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 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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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).
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