Photos of some of the potatoes we harvested from our potato tower can be viewed in our photo album, Potato Harvest 2009. The potatoes were excellent, but they didn’t grow above the first level of the potato tower. See Part 1 and this post for more info. You can check out the original article in the Seattle Times while you’re at it.
Potato Tower Results — An End to the Hype? by Rob over at One Straw provides a more realistic account of what it’s like to grow potatoes in a potato tower. He had about as much success as we did. The problem for us was that the potatoes simply did not grow above the level they were planted. They grew well within the first 10 inches of soil, but no potatoes grew in the other 40 inches of soil above that. We were supposed to get about 100 pounds of potatoes, but I’d say we got more like 7 pounds, probably less. We put a lot of time, money and effort into those 7 pounds of potatoes.
So what went wrong? Why didn’t it work for us? Let’s take a look at what we did first:
Read on . . . »
The big potato tower experiment was not a success. The original article in the Seattle Times makes it seem easier than it is. I haven’t heard of too many success stories so far.
We planted our potatoes around May 17th. We did our first test harvest 3 months later on August 17th. It looked like this:
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