Potato towers are a lot of hype

Posted: September 21, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: 3. Food Security | Tags: , | Comments Off on Potato towers are a lot of hype

…but don’t deliver as promised. The official tally is in and our trenches blew away the potato towers for production quantity, and ease of use. 214 pounds of eating potato from 20 pounds of seed potato! A few photos from our whole family harvest days (the middle photo just makes me happy):

Potato harvest

Posted: September 14, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: 3. Food Security | Comments Off on Potato harvest

So far in the contest between potato towers and a normal potato setup in the ground (using trenches and hilling), the in-the-ground solution is the clear winner. We harvested just 10% of our in-the-ground potatoes today and got this.

Holy smokes. That is A LOT of potatoes and we’ve still got three more trenches to go that are twice as long as this one!

Adding potatoes to the garden

Posted: March 11, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: 3. Food Security | Tags: , | Comments Off on Adding potatoes to the garden

Back from another teaching gig and reinvesting in the garden.

Down in the food forest I added two sets of potatoes as an experiment. The first section is the fairly straightforward trench method so we can do hilling. I dug ~ 200′ of trenches, some in their own dedicated beds and some snaking around our new berry bushes and more two year old fruit trees.

In another section of the food forest that had a site prepped but no topsoil/compost (because I got tired of hauling compost this past summer) I added a line of buckets with potatoes in them. The plan is to add a second vertical layer of buckets (with the bottoms cut out) on top of these as we add more dirt to them during the hilling process.

I went with the buckets for the experiment (and a random trash can) rather than the more popular towers since not many folks actually *doing* the towers were getting good results. I found lots of articles citing the wonders of potato towers written by journalists, but it was clear none of them had actually planted these and watched over them for a season until harvest time. On the other hand, there are many more blog entries by folks actually doing the planting/harvesting with buckets.

And I had truckloads of extra buckets left over from planting the berry bushes and runs to the local deli/bakery for food grade 5-gallon buckets. Reminder: drill holes in the bottom for drainage.

The best part? At the end of the season, I spill the buckets over right where they are in the food forest to make a new bed for a different crop next year. Instead of hauling four yards of dirt down the hill in one day, I do it in small batches over several months…

What are we eating?

Posted: June 14, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: 3. Food Security | Comments Off on What are we eating?

I was recently reorganizing my workshop when I came across our stack of potato tower buckets that I scavenged from our local bakeries and delis.

One of the buckets for “cream cheese icing” caught my eye, specifically the laundry list of chemical ingredients. We’re literally killing ourselves with these food-like substances masquerading as real food. The only true purpose of these chemical compounds is to make corporations money; there is no effort made here for health, beauty, or taste. Ugh.

However, I do enjoy the irony of using the old containers of this chemical crap to grow hyperlocal organic food.   🙂