While many common staple crops require large amounts of space to grow and expensive equipment to process, potatoes are considered one of the easiest crops to grow. Even better, there's no need to peel or crush them. Even better, you can store it for several months in a simple place like a basement or garage in the winter in a cool, humid, dark place.
Potatoes are extremely versatile in the kitchen and serve as the basis for many of our favorite dishes, including hash browns, mashed potatoes, potato soup, fries, roasted potatoes, baked potatoes, stuffed potatoes, croquettes, and many other dishes from around the world. Masu. In addition to being hugely popular in many forms, potatoes are also a filling food that fills you up without ingesting tons of empty calories.
When it comes to gardening, potatoes are suitable for vertical gardening, making it possible to grow large quantities of potatoes in a very small area. However, most information about potato towers is slightly off and will not produce the desired result of a great harvest from a small space. So let's think about some ways to make it better.
What is potato tower?
There are several options for making potato towers. Some people pile up bottomless buckets. Some people make wooden towers. Some people load tires. But the simplest potato tower will probably be made by rolling a section of wire fence into a cylindrical shape. They are typically about 3 feet wide and 3 feet tall.
Fertile soil, compost and straw are provided at the bottom of the tower. Plant potatoes, and as the plants grow taller, more medium is added, eventually forming a potato tower.
The idea behind potato tower
Most of the videos and articles we see about potato towers are based on the idea of raising potato plants to higher ground. Traditionally, potatoes were planted in soil and buried after a few weeks, leaving only a few leaves at the top. This is called a hill, and the buried young potato branches will become roots and provide further tubers.
The potato tower idea that you see in most videos is that you can keep climbing up the hill and build a bed (or tower) 3 to 4 feet tall. If branches continue to turn into roots and roots into tubers, the harvest will be huge. Unfortunately, that won't happen. It is true that potatoes will continue to grow upwards, but in most cases they will only be produced near the bottom.
Without a doubt, this type of potato tower will produce potatoes. More numbers will probably be produced, but they tend to be small and misshapen. From a weight standpoint, this tower will not produce more potatoes per square foot of garden space. It just makes for tall plants and a good story.
Another view of potato tower
To take advantage of the vertical space that a garden tower creates, it is better to plant more potatoes on top of the tower. The tower should be filled from the beginning to the top. Then, rather than adding soil each time the potato plant grows one layer, he towers the seed potatoes one layer at a time for each foot of height.
Spacing within the planting layer is also important. For this tower, the idea is that the bottom potatoes will grow from the sides of the cage (fence) tower, and the top layer will grow from the top. Inside each layer, place seed potatoes about 4 to 5 inches from the sides of the tower and about 1 foot apart from each other.
Potato vines cover the outside of this tower from top to bottom, with most of the plants popping out horizontally. Moreover, the plants are not only planted along the bottom, so in that space there will be at least three times as many plants as him. This equates to more potatoes per square foot.
One last tip about potato towers
The consensus of experienced tower growers is that potatoes seem small, towers require regular watering, and in general, crops planted too early can be killed by late frosts. is.
- Therefore, it is recommended to grow small potatoes at first. Instead of expecting oversized baking potatoes, aim for the Yukon Golds and Purple Majesties of the world. If you want to try larger potatoes, leave extra space.
- Potatoes are sun-loving and thirsty plants, so it makes sense to place them where there is plenty of sun and easy access to water. As the season progresses, they will be able to tolerate giving you a drink.
- Those who plant potatoes before the last frost should be prepared to protect young plants in some way if a late frost comes. If you have a long growing season, wait a little longer before planting potatoes. Small potatoes only take about three months to mature. Large potatoes may take up to 4 months.
Potato towers are a lot of fun to experiment with, and some people have had real success with them. Successful growers should expect about 2 pounds of potatoes per plant, so grow a reasonable number of towers.
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