I took photos yesterday of every single thing growing in our backyard. We’ve had some hardships in the garden this year with slugs eating away at the broccoli, onions and some other crops. Our beets are pitiful and just about everything else has grown at a much slower pace than last year. But things are starting to pick up and there have been a few surprises. So here’s a pictorial review of everything growing in our small backyard (this is a long post), starting off with a zucchini plant growing upside-down in a bag:
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We planted some Blue Pride mid-season potatoes on June 5th in our first potato mini-tower. They sprouted 2 weeks later and have been doing well ever since. (We planted some mid-to-late season Chieftain potatoes as well, but they’ve barely broken through the soil yet.) We’ve been hilling the potatoes every day so the stalks don’t have a chance to get hardened by the sun. This way we hope they develop roots and more potatoes as they grow up through the soil — modifying our potato tower methods. If it doesn’t produce a bumper crop, that’ll be the end of any kind of potato towers for us. It better work.
An 8-minute low-rez video shot on my Sony Cyber-shot S700 camera (not a good camera). The sound was recorded on my Zoom H2 digital recorder, so at least it sounds okay.
We decided this year not to waste our time and good organic soil on a potato tower again, but we did build two 3 x 3 raised beds for our potatoes, and we might build them a couple feet high, just enough to qualify as potato mini-towers. We’ll follow the same technique of covering the plants with soil as they grow up, but this time — and we believe this is crucial — we won’t let the stalks get hard before we cover them. See How a Potato Tower Might Work for more info, but the basic logic is this:
If the stalks grow and get hardened by the sun, then you can forget about them turning into roots and tubers when they’re covered with soil. They have to be soft and rooty to transform into roots that will eventually produce the glorious bounty of potato tower spuds (theoretically). So we plan to bury the stalks while they’re still soft, covering all but an inch or two of the plants until they’ve reached the top of the mini-towers. That shouldn’t be too hard on them because they’re only going up a couple feet and then they can relax (a benefit of growing in a mini-tower).
Read on . . . »
I found what might be a potato tower success story. (It might also be a potato box or potato bin success story. As far as I know, I came up with the term potato tower, but it’s the kind of phrase anyone could come up with, so I’m probably not the first. Most people seem to call them potato bins. That’s not nearly as cool as potato tower, though, is it? I didn’t think so.) Anyhow, Jaki over at Farming At Country Dreams [a site which no longer exists] managed to grow about 25 pounds of Yukon Golds in her potato tower. That’s not great, but it’s the best harvest from a potato tower I’ve found evidence for so far.
I would have liked to have seen photos of the potatoes in the tower as she was harvesting them so I could actually see how high they grew, and links to her online references would have been helpful too, but otherwise Jaki’s post is very detailed, showing how the whole project went every step of the way, from building the tower to harvesting the potatoes.
I found something in Jaki’s post that might explain why potatoes didn’t develop above the first level of my potato tower. Everybody pay attention now because this might be the magic trick that makes the potato tower work. Jaki got some of her info from the Gardening with Ciscoe web site. Let’s hope it’s correct. She says:
Read on . . . »
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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This is what our raised garden bed (and everything else in our backyard) looks like today:
We got the idea for a potato tower from the Steel White Table blog out of Atlantic Canada, which links to a 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.
Read on . . . »
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