Old Tires Make Ideal Retaining Walls

Old Tires Make Ideal Retaining Walls TIRES/WHEELS New Uses 28-4-29 Joyce and Bob Lenhardt make retaining walls from old tires. They say the idea works great, costs next to nothing, and the walls actually look pretty good. There are a lot of steep banks where the Courtland, Miss. couple lives, and erosion from runoff was a problem. "It was my idea, but my husband did the majority of the manual labor," Joyce says. "We have put up three different retaining walls on our four acres. Using railroad ties, like most people do, would have been quite expensive." The Lenhardts' biggest retaining wall is 50 ft. long and is made up of six rows of tires laid in stacks on their sides. There's a stepped walkway up the middle, giving access to their home. "To build a wall, we start off with the first row of tires at the base, packing in the bottoms of them one at a time with the sandy, clay type soil we have here," Joyce says. "Once the bottom row is done, we do the next row and work our way up. Each tire is offset from the one below it, like bricks, and each row is set back a couple of inches further as you go up so it's terraced." The way the tires stack leaves room along the wall to plant flowers and vines in the tires so the tires themselves are hard to see through all the plant material. They plant English and Japanese Ivy, which cover parts of the structure, and a variety of flowering annuals and perennials. "At first, I wasn't sure if I liked the look of having so many tires in my yard, but after the plants and flowers got established, it started looking really pretty and you don't even notice the tires," Joyce explains. "It only took about two years for the plants and vines to fill in the area and for it to look decorative." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Bob and Joyce Lenhardt, 4400 Figg Rd., Courtland, Miss. 38620 (ph 662 563-8153).

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