This year, we are growing potatoes with a vertical growing technique. This is a fantastic concept for urban garden enthusiasts, gardeners with small limited areas, and for easy and effectiveness. In addition, potatoes will keep for a long time with a vertical growing approach. Regular potato planting needs a lot of area as the bushes can get quite large. And you will require to harvest and store in a dirt stack in a root cellar or other similar approach. But the vertical approach ends up being like a root cellar. We wished to share a few concepts with you and then the technique that we ultimately selected and the reasons that! 
Photo Credit: Curbly.com 1. Growing Potatoes in a Tires— We actually first heard about vertical potato growing from an acquaintance that was telling us about her vertical potato tower. Basically, she takes utilized tires and starts with one. Plants the potatoes and then when they begin to grow and grow, add the next tire and another level of growing potatoes. We likewise understand many that don’t wait and plant all levels at one time. The benefits of this technique are a well insulated vertical garden that enables you to keep and store the potatoes throughout the year, consisting of winter season, and then just get out potatoes when you want. We were very intrigued about growing potatoes vertically after this as we were going to be using up a large portion of our yard for these potatoes. However, we personally chose that tires weren’t the very best option for us as we are seeking to grow an organic garden and had issues concerning the petroleum or other products seeping from the tires. 
2. Square Box Vertical Potato Tower— This is another version of this method! I in fact discovered a great source and intend on growing a square wood potato tower from the Seattle Times. This short article. discusses much of what the advantages are to this method of growing. They likewise supply the plans, but here’s an idea and image for you. 
Photos from. Seattle Times short article. There are obvioulsy lots of advantages to this form of growing potatoes. You can rob the potatoes (noises so horrible, but it just means collecting potatoes from the bottom up), they can remain in here for storage in warmer climates and cooler climates can quickly collect and after that shop in a garage. We were set to make this for our garden this year. We didn’t have any recycled lumber for this job. We practically simply utilize recycled lumber for non-food growing tasks since we don’t know what the wood was utilized for and wish to preserve an organic garden as much as possible. We headed to the lumber shop and tried to figure this job with the cost of differing lengths (that we might cut down to size) and after an hour and a half in the house improvement shop, the best scenario we could come up with still put us at a $60 box. This was more cash than we desired to spend, so the Seattle Times short article wasn’t lying when they stated a drawback was the cost. 3. Chicken Wire and Straw Tower.— this particular tower is very easy to build– generally, it takes no building skills. It is pretty economical and it is very practical. The concept here is with a little chicken wire, rebar or stakes and straw, you can construct rather the potato tower. Well, this was the alternative that we selected as it has the benefits of having the ability to rob the potato plant, be insulated for a longer growing season, is budget friendly and extremely easy to create! Let us share with you our potato tower. You can plant potatoes as late as August 1st in the U.S. as they are gathered in November and can sustain cooler temps. What you need to construct this
- Chicken wire– we just bought some chicken wire, about 6 feet in length. We likewise got chicken wire that was 5 feet high, which we didn’t need. We planted 5 pounds and we just used about 2-3 feet.
- Again, there are hundreds of options, but we wanted to be sure that our tower was really tough, so we bought a more heavy responsibility stake. We bought 6-foot stakes as we wanted to be able to stick the stakes far into the ground, again it ended up being more than enough and so a shorter stake would have conserved us cash.
- Straw for the circular insulator ring that you will develop. We would recommend purchasing sliced straw. You are going to have a time of it attempting to handle non-chopped straw. It can still be done if that is all you find, but it will be a bit more work.
- Then you will require soil and your potato seeds. Potato seeds are essentially potatoes that have lots of eyes on them.
As a reminder, Mel’s mix is 1/3 compost, 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 peat moss all mixed together. How to build your tower Find a spot on the ground or in the garden to put your tower. We told the story of this large garden location a couple of years back, but in a nutshell, we covered the whole garden bed in landscape material and then positioned the garden boxes and bark all around. This was ideal spot as the landscape material is a weed barrier and so by placing our potato tower here, we can accomplish 2 things– prevent weeds getting into the tower and avoid the potatoes from attaching and planting in the ground. 
The rest of the actions - Produce a circle from the chicken wire with the ends over lapping a little.
- Then thread the stakes/rebar through several of the openings on the chicken wire.
- You must end up with a circleish shape.
- Then hammer the stakes about a foot into the ground to secure it in the ground to endure wind/weather.
- Then you require to start making your straw layers and planting the seeds once it is in location!
- Start by covering the bottom with a bit of hay, then develop about an 8 inch high circle all around the interior of the tower. Basically, attempt to push the straw to the sides in a circle formation, then return with your hand or shovel and make a well to push the rest of the straw to the sides.
Profile of very first level of straw..
Top view of first level of straw..- Add the dirt in the center to be just under the layer of the straw.
Profile of first level of dirt.
Top view of very first level of dirt.- Include a layer of potatoes. You can plant a handful of potatoes per layer. Typically along the sides every couple of inches and then 1-3 in the middle.
Top view of first layer of potato seeds. These are organic blue potatoes! YUM!Cover the potato seeds in a layer of dirt before beginning the next layer!.- Repeat the layering up until you have actually planted all of your potato seeds.
- Then soak the tower in water. I essentially created a pool on top. Potatoes like water.
Then keep up with the watering and view your potatoes grow. When it is time to harvest, you can simply inch up the chicken wire on the safe stakes and inch it upwards so that you can reach in the tower from the bottom to rob your potatoes. That’s it! This solution was easy to do, budget-friendly and ideally rather reliable!
Article source: http://thethriftycouple.com/2014/05/31/how-to-build-a-potato-tower-for-small-space-growing-3-types/
