How to Build a Potato Tower

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).