The Four-Square-Foot Potato Tower
Apr 29th, 2009 | By Guest Post | Category: Gardening |[ Another great post from Rob at One Straw. ]
A huge focus of this blog is finding creative, sustainable ways to eek more produce from small spaces. I also love growing calorie crops, especially potatoes, and furthermore I really enjoy building things. So when a friend recently recommended the use of potato towers, I was very interested. So yesterday I was off to buy materials for several compost bin orders I have and wouldn’t ya know? 2×6 pine was on sale.
The theory is simple – solancea plants will root from any stalk that has ground contact – I’ve seen both peppers and tomatoes rooting from their stalks. The important part with potatoes is that they will lay tubers anywhere between the original “seed” potato and the soil surface. Every time the potato plant gets about 6 inches above ground, add more soil – this is why you mound potatoes in the field. These towers just take the mounding to crazy logical conclusions – the tower is essentially a three foot “mound”. What I like most about this kind of tower is the ability to “sneak” potatoes as the season progresses by removing a lower strip of 2×6 and grubbing around. As most suburbanites don’t have root cellars (yet!) this is a huge plus if you are growing 100 lbs of spuds. Also, as the sides are opaque, spud production will occur right up to the sides, maximizing space and using less water compared to wire mesh designs. Also, the lumber avoids some concerns that may be present with using old tires. Old garbage cans, etc would also work.
The only major change I did for mine was that I used 2×4’s for the uprights as I had 10′ of them laying around the garage and I also put a sheet of cardboard under it to thwart the quack. Speaking of which, this could be considered a hyper productive way to sheet mulch - cardboard out next years beds, and build potato towers along them – one could get (in theory) 600 lbs of spuds form one 20-foot bed (6 towers with 18-inch spacing) and when the towers come down you have a raised bed about 2 feet deep with compost when you’re done. Hmmmm…
Planting the tower is easy, I took four medium seed potatoes (1 lb exactly) and cut them in half. In the spirit of science, I used one each of Kennebec, Purple Viking, Carola, and Yukon Gold to see which liked this method more. The growing medium I used for the first layer is two-year-old leaf mold, to which I added some pelletized chicken manure for nitrogen as it looked a little “carbon-ey”. Weather here is mild and rainy, so they should be sprouting in no time. The only down side is that right after the photo shoot, our new adolescent dog decided that this was a fantastic play pen and tore into it with abandon – I think I found all eight seeds, but she may have eaten one or two.
The claim is that the towers will produce 100 lbs of spuds with about 1 lb planted in 4 sqare feet. That is freakish considering a record yield for field sown spuds is about 14:1; I was very pleased with my 8.5:1 last year. In typical culture, 100 lbs would take at least 75 square feet, but more likely 150. I am stoked to see this work and will certainly keep you posted. Other great advantages – you do not need any heavy equipment to grow these – and harvesting is super easy. Just be sure to save the soil somewhere for next year – mixing it with fall leaves and grass clippings in a compost bin would be a fantastic way to rejuvenate the soil.
Couple of post-scripts. This thing is crazy overbuilt – I would feel comfortable parking a car on it if it had a cross tie across the top! I think the prime driver of the dimensions is cost. In the irony of modern economics, 2×6×8′ lumber is cheaper than 1×6×8′ lumber. Also, pine rots quickly, so using 2x lumber will buy you a few extra years -though by Year Four I expect these to be falling apart. If it works I will likely build the next one using cedar decking for the sides and 2×2 cedar for the uprights. That should last a decade, but would cost about double. Another advantage would be that it would weigh half as much – this thing is heavy when built!
To make it more fun, we will likely be painting the sides with the kids – I have the idea of making each side a different person, and then we can mix and match the parts each year to create silly combinations. I would also like to enlist my wife (waaaaay more talented artist) to paint a picture of a potato plant with a “soil view” of roots on one side.
All in all the total cost was about $30 (8 2×6×8, screws, and 12′ of 2×2) and about an hour of time in the workshop -mostly becuase my kids were running the screw guns and they are 5 and 7. If you can truly get 100 lbs of spuds that is crazy cheap – down to literally a few cents per pound over the lifetime of the tower. Combine that with the ability for literally every single homeowner to grow all their potatoes for a year in as little as 8 square feet, this could be huge!
I am SOO excited about this! I just sent this to my brother as well. I was planning on growing in tires but now I think I will do both. Thanks so much!
Our first growing year we did the tire method. Spent a lot of money on certified organic seed potatoes and then organic soil filling them. At first these things grew like crazy – we thought these were the only things that would produce. When it was time to harvest though, there was NOTHING in those tires. We spent SO much time and money on these things and got nada out of it.
