THE POTATO TOWER EXPERIMENT: THE RESULTS

Remember the potato tower experiment? This was a method of growing potatoes I tried in part to get a crop of potatoes without using precious garden space. I also thought they would be easier to harvest.

Last weekend I attacked those towers to get a feel for how successful this experiment was.

I'm not going to keep you in suspense: it was basically a failure. (But since pictures of failures are horrible to lead with in a blog, I offer you this photo of some of the potatoes I did grow looking pretty.)

Honestly, I knew that it wasn't going well a long time ago. The towers never were covered in foliage like they should have been. And while a few nice shoots grew for a time, the plague of slugs (plague may be dramatic but after speaking with other gardeners, I'm convinced that the mass quantities of slugs were a common problem in our area) defoliated most of what was there. By late summer there were only a few sad leaves still hanging out of the towers.

Before I get to the depressing results, let's just take a look at the towers when they were fresh and new and full of hope.

When it came time to harvest my potatoes, I pulled out the metal stake that was supporting them and then knocked the first one over onto a tarp. And what I had was a big old mess because then I had to move all that soil and straw to the compost bin, and there was a lot of it. I got a little smarter with the second one and actually dug out the soil from the top with my hands as far as I could and then leveraged the wheelbarrow under it to catch most of the rest.

It wasn't easy to find the potatoes. Since my harvest was small in quantity and size, I was feeling through each bit of dirt for little potatoes that might be hiding in there.

One of the biggest earthworms I've ever seen peeking out from the great soil in the towers.

At this point one very good thing became clear. Those towers were creating some amazing soil. I pulled out several of the most enormous earthworms I've ever seen from them. And as far as I'm concerned, the quantity and quality of earthworms is the single best indicator of soil health there is.

After I cleaned up the potatoes, it was the moment of truth. After I added up all the costs that went into making the towers and figuring an average cost of $2.50 per pound for organic potatoes purchased at the store, I calculated that I would have needed to produce 22 pounds of potatoes to break even.

And this is all the potatoes I harvested.

And here's the moment of truth.

Don't get excited. The scale (an antique from Mr. Much More Patient's grandmother, I think) might say 6.25 pounds but that's before you subtract the 3-pound bowl.

For the math challenged, that means that I grew 3.25 pounds of potatoes. From 3 pounds of seed potatoes.

I'm not ready to say that potato towers don't work. There were a lot of factors that contributed to my lack of success. But the fact is, other than not taking up precious space in the garden, they don't have a lot of advantages. They were difficult to water, requiring me to spray the entire thing thoroughly. I think a PVC pipe with holes drilled in to stuck down the middle would help with watering the bottom layers, though. And they were a huge pain to harvest because cleaning up all of that soil wasn't easy.

It's not a total loss. First of all, I learned a little something, even if it was about what doesn't work. And I have a whole bowl of really pretty potatoes waiting for me to make something yummy with.

THE STATE OF THE GARDEN (AKA WHAT'S HAPPENING)

There are so many things happening in the garden at this time of year. Sometimes I feel like I mention something and then completely forget to give you an update on it. So today I'm tying up a few loose ends.

GARDEN CLEANUP
A couple weeks ago I mentioned my new strategy for getting the garden in shape: Take one garden area at a time and finish it completely before moving on to the next. It should come as no surprise that I grossly underestimated how long this would take, but I'm happy with the progress I've made.

I spent most of one day working on the circle garden which is now looking pretty good. The chive hedge I planted last year has just started blooming and I absolutely love it. So much, that I've decided to continue it around the entire perimeter of that segment of the circle garden. I need a few more chives to surround it (I'm hoping to take a few off my mom's hands or else it will have to wait until I can divide what is there), and eventually I would like hedge the other two segments of that garden.

