I have decided to make Thursdays my day to post my weekly garden updates, so let’s get started with the first update.
My Version of a Potato Tower
The past two years I have planted potatoes in rows. After doing a little research I decided to make potato towers this year and completed that job yesterday.
While I have no idea whether it will work or not, I am hopeful based on a post I read at One Hundred Dollars a Month.
Here is what I did to make the towers.
Step1: I used some leftover fencing from when we built our chicken yard. The fencing was 5 foot tall and the openings were 2 inches x 4 inches.
I cut the fencing in half so that I had two 2 1/2 foot pieces that were about 6 feet long. I formed each piece into a circle and crimped the wire around itself on the edges.
I made a total of four towers and pushed them into the ground a little bit. (You would never know we had too much rain last week by looking at the dirt, would you?)
I highly recommend having a cute helper. It makes the work more fun.
Step 2: I then lined the bottom and about 1/3 of the sides of each tower with straw. The straw is supposed to keep the dirt in the tower.
Step 3: Then, I added topsoil to the tower so that it was a few inches below the top of the straw.
Step 4: Next, I cut my seed potatoes and arranged them in the dirt. I am hopeful I didn’t plant them too close and I hope it was alright to plant some in the middle.
It is recommended that you plant the potatoes with the eyes up.
Also, I read, though I didn’t do this, to wait a few days between cutting the potatoes and planting them. Another thing I read to do was to coat the pieces of potato in garden sulfer.
Step 5: Finally, I covered the potatoes with more topsoil so that it reached the top of the straw.
I have no idea how well this will work, but it sure beat digging a bunch of holes.
As the potatoes grow I plan to add more straw along the sides and cover them with more topsoil.
Supposedly, when the potatoes are finished growing I should be able to just lift off the fencing and potatoes will spill out. Sounds pretty easy to me. 🙂
Update
I thought you might like to see how easy it was to harvest potatoes from my potato towers.
When the potato plants were mostly brown and dried up it was time to harvest them. (Ignore the fact that the towers are surrounded by weeds. 🙂 )
I simply had to lift the wire tower and start digging through the loose dirt for potatoes. It was kind of like treasure hunting.
It was so much easier to harvest the potatoes from the towers than having to dig through the hard ground like I usually have to do.
My Garden This Week (5-16-13)
Last week I started planting our garden and got about halfway done before we had some major rain. There were some big puddles in the garden and a few of my plants sat in water for a few days.
As if flooding wasn’t bad enough, we had a few nights over the weekend where the temperature was into the 30’s.
Some of my plants are looking pretty sad. I am hopeful that they will snap out of it. However, it’s pouring down rain as I am writing this.
This week I planted some seeds, so I am getting closer to being finished. I still have carrots, onions, radishes, and a few varieties of greens still to plant.
I can’t believe how dry the garden looks. Not only have I been battling too much rain and some cold weather that may have stunted my plants, a mole has been on an excavating mission all through my garden.
This is my back garden spot where I put the potato towers and I have hills of cucumbers, zucchini, and butternut squash. I will plant a few more things here in a few days.
Just in case you were curious, here is what I have planted so far.
- 12 Sweet Potato Plants
- 13 Broccoli Plants
- 10 Cabbage Plants
- 4 Dill Plants
- 6 Sweet Basil Plants
- 10 Bell Pepper Plants
- 16 Tomato Plants (6 Marglobe, 8 San Marzano, 2 Red Grape)
- 4 Rows of Green Beans
- 2 Rows of Sweet Corn (I will plant two more in another week.)
- 2 Hills of Butternut Squash
- 2 Hills of Cucumbers
- 2 Hills of Zucchini
- 4 Potato Towers
Are you having a garden this year? Has the weather cooperated for you?