We did nothing with them the next year, and some came back up, but still .. pathetic, very pathetic excuses for potatoes. This year we’re doing potatoes more traditionally. We dug up some of the dirt that has been sitting in the tires and actually finally found ONE big potato.
Another friend has had same results with the tire method. She shared the thought about potatoes preferring cool soil while, when you put them in tires the soil ends up getting heated up and staying too hot.
I hope this works out well for y’all and am interested in hearing how it does come out. Good luck!!!
Hmm, I now realize why my own potato tower won’t work – I have to be able to add soil…
I’ll try this next. I wonder if there is a way to make the side slats more easily removable for early harvesting…?
I used the tire method a couple of years in a row (I’m tenacious like that
and had dismal results, too. I also grew potatoes in buckets and all sorts of other containers, all of which worked a little better than the tires, but just weren’t deep enough to get the kind of results I needed/wanted.
This year, I’m trying the wire-tower method, the traditional “row” method, and after I showed my husband the wood towers in this post, we’ll be trying this method too. If I get 100 lbs of potatoes out of all of it ….
… if I get 100 lbs of potatoes from my tiny, little space, you’ll have to peel me off the floor
! But I’ll be happily gorging on pommes de terre all winter 
.
I just built two similar sized potato towers too. Do you plan to thin your plants? If so how many per tower?
Last year, I used 2 “barrels” of chicken wire, approximately 2-1/2 to 3 feet in diameter. With two pieces of potato, I got 13 usable potatoes (from larger than my fist, to about 2″ in diameter, and 3 potatoes that were so tiny as to be unusable for food. That was with only filling the “barrels” half way up with soil, as I ran out. This year, I’ve added a third barrel (made from sturdier hardware “cloth”), and I’m hoping to use my compost toward the end of the season. A coworker reports that in the past, she grew potatoes without actual soil, using only over-wintered leaf-mulch. Said she got a great haul, with the same “barrel” technique, without any soil.
Last year I tried potatos in rows and the result was okay. Probably about 25 pounds of potatos from 12 plants. I also planted in leaves inside a white plastic clothes hamper. Those I think did well, but at harvest time found that mice or chipmunks, had chewed through the bottom and nothing was left for me. The best yield per effort was from the seed potatos I threw on the compost pile because I ran out of space to plant!
I tried the tower and got very poor results. You need to make sure the soil remains moist. A reccomendation from a potato seed seller was to coil in a drip hose as you fill the tower. This will help keep the mound evenly watered. I live in the Southeast US and it’s just too hot here in the summer to make this method work. I got good results planting in the ground last year. I’m trying an area with partial shade this year to see if that helps yields any.
Great idea! I’d love to see an update. How do the completed towers look? Any signs of success yet?
Are there more updates on this somewhere? Would love to hear how its been working out!
I normally plant sweet potatoes on a trellis by the back door. I just stick the sweeet potatoes in the ground, and keep them going up the trellis – the vine looks just lovely, and has little purple flowers on it. However, when I clean out a nearby flower garden, I have found some tremendous sweet potatoes in the ground. I see I could use a tower for the planting, and harvest a lot more of the sweet potatoes. Huh! I’m going to do that next spring – planting the sweet potatoes is really easy, and rewarding. This makes it doubly so!
A potato tower needn’t cost any money at all. Oak pallets are free for the hauling at many manufacturing plants. I use them to build a huge 16′X8′ compost bin. Now, thanks to your idea, I’ll be planting potatoes in a pallet potato bin.
Keep up your good work.
Jim
Rob and friends, Good job on your improvements to this concept. I’ve been working with this notion for 30 years, and here are a few hints to get it to work more productively. Basically the towers only really help with two issues, garden space, and weeding. The rest you still have to tinker with. Yield depends on the already noted factors plus 1) Location, and 2) Density of AVAILABLE carbon in the growing medium.Re. Location, remember that these solanaceae are not tropicals and require their ‘feet’ to be cool/ in no more than ground-ambient temps(50-60 F), and their tops in the sun, and Re. Soil carbon density, this is really where yields are affected. One still needs all of the carbon density that would exist in your garden rows,but now confined to 4 sq.ft. Single-season green-manuring is used up/ will only give you good yield for the first one or two(at the most) layers, if you see what I mean.Three other thoughts…the towers also help a lot with controlling potato vine ’sprawl’ which takes up a lot of useable garden space, Secondly , each potato variety has hugely different growing habits, so continue experimenting, and thirdly, don’t be stingy with the seed potatoes…plant them at least as tightly as you would in your rows…the journey continues…Tom