It appears that everyone is looking to be more mobile, and doing home systems for growing crops, including something called aquaponics systems, hydroponics, smart gardens, portable bags for tomatoes, and more.
Finally, we come to potato towers, but what is it exactly?
A potato tower is literally what it sounds like, a tower shaped structure of soil above ground, surrounded by whatever you want surrounding it, and filled with potatoes. Everything else, the methodology of growing potatoes, and soil type, is completely up to you.
Potatoes grow underground and are also called tubers, but they are usually all packed up higher in the ground as a hill or mound.
The thought being that they grow better higher, it was just a small step to come up with a potato tower.
How Do You Make a Potato Tower?
To construct a potato tower, you put a tire where you want it and fill that tire with soil and typically your mix that you use for potatoes, with the seed you want to plant.
As the potato plant grows up you keep removing more of the leaves and putting soil in with a second tire; then a third tire; then a fourth tire (you get the point).
You can construct a potato tower in different ways, and keep the soil and potatoes in your design of stack.
The tire building method for a potato tower is a well-known one and will provide you an idea of how simply this will work.
People have used more than just tires.
Additionally there have been examples of lattice work, chicken wire, regular, chainlink fencing, pallets, cinder blocks, bricks, and stones, tomato towers, etc.
Again, the idea is to build several stacks, keeping the space really small, so you can get as many potatoes as you can when you don’t have the real estate to do it in the traditional way.
Do Potato Towers Work?
The issue is that potato towers disregard the way potatoes grow. Much of the plants’ energy for food, flowers, seeds, and everything else, comes from the sun like any plant.
Water and nutrients in the soil is a good stepping point but if the sun is taken away, your plants will die.
As you continually stack higher and higher, you are then covering or cutting off leaves to add more soil and another layer or stack.
In doing this, you have reduced the ability for the plant to receive sunlight and energy to produce potatoes.
That does not necessarily mean there are versions of potato towers that do work and are known, or that it is not out there. There is, however, a better way to do this without using the four tire stack.
While it looks cool, and a potato tower sounds fabulous (who doesn’t want hundreds of potatoes with as little space as possible?), you need to practice restraint regarding how high you are stacking and to not cover up the leaves.
The second problem is that it feels like small gardening and diy tip and trick is all the rage right now.
There are so many clever ways to try and innovate, and create new ways to grow and provide food for your family in the smallest spaces.
Many of these tips and innovative ideas are super good ideas for urban gardening, and work just as well.
Smart gardens, such as IoT devices, are a dream come true for homegrown, self made herbs and seasonings.
Hydroponics, use of all the household and container items we already have that is such an awesome fast way to grow indoors.
Aquaponics is even cooler and cheaper than backyard hydroponics, with your own fish to produce plants, whether indoors or outdoors, in complete auto-phonic life.
Nevertheless, this leads us to another area like the potato tower that people will simply be sucked into, all of a sudden – 100 pounds of potatoes in a small, four foot stack is unrealistic.
Not only will this not produce results of 100 pounds of potatoes, but you are also going to waste your time with it and be disappointed.
Is There a Potato Tower Alternative?
There is an alternative to towers for potato plants, and you will still be able to conserve space.
While it might not save as much space as a tower, you still will be impressed with the harvest and still harvest much more than you yielding on a potato tower .
10-Gallon Potato Grow Bags
Potatoes grow bags also work great for tomatoes as well.
After you have your potato grow bags, lay down a bunch of newspaper under the plastic grow bag to keep the weeds out of the potato bag. And remember to cut holes in the bottom of your potato grow bag!
To start, you will use the method of rolling the edges of the potato grow bag down to the ground so it will be low-profile.
Below the rolled down edges of your grow bag, place your potatoes, and cover with soil and mulch. Then, as the potatoes grow, unroll your bag and add a layer or two of mulch and soil as you go.
If you have been paying attention, we are actually doing the same concept as Potato Towers.
In fact, the potato grow bags will be no more than 18″ tall, significantly less height than the potato towers.
In fact, because the potato plant stem is going to grow quite high out of the top of the potato grow bag, it is likely going to tip over.
And that is just fine, and you can buy some of the same stabilizers you use with tomato plants to stabilize the potato stem if necessary.
Quick Tip: By the time it is tall enough to tip over you can probably begin harvesting some potatoes and leave the smaller ones surviving to grow.
Plant Them In The Ground
The whole point of having potato towers is that they are for folks who don’t have the space to grow potatoes in the traditional way But, it really doesn’t take that much real estate to grow a few rows of potatoes, especially when they can be so prolific.
Just dig out a 10′ long trench, 6″ deep And, plant the potatoes 8″ to 12″ apart- and cover them up with loose dirt and mulch. You might want to mix in some straw, hay, or compost, or something like that into your covering dirt; it will help with moisture retention.
After that, just wait for the first sprouts of plants to pop up from underneath, when the soil is drying out, you can water them.
No need to add dirt too high.
Recall that the inherent failure with the potato tower concept has to do with not exposing enough leaves and allowing the plants to generate enough nutrition through photosynthesis.
Other Potato Planting Methods
Anything you choose to do will be successful as long as you apply the same method as the two examples above.
As long as you plant the potato no more than 6″ deep and let the stems and leaves get enough exposure, the harvest will be positive.
You can also use pots the same way you would use the grow bags. There are also hydroponics and aeroponics.
Research has shown you get more production out of the aeroponic method than the normal, growing potatoes in soil method.
Hydroponics is also a great method of growing potatoes.
In Fact: It is one of the ways to grow potatoes easiest out of all the DIY, home-gardening techniques.
Why Are Potato Towers a Growing Trend?
When public opinion swings towards something new and innovative, you can be assured that there will be people who can’t resist trying to make a quick dollar off of it.
You may have heard of the potato tower method for growing potatoes, but if you can even get a 1:10 ratio out of the potato tower method, you are doing much better than expected.
This is akin to those advertisements you see throughout the internet and blogs.
Click here and fill out this survey, and you will win $20,000 dollars!
Chain letters and viral advertisements (that were actually false hundred years ago) are nothing new. It really just means the authors of the scam have invented a new mechanism to do it.
This is the same process as “growing potatoes in a potato tower.”
You should always be on the defensive, and do your own research once you hear that you can grow hundreds of pounds of potatoes in a four-foot tall tower.
The claim is the same as always – you will get something amazing from very little effort and expense on your part. The difference is that there actually are ways to grow hundreds of pounds of potatoes without it feeling like you’re going to die.
Some of those ways are mentioned above. But do-it-yourself home gardening, automation, aqua- aeroponic, and hydroponics, are all really excellent and cost-effective ways to grow potatoes. And really anything else for that matter.
All Things Considered
Potato towers may sound like a great idea and fit perfectly into the rising trend of do-it-yourself (DIY) home-gardening.
Unfortunatley, it is probably the worst way to grow potatoes imaginable.
Fortunately, evidence, both on the internet and spreading among other means, is plentiful, to counter potato towers as the inferior kind of method it is.
In all of the many ways to try and grow potatoes effectively with some good production, probably an immeasurable amount more than potato towers, there is no need to grow potatoes in potato towers.