French Bottle Garden & Tire Planter Garden
Blog post will be edited & updated momentarily. Thank you for your patience.
Current during the month of January, continuing next month and the month of March we are revamping our gardens, especially our backyard. I have been thinking over our current garden design and we aren’t really loyal to it. So, a new design of our garden is underway. I have been thinking of how my parents and relative garden. I want to incorporate my family traditions of gardening here at the Saint Charles Streetcar House.
After observing his father’s homestead in the vil, our home city New Orleans, for a few years, and planting produced and herbs here at home, my Mari has expressed that he wants to move forward and start planting our produces and herbs in raised garden beds as his père (father) actively does. At this time of his decision, a year later, his grand-mère, his père and tante’s house were damaged by hail and tornadoes. His pere’s homestead was damaged. With much enthusiasm, he replanted all the fruits, herbs and vegetables that we damaged by tornadoes. In 2018 my father in law, successfully had a blooming productive homestead with recycled truck and school bus tires as tire planters, a family tradition. Replacing the wooden raised beds he originally had planted his vegetable, fruits and herbs in.
While scaling through google books results on chinaberry tree in front yard key term, I happened to stumble upon a snippet on an author expressing that their grandmother using tires as herb planters. I was surprise, taken back and instantly wanted to know more. We have a set of three tires in our back gallery and they are just wasting space. They aren’t the right size for our Ford SUV. I got out of the books section of google and the image search section of google and typed in tire planters garden Louisiana. After my first scroll down from the topic of google’s image results, I begin to see photos of a yard I know all to familiar. I preceded to click on the photo and then similar photos option and more photos from the same garden pulled up. I said to myself, “I knowledge that yard.!”. As I continued on looking at the third photo, I exclaimed, “That is my father in law’s homestead!” When I clicked on one of the garden photos, I was taken to a website where my father in law write a blog post about his tire planters. I thought I known that homestead anywhere.
After reading through his guest blog post, I begin to visualize little how our back yard and gallery would look with tire planters as raised flower red and the oyster shell walkways. I am delighted I found my father in law’s guest gardening post and even more delighted I read his post. I am enthused that my mari wants to incorporate his family gardening techniques and habits here, in our gardens. More tire planters searches were underway for me and learning the history of the use of tires as planters. Looking at photos, repressed memories of my Maman having natural rope covered pots. I thought these type of pots and seats were simply what I saw on the outside but now I know that they were tires.
The more photos I saw of tire planter gardens the more all of the piece of how we want the garden to look began to come alive. A few years ago I came up with the idea to have our flower and herb beds with cobalt and brown wine bottles. Aware that bottle gardens in Louisiana is primarily associated with our creole community of Cane River (Isle Brevelle & Natchitoches) as scholars would have the general public believe. However, I don’t think that that’s primarily true. As a child, my father would take to visit his family members from all over the vil, New Orleans. This is were I got my first lessons in long distance walk. One or a few of my popa’s family had wine bottles turn inside down and used to outline their front yard flower beds.
