Potato Tower - Vertical Growing Solutions

In order to save space and find effective ways of increasing the annual harvest of our crops we have been experimenting with various methods of growing, At Blackhill Club Community Garden we have generally adopted a no dig approach but with potato growing that seemed difficult,

From our first year of growing, in 2017 we had lots of space but no beds and few resources. Verticle growing and using tyres for potato tower growing was one of our very first experiments. We had some success in our very first year and much improved yields in 2018 when our experience helped us better understand the space and method.

Sadly in 2018 when we tried growing potatoes in our new vegetable beds they were badly eaten by vine weevel and our root growing days were over. We have been treating the ground, soil and compost with nematodes and are ready to grow again in 2020.

Learning from our mistakes we decided to go back to growing vertically with the potatoes and use our most effective, high yielding method which is low cost, easy and space saving. This year we are also experimenting to see if you can grow potatoes successfully from scraps. We will update this post in Autumn and let you know!

How We Did It...
Grow potatoes in tyre planter towers.

Step 2
Add a layer of your seed potatoes or scraps on top of the soil. Don't tuck them too far away in the tyre rim but do use as much of the space as possible.  They can go pairly close together without touching. Leave 2-3 cm around each potato.

Cover the potatoes and fill the rest of the tyre making sure there are no gaps but without packing the soil too tightly.

Water well.

Put another tyre on top of the first giving a second layer.

What you need:
Per Tower -

• 4 Used Car Tyres
• 10-12 seed potatoes (or shooting potato scraps)
• 4-5 Barrows of soil/compost/manure mix- They like a good even mix of manure/compost to topsoil we find. try to keep the mix soft, adding a little sand could help. We use horse manure.
• Water

Step 1
Find a suitable spot for your towers where they can well drain and will get regular  sunlight. If it is on top of grass put a thick layer of cardboard down first.

Lay the first tyre, make sure it is fairly well leveled. Fill the tower 2/3 full of soil/compost mix.

Step 3

Its best to try and keep the towers damp but not waterlogged, so water reguarly until gree shoots start to appear.
Once the shoots reach the height of the second tier, cover them fully with another layer of soil/compost mix.
Add another tyre on top of the second creating a thir teir and water regulary.

Complete this process again when ready for the third teir. Once you have reached the fourth and final teir fill the tyre, water as normal but allow the greeery to flower and complete its life cycle.

Step 4

The final process involves harvesting your potatoes.
Early varieties and new potatoes can possibly be harvested when flowering but we prefer to wait.
Allow the plants to flower, and stop watering once the begin to wither and die back. Once they are yellowed and totally limp they are ready to start harvesting. You can wait and allow the potatoes to grow but don't wait too late as they will ruin if frost hits.

The idea is to harvest layer by layer and save your soil. The top layer can be removed by tugging out the pants and following the root system seeking tubers. We use our hands or a hand trowel to find as many as possible before gently shoveling the soil into a barrow and removing the potatoes if any more are found.

We normally dust off and clean the potatoes as we go and collect the harvest in a box or sack, and put them directly in the sytem we are using to store them.

We also collect our soil and mix it 50/50 with some fresh manure before bagging and securing it. Store the tyres and soil/manure mix safely ready for next season.

This process can take a little bit of time and is probably the longest time dedication of the entire sytem. It is much less back breaking than digging in the ground and everything is then ready to use when needed, also the additonal yields of this system speak for themselves.