There are a lot of bare spots in this garden (actually, all of my gardens, which is something I'm discovering as I free them from weeds), so filled them in with 75 kale seedlings. I planted Redbor kale seedlings in one segment and Lacinato in the other two. If they grow well, and I hope they do, I think it will be a really interesting look to the garden. Maybe by the end of summer I'll be able to call the circle garden (which is very much an oval) the kale garden.

See the vetch trying to eat that hosta? Edited: Upon further review, I don't think this actually is vetch. If you know what it is, let me know! I also see a maple seedling there and some jewelweed off to the right. So much weeding, so little time.

We've had a very wet and cool spring and the amount of weeds is astonishingly. Some kind of vetch (see note in caption) seems to have taken over the garden and I'm literally pulling it out by the handful.

POTATO TOWERS

The potato towers are finally starting to show some signs of life. As you can see, there are plenty of shoots popping out and up. I've been "hilling up" the compost on the top of towers as the shoots grow. Other than that, I've done very little with the towers since I planted them. I have occasionally taken the hose and made an attempt to water the entire thing, but that's about it. I'm starting to lose hope that the entire tower will be covered in green leaves, but there is a long summer of growing to go yet so we'll see.

COMPOST BIN

Although I still need to transfer in the unfinished compost from the previous location, I've started layering future compost. On top is nepeta trimmings and under it is shredded paper I picked up from work. Above, you can see the new location of the compost bin. I didn't meant to tuck it in so close to that tree, but I had already dug the trench for it and I didn't feel like redigging it, so that's where it's standing. I'll just trim the tree around it.

I successfully moved the compost bin and ended up going with the sunnier location by the vegetable gardens. I actually tucked it a little more under the tree than I intended to, but once I dug out the trench to level it, I wasn't going to dig it again, so that's where it ended up. There was some lovely finished compost lurking at the bottom of the bin that I've been happily using. I'm throwing all the unfinished bits back in and starting to make some new layers as well. Because its the time of year for lots of greens (plant trimmings and kitchen waste; I never put in weeds), I got a supply of newsprint trimmings from work to serve as "browns" in the pile until some fallen leaves are available in autumn.

TOMATO STAKING

A few brave tomatoes have made an appearance but I don't see them ripening any time soon.

It has not been very summerlike here so the tomatoes have done very little growing, but so far my new method of staking is working out pretty well. One of the jute strings broke off at ground level. I'm hoping this does not happen to the rest. I had some excess at the top so I lowered that and tucked the bottom back into the soil as firmly as I could.


GARAGE

The "before" shot of the garage taken last fall. Check out that mossy roof!

Hallelujah, I found someone to paint the garage and with luck it will be finished by the end of the week. With all the work there is to do in the garden as well as a very busy sailing schedule (pretty much every weekend from now through August), I knew I wouldn't have time to do all that scraping and painting and I didn't want to look at an unfinished garage all summer.

I ended up choosing Ozark Shadows for the siding color (the top right in these photos), which was a favorite of many people. The trim will be Simply White, which is the same color as on the deck.

RAIN BARREL

The rain barrel we put on the corner of the garage is already proving its value, even if I think it's pretty ugly. The garden by the garage is right on the edge of reach of both hoses, so it has been very nice to be able to water that area from it. There's not enough pressure in the hose to actually spray water, but it works great to just set by the base of new plants and give them a good soaking.

NEW BACK/SIDE GARDEN
It's finished. Well as finished as any first-year garden ever is. I keep waiting for a nice day to take some photos, and that never seems to happen. I'll show you soon and hope that the deer don't eat it in the meantime (they've already munched my Sweet Summer Love clematis to the ground).

That's what's been happening here. What's up in your garden?

THE POTATO TOWER EXPERIMENT

I grew potatoes for the first time last year at one of the community garden plots my mom and I share. Despite the fact that I had no clue what I was doing and the soil in the new plot was very, very poor, we got a small but delicious crop of fingerling potatoes. The harvest was that much more appreciated since I've been trying to avoid non-organic mass-produced potatoes ever since I read "The Botany of Desire." Great, interesting book by the way, but not recommended if you want to keep eating the reasonably priced potatoes at the store.

