It was a great plan:
This post is something of a morality tale of gardening. Back in the spring, I wrote a post on one of this year’s garden experiments: The Potato Tower. The plan is you build a tower frame (mine had roughly a 3 ft by 3 ft footprint) and plant the potatoes in it. As the plants grow up, you put more boards on the frame, building the box taller, and add more dirt. In theory, the newly buried stem sprouts more roots and fills the new dirt with potatoes. Keep going till fall and you are supposed to end up with something like this:
This is a ‘tower bag’ variant, but the theme is the same: By season’s end, it’s a TOWER OF POTATOES!
Well That didn’t go according to plan:
Thing of beauty, isn’t it? Well, mine ended up looking more like this:
My Tower, at end of season.
So not Quite the same. First problem: The rabbits. They ate through my smaller fence, so I had to get more ambitious. That botched my plan for adding more boards. I managed to get a few more on (about 24 vertical inches of tower), but it was such a hassle it got away from me some in midsummer and I didn’t build it as high as intended.
Things were looking good though! The stems kept popping up as I layered compost and straw higher and higher; they looked vigorous and well. So I had high hopes this past week when it was time to harvest – you can see the tops were dying back in this last pic.
But as Einstein said, “If we Knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be Research!” I dug down and down, through several bags and half a straw bale worth of building, with nary a potato to be found. The stems I was exposing were smooth, with no root branches. Eventually, when I had made it down to nearly floor level, I found them. This last pic demonstrates it:
I had taters all right…but they were all right down at ground level. The horizontal straight brown hose under this plant’s haul is the drip irrigation hose I’d laid right over original ground level.
So what went wrong with the potatoes?
13 lbs of potatoes from three plants. Fine healthy potatoes, sure, but no more than I’d’ve gotten without the tower at all. A key observation: The potatoes were crowded in, all right at the bottom.
I’ve two hypotheses: The first I came up with myself, from the fact that all the taters were within a few inches of the irrigation hose: Water. The plants didn’t Look water stressed, but roots will seek water. Despite some really nice rains and loose soil, the middle of the tower was pretty dry. The roots might only sprout from the stem if there’s sufficient water there to attract them.
The second hypothesis came from my post-game trouble-shoot. Buried at the bottom (kind of like my taters) of one of the posts singing the glories of the method, one guy slips in that his first attempt failed miserably, and his guru told him he’d used a wrong variety of potatoes. Apparently, early season varieties such as Yukon Gold set their roots early then stop…and won’t bud new ones from the stem after it’s buried, but just grow their usual crop right at the bottom. .
The bigger picture
13 lbs of potatoes isn’t the big story after all, then. The big story was a big fat underlining of something Life teaches me every chance it gets: You don’t know how to do a thing until you’ve done it... and in my case, often done it badly a time or two. Reading stuff on the Internet is great; in fact I encourage it:
… but if you imagine you know how to do something because you’ve read about it; well good luck with that. It’s sure not something I’d recommend betting your life on.
Practice, prepper friends. There Is No Substitute.
Are you going to give it another try?
I think next year I’ll check out the varieties our greenhouse has. If they have long-season varieties, I’ll probably give it one more go to see if that was really the problem. I’m not actually tight on space, so I tried it mostly to see if it could possibly work as well as advertised than because it’s a great fit for my situation.