A year and a half ago I started an experiment on growing potatoes in a bin, touted as the most space-efficient way to grow food I’d ever heard of. When the first year’s crop was disappointing, I did some trouble-shooting and determined to give it another try. Yesterday was the day! I harvested the bin from the second year’s crop of potatoes. Here are the results.
I harvested this year’s potatoes…both of them.
Ok, it wasn’t quite that bad. I got more than two potatoes. But not by much. Out of three plants, it was a total yield of about four pounds of potatoes. Pretty darned pitiful, considering the resources and effort expended.
My entire harvest fit on the lid of the five gallon bucket I was going to *start* collecting in. Sigh.
How are potato bins supposed to work?
The idea behind the potato bins is that you build a framework around the potatoes in the spring. Once the aboveground part of the plant is growing up nicely, you start enclosing the sides of the bin and adding more soil. The more the plants grow upward, the more soil you add around the lower stem.
When the tops die back, it’s time to harvest. I hadn’t built the box all the way up, after last year’s disaster, but it was enough to test the concept.
The contact with soil on the lower stem triggers that part of the plant to start sending out additional roots, that grow additional potatoes. By the end of the season, you end up with a tall box with potato plant shoots sticking out the top and a big rectangle of soil and potatoes beneath, with the lowest potatoes being around the original planting.
Did the concept work at all?
Well, it tried to. Unlike the first year, when I erred in planting early harvest potatoes, this year I went with late season potatoes that are better at sprouting new roots. Once I got well below the soil level, I could see the plants were trying to put out side roots and trying to grow potatoes on them.
The bad news is, these side roots were tiny and their potatoes were about the size of small marbles. I found just one baseball sized potato in the box well above ground level. The rest of the harvestable potatoes were at the very bottom; no better than if I’d not built the box at all.
If you look Close, you can see several side roots, with tiny little potatoes attempting to grow.
What went wrong?
Drought, I think. We had a nasty drought this year. I did water the garden. Most of the watering was by drip irrigation, which would help the ground level potatoes but not the ones in the box. The potatoes got extra watering by hose. I suspect it wasn’t enough, due to a combination of the plants needing extra water to support all the extra shoot that was extra high above ground level, and the fact that the soil aboveground in the box was more prone to drying and draining than the rest of the garden.
My prime reasons for this hypothesis are: 1) The stems were trying to get out new potatoes, but made very little progress. 2) Despite one MONSTER rain of over seven inches (!!) less than a week ago, most of the soil in the box was bone dry. The top few inches (right under the mulch) were nicely moist, and the ground level part was not bad, but it was bone dry in between.
My final call on potato bins
I’m going to recycle the wood from the bin I sued for the potatoes and not try this again. Water is almost always a limiting factor here in Missouri, and given how very dry my box was despite some watering all season and a goose-drowner rain within the last week, I think these bins require much more water than I’m willing to give them.
For me, space is not at a premium but water’s limiting. That seems to make this potatoes from bins a bad fit for my garden. If your restrictions are reversed, maybe it would work for you. My own gardening friends who’ve tried it were never impressed though, so I remain unconvinced this is a great idea.
Sigh. Scratch another gardening idea that looked great when I read about it on the internet…
p.s. This is why we’re experimenting now, when all it costs is some sweat and frustration. I’d be a lot more bummed if I was depending on the food from that bin.
Interesting article, in the homesteading/survival context small scale anything is not a viable way to grow food. Fun experiment but bins are not realistic when considering that you would need to grow a years worth of potatoes plus next years growing stock . Nice try though, keep up the good work.
I don’t know if the link will be accepted, but this is a video using hay bales to grow potatoes. Might be a better plan. Apparently watering is not needed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlratwBT5OI
Thanks, Uncle George. We’ll try it…costs nothing but some effort, spoiled hay (cheap), and seed potatoes (also cheap). It’d be great if true, especially at The Place where getting spoiled hay’s likely to be easy and the ground’s so awful.