YES! you Can grow Strawberries in an old tire - Update

When we first planted our strawberry tire garden I wondered if they would be baked alive in black tires in the South Carolina summertime heat.

And  to be honest there were a couple weeks I thought surely they had died, many of the larger leaves did wilt and die in the first weeks after we planted them. It didn't look good, and the disappointed look on my sons face only added to my guilt. Was I really a strawberry killer?  I had the urge to scoop them up out of the tires and re-plant them somewhere else, anywhere else, but then a baby cried, I became distracted with his needs,  and the moment passed.

A few days later we began to notice new growth at the base of our dead looking plants and they all began to re-grow almost miraculously! 

Now we have lush healthy strawberry plants that are growing out of their tires and yesterday we ate our first delicious strawberries. 

So what did we do to bring our strawberries back from the dead? 

Nothing.

It took me a little while to figure it out, but when we prepared our strawberry beds, we used some wasted hay from our goats pen which was mixed with fresh manure, this is the hay that falls out of the feeder and gets trampled on. I have always been told that goat manure was not "hot" and did not need to be composted before adding to the garden. I think I failed to take into account the urine in the hay as well. I believe the bed was too hot and that's why the plants died back but after a couple of weeks with regular watering they were able to come back and thrive. 

So lesson learned here: If you don't want to bake your strawberry plants alive, don't put them into a hot bed  using un-composted mulch in a black container. It would probably have been better to let the prepared bed sit for a few weeks before planting.