was her home. After some discussion, the girls and I decided to raise the grave by edging with tyres and dear old Calcium went into a flower shaped grave that was filled with topsoil from neighbouring beds. An old door was put on top, just to deter any local wildlife, and we will leave that there until the soil settles. Eventually it will become another raised bed and stand as a nice reminder of our dear old mate.

Sorry to hear about your goat... You do get attached to your animals, especially if they are with you for so long, as dairy goats (or cows) are. At least she'll turn into good soil, eventually. (Needless to say, that kind of disposal is banned in the UK. )

My problem is getting hold of old tyres - when I had my exhaust done last week, I asked the mechanic what happened to the piles of tyres out back. He said they were waiting for a way of disposing of them, so I offered to take some. No go - they have to be taken away by a licenced waste contractor.

I could use them to build pig huts (with rammed earth inside even a boar finds them hard to move), retaining walls, wormeries, composters, water butts (stack them up, line them with pond liner), troughs, steps, livestock chutes (new corrugated iron costs £15 a 12ft sheet, reclaimed £10!), anchors for strainer posts, car/boat bumpers (for cars, bolt them to posts or walls; for boats, hang them on ropes along the sides), etc.

Only problem is, and I've checked the regulations, most of my uses are illegal as the tyres are now regarded as waste and as a registered holding I'm supposed to dispose of waste properly. Grrrr!

Stonehead

PS Anyone like to donate a few tyres?

use it as a "flaming necklace" on the pole supporting a speed camera.........

On green peter (a special green episode of blue peter) last week they had set tyres into a slope to use as planters... I'm going to do this as we've got a grassed slope which is a pain in the bum to mow... makes sense to do something different with it.

Stonehead wrote: PS Anyone like to donate a few tyres?

We've got a huge pile of them - they used to weigh down the silage, but they've found different things (kind of like sand sacks) for that now. Don't know what the manager would say, but I can always ask. He did allow me to take some for planting tatties in (which in the end I didn't do, because I found a taker for the surplus seed tatties).

What size do you need, or would you prefer?