We got the idea for a potato tower from the Steel White Table blog out of Atlantic Canada (which links to this Seattle Times article). The concept is simple and very cool: plant the potatoes in a small raised bed. As the plants grow, keep adding soil, slowly burying the plants and forcing them to grow up even higher. Meanwhile, everything that gets buried develops roots. Just keep adding boards around the raised bed until it’s 4 feet high. All the roots beneath the 4 feet of soil turn into potatoes. In theory. The potatoes are harvested by removing the lower planks of the tower first and working your way up.
The construction of the tower was easy: 4 square poles screwed together by 4 planks. The corner pegs or poles are about 5 feet tall. The original blueprint for the tower calls for 2-inch thick lumber covering a 4 x 4 area, but we passed on that and made due with 1-inch planks and a 3 x 3 area. We bought two 6-foot long planks (untreated, cheap knotty pine, $5.50 each), 1-inch thick, 10 inches high, and cut them into 3-foot lengths. I found four 5-foot long poles in my shed, 2 inches by 3 inches. We screwed the four sides together around the poles — nothing to it. Done. (Note: I would hate to do this without a powered screwdriver, or in our case, a drill jury-rigged with a screwdriver bit.) We placed the tower on the ground over some cardboard boxes. The boxes will eventually rot, but the tower has to be rebuilt every year, removing the soil each time, so we’ll just replace the cardboard every year. The total cost of all the materials if you had to buy them from scratch is about $25 or $30. But making due with what we already had on hand: $11.
Continued in: Potato Tower Failure (Part 1).
After discovering that the soil in our beautiful field is full of lead, we decided to build a raised garden bed. We searched YouTube for “How to build a raised garden bed” and found several instructional videos. We learned most importantly never to use pressure-treated wood. We don’t want any chemicals in our veggies. Besides that, there isn’t much to it. Just screw 4 planks of wood together in whatever shape works best. Use square wooden poles or metal braces in the corners to hold it all together. Here’s what we did:
We bought 4 planks of untreated knotty pine, 1 inch thick, 12 inches high, 8 feet long. $12 per plank. (2-inch planks are better, but at more than twice the cost, we said no thanks.) We found a piece of 2 x 2 lumber in the shed (basically a square pole) and cut it into 4 pieces, each piece about 14 inches long — they would become the corner posts. We bought a 100-pack of untreated screws (photo). Then using a power drill with a screw driver attachment instead of a drill (our drill isn’t designed for this), we screwed together the garden bed frame one corner at a time. We had no drawings, no measurements. We pieced it all together first, then carefully held each piece in place as we drilled in each screw, 2 screws for every plank end we had to attached to the little poles in the corner. It’s the first thing either of us has ever built. It took about 90 minutes. (We haven’t included blueprints for the raised bed because we didn’t use any, and it’s easy to see what we did by looking at the photos.)
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Click image to view all photos of our raised vegetable garden bed from 2009.
We then cut up some thick plastic that was left over from when we had a couch delivered a while back and spread it down on the ground and placed the frame over the plastic. We could have used cardboard boxes, too, but cardboard eventually rots and we want to keep whatever lead may be in the soil down in the soil, away from the veggies. (Not necessary if you know you have safe soil underneath.)
Total cost: About a $50 (Canadian).
Next up: Filling a Raised Garden Bed with some good composted soil.
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