Last year's success was enough to make me give it a go this year. The problem with potatoes is that they take up a fair amount of space in the garden and they are prone to disease, which makes moving them every year, important. Complicating the issue is that they can pass illness to their cousin the tomato, so you have to avoid rotating them with tomatoes as well.

I've been intrigued with some of less traditional ways of growing potatoes, including in grow bags and even garbage bags. But to me, the potato tower idea made more sense.

There are several methods for creating a potato tower. I read about a lot of them, including several on Pinterest and one from Fine Gardening magazine, and came up with an amalgamation.

I started with a metal fence support, just the green kind that you pound in to the ground. Then I used plastic wire ties (aka zip ties) to attach a circle of fencing to the post. The instructions I read all used different types of fencing. I avoided hardwire cloth, which typical has half-inch squares because it seemed like that would be hard for stems and leaves to sneak through. Instead, I bought rabbit fencing, which has 1-inch by 4-inch holes on the bottom and 4-inch square holes on the top. I did a double layer of fencing, flipping the bottom to the top on the second layer, just so the holes weren't so large.

The sprouts or eyes on the potatoes faced outward. Some layers got three potates, but then I was running out of room, so I put a few more in on upper layers.

Then I started the layering. I did four layers in each of my two towers. Each layer is constructed by putting down a bed of straw and lining the edges with about a 2- or 3-inch thickness of straw, then putting in a "core" of soil in the middle. For the soil, I used a combination of purchased top soil and mushroom compost or leaf compost. On the soil layer, I threw in about 4 or 5 inches of blended soil, then put in the seed potatoes, a few inches in from the edges with the eyes or sprouts facing outward. I covered it with an equal amount of soil and watered it thoroughly. That completes a layer.

Then I just repeated that process in each tower. Since I was doing two towers, I found it easier to do a layer in each tower before moving onto the next tower. The key is to keep the straw on the outside packed pretty tight to keep the soil in and the light out.

When I got to the final layer, I left some room at the top of the tower to add more mulch as needed to continue covering the shoots. I also watered the entire tower really well. One of the negative comments about potato towers is that they dry out too much and it's difficult to keep the potatoes properly watered, so I intend to keep a close watch on that.

You can see that things got a little messy and I'll need to do a little raking. The chopped straw was difficult to keep in, but I think it was nicer looking than the straw from bales, which is the top half of each tower.

If all goes well, the towers should be covered in leaves as the potatoes grow (which I sincerely hope because they are not the most attractive things) and when it's time to harvest, I should be able to just knock the towers over, pull out the potatoes and compost everything else.

I'm willing to experiment a little to get some great potatoes, but I think it's safe to say this is probably not one of those money-saving things. I had to buy everything for this project. Granted, I can reuse almost all of it in future years, but there was definitely an upfront cost. And obviously I didn't need an entire roll of rabbit fencing, but I had to buy a whole roll to get what I needed so I'm including the entire roll cost in my tally.

So here's the cost so far:

• Metal stakes: $2.80 for two
• Roll of rabbit fencing: $28
• Straw (I had a bag of the chopped up stuff for seeding lawns plus purchased a bale): $1.50
• Soil: $25 (approximate)
• Potatoes: $25 from here (There are definitely less expensive potatoes, including organic, out there, but for various reasons that's what I went with).

Grand total: $57.30

Let's say organic potatoes cost $2.50/pound (I usually buy fingerlings which are more expensive). That means I need to produce about 22 pounds of potatoes to break even. We'll see what the season holds, although I think it's worth pointing out that I rarely grow my own food for economic reasons. The taste and satisfaction I get from growing food is generally worth whatever it costs.

Don't worry, I'll keep you updated on how the towers work out.

Interested in how this turned out? Check out the end-of-the-summer results here.