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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Not too shabby. So we left it alone and let the potatoes grow until the first week of October when we just couldn’t wait any longer. This was the moment of truth for the potato tower.
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We got a nice large bucket of potatoes from the first level of the potato tower. We had high hopes for the second level. And…
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Not a single potato above the first level. I didn’t take any photos, because what’s there to see besides a big pile of dirt?
Rob over at One Straw (who knows a lot more about growing veggies than we do right now) had a similar experience with his potato towers. He had high hopes just like us, and like us, instead of 100 pounds of potatoes per tower, he got about 3 pounds. (Yup, it was disappointing for us too.) He had some problems with heavy rain and grew a different variety than us, but at least he got some growth above the second level (we got zilch). Rob said:
- My strong suspicion… is that all the aggressive hilling perpetually knocks back the leaf growth and the plants never develop a lush canopy of sugar producing leaves to build the starch needed for a good harvest.
We didn’t have that problem. We kept hilling as the plants grew — that is, we kept burying the lower parts of the plants in soil as they grew up and up — and even though they looked pretty darn bedraggled afterwards, they’d bounced back into a rain forest of leaves within 24 hours. Our potato plants (a red variety I can’t remember the exact name of) had no difficulty growing through an extra few feet of soil and staying healthy the whole time.
The problem was that the roots didn’t grow out from the submerged branches. The original Seattle Times article quotes potato seed grower, Greg Lutovsky:
- A lot of people think you plant a potato and that the new ones grow below it, but that’s not so… Potatoes grow between the seed piece and the above-ground plant.
That didn’t happen with our plants at all. After we tore down the tower, all we had was a bunch of potato plants with really long submerged stocks. They looked exactly like the plant on the right (photo borrowed from Rob at One Straw who said: “Buried ‘Stem’ had ZERO roots developed after 3 months beneath the soil”). With the exception of the first level, nowhere between the seed piece and the above-ground plant were there any potatoes in our potato tower.
The potatoes we got from the first level were beautiful, though, the most flavourful potatoes I’ve ever had. Baking them on the BBQ in tinfoil with a bit of butter and pepper — we loved every minute of it. So the potatoes did their job, but the potato tower — which was supposed to fill up with potatoes — did nothing. We would have got just as many potatoes in a 3×3-foot raised garden bed.
So what did we do wrong? I’ll try to answer that question in the next post.
Continued in: Potato Tower Failure (Part 2).