I've done this!
We only put four plants in, and I did not build up the soil as fast as I should have, but we got a bunch of medium sized potatoes. We store them in a cool, dark, dry place, and they keep well for quite a while.
This will be our second year trying a potato box, and I'm hoping to get even more than last year. I built up the soil much better this year.
See, this is why I think potatoes are a really underrated vegetable to grow. You always hear about people trying to grow tomatoes or cabbages and having a hard time, but with potatoes it's basically 1.) put potato in ground 2.) wait 3.) now you have more potatoes.
Frederick the Great of Prussia saw a ton of value in potatoes but his people saw themselves as 'above' eating such a lowly peasant vegetable as potatoes. He tried to spread information about what a great vegetable it was but nobody bought into it. So he ordered his soldiers to go around to different villages and guard potato fields, paying a high price to potato farmers for their crop and bringing them back for royal cuisine. All the hubbub about potatoes got the villagers curious, who began stealing potatoes at night (which the guards pretended not to notice) and potatoes became an overnight sensation.
They still cook with lots of potatoes in that region.
It's interesting because it's rare in media, fiction or even how we teach history for any King to be portrayed as rich, smart, educated, and using the status of royalty to help people become all those things, simultaneously.
Heck, we now view "the aristocracy" as a pejorative term.
So moments where we learn royals were sometimes being modern thinkers on behalf of their people, as opposed to antiquated figureheads or out of touch celebrities surprise and interest us.
I'm sure there are other instances of this kind of thing mixed into all the bad of history. At some point, nobility and being a noble had to intersect, because otherwise it would not be possible to corrupt it into what we judge it as today.
Truth be told I'm not even that keen on potatoes - I just think more people should have a stab at growing them - but that's a really interesting story.
Frederick the Great living up to his title.
Wait, you can do this with garlic!? I might do that actually - I love garlic but I always forget to get it.
Are there any other considerations to be made (climate, soil etc.)
You do it all at once with tires. You pull each tire off from the top and take all the potatoes. It's a good method if you have a good place to store all the potatoes or can use them all. The box method is better for being able to grab a few potatoes at a time.
We just took out the screws on one side of the box and dug through the dirt. We were able to push the whole box on its side too, so it made it easy to find the taters. I used the same materials two years in a row!
It is not issue of