Growing potatoes in a tower is a space-saving, high-yield method that has gained popularity recently. Whether you have limited garden space, have poor soil conditions, or just want to try a fun and efficient way to grow your spuds, a potato tower could be the perfect solution. Here’s why you should consider growing potatoes in a tower.
Maximizing Space Efficiency
One of the biggest advantages of a potato tower is its ability to produce an impressive harvest in a small area. Instead of spreading your potato plants horizontally, a tower allows them to grow vertically, making it ideal for small gardens, patios, or urban settings.
A simple tower can be built using materials like wire mesh, wooden boards, or even pallets, accommodating multiple layers of potatoes into a single compact structure.
No Mounding Up
Potato towers are designed to encourage vertical growth, through existing layers of soil and straw. This means you don’t need to mound up the potatoes as they grow like you would with traditional methods.
Better Disease Management
Growing potatoes in a tower can help reduce common pest and disease problems. Since the tower raises the plants off the ground, it minimizes the risk of soil-borne diseases, rot, and pests like wireworms and slugs.
Additionally, the controlled environment of a tower makes it easier to monitor and manage any potential issues before they become major problems.
Improved Soil Conditions
Not all gardeners have the luxury of rich, well-draining soil. A potato tower allows you to create the perfect growing medium by layering compost, straw, and quality soil.
This ensures that your potatoes have the nutrients they need to thrive without being hindered by poor native soil conditions. This can be particularly useful if your natural soil has poor drainage.
Ease of Harvesting
One of the most frustrating aspects of traditional potato growing is the labor-intensive harvesting process, which often involves digging and potentially damaging tubers. With a potato tower, harvesting is much simpler.
By disassembling the tower or removing layers of soil, you can easily access the potatoes without excessive digging, making the process cleaner and more efficient.
How To Make A Potato Tower
In this guide, I will show you a really simple way to make your own potato tower using wire mesh, straw, and compost.
To start with you want to cut your mesh to size, the longer you cut it the wider your tower will be. This will mean you can plant more potatoes but it will be more expensive to fill with soil and compost. Have a play around with potential sizes and find one that works for you.
Then you need to join the two ends of your mesh together to form a circle. In the photo below I show the rod method – just weave a rod or cane down through the two sides of the mesh – interlocking them. Alternatively you can tie the sides together with metal twist ties.
Once you have the structure assembled, it is time to start adding straw. Fill the bottom 6″ of your tower with straw. You can also start building up the sides a little too.
Your aim here is to build a sort of bowl in the straw where you can add your potatoes and compost.
Then once you have this built you can plant your seed potatoes. The number of seed potatoes you use depends on the type of potato.
Here I am planting a small salad potato so I put quite a few seed potatoes in, if you are planting a larger potato then you won’t need as many.
You could also use halved potatoes to reduce the seed cost
You can harvest in sections if required. You don’t have to harvest the whole tower at once, you could remove the top layer while allowing those lower down to continue growing and sizing up.
Or alternatively, you could undo your ties and let the whole thing collapse for an easy harvest with no digging!
Cutting Seed Potatoes in Half – Bigger Harvest?
This is one of those gardening things that some people do while others will have never even heard of.
Cutting your seed potatoes in half to get extra seed potatoes.
The premise is simple enough: you cut your seed potato in half before planting, doubling the number of plants you get.
But does this work? And if the plants grow, do you get the same-sized harvest?
I was intrigued to find out, so I ran a mini-trial of my own this year, using Charlotte potatoes.
I had four bags filled with the same compost, and then two would have half a seed potato in and the other two a full one.
Would the half grow? Would the harvest be the same? Let’s find out.
Here are the potatoes, full, half, full, half from right to left. They are all in the same compost and will be grown in the same spot.
When cutting your potatoes in half, you need to let them cure for a bit and skin over the wound before planting – just a little tip if you do decide to do this yourself.
The Results
So now it’s time to harvest the spuds and see the result.
These were Charlotte potatoes, so an early type which means we are expecting to harvest smaller “new” potatoes.
So it’s pretty clear already that you will get a much smaller harvest if you cut your seed potatoes in half, but how much smaller?
Well, when we combine the numbers, we get 465.9g vs 652.7g
That’s a whopping 40% larger harvest if you use full-seed potatoes rather than cutting them in half.
This is just a small trial with only four plants in it, but it has shown a very clear difference.
Next year I will be trialling this again but with maincrops, so keep your eyes peeled for that and why not sign up for my newslett
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