My Rubber Rainbow

The last few weeks, I've been fighting some melancholy feelings. Its been up and down, but in between episodes on the couch, I've been pushing myself to get outside and garden while it's still nice.
At least while I was glued to the couch trapped in a state of "bleh", I did a little web surfing and discovered a few things that led to this project, code named: The Recycled Rubber Rainbow.
1. I found free tires with delivery on craigslist.

2. I found loads of cute gardens made from tires through Google: from blogs to youtube, to articles, here's what inspired me:

this pic was from the peace corp website. The country was Guatemala. A volunteer worked with a group of girls on this garden for their community.

This one is from a garden in Cali.

These ideas were right up my ally, so I got to work and recruited some novice painters to help.

Another shout out to our local ReStore: the colors (including the white base coat) are all brought to you by a shopping cart full of paint that I paid $5 for!

 While the tires new look dried, I dug up a section of our backyard that had a ton of rocks and weeds and started accumulating bucket apon bucket of rocks and soil (separated).

 Understand that this was a process that took 3-4 weeks, While my moods went up and down so did my progress. (also the temperature one week on average was 98 degrees)

Once I had all my materials, I began to haul the tires, rocks and soil up the slope from our backyard to the sidewalk.

I laid down newspaper under each tire to keep the nasty weeds at bay and filled them with a mix of our sandy top soil, a bag of soil amendment and a handful of compost.

Since mums are hardy, in season, colorful and cheep: we chose them to move into our landscaping project.

We painted a few rocks, then pored them all out to cover the bare ground around the planters.

Here's the result:

 My rubber rainbow garden is finished for the season, but in the spring, I'm hoping to add more. It was a good way to add some brightness to the neighborhood as well as to my outlook. When I force myself to get outside, breath the fresh air, get dirty and be creative, my worries are at least temporarily lost.