Potato Towers

This is one corner of the garden. The yellow things are potato towers. We scrounged a discarded plastic window blind from neighbor Steve’s trash. (Some people use old tires; it depends on what you have.) I cut it in two, and and wired the ends together to make two cylinders. Some half-composted yard waste, plus commercial composted cow manure from a garage sale became medium.

You put a little bit of medium in the bottom of the cylinder, lay the seed potatoes on top, and just barely bury them. As the plants appear, you bury the stalks, and keep doing that until you get to the top. In the fall, you open up the cylinders and take out the spuds. A potato high-rise.

I never did this before, so I put too much medium in before I placed the seed potatoes (especially since the towers were on top of an existing raised bed). The foliage has grown a lot taller than the tops of the containers. I think I could have cultivated a larger harvest if I’d started the potatoes deeper in the cylinder. The limiting factor would have been the amount of medium I could find.

Here’s a link to a video. Don’t take this guy too seriously. It’s just nice to have an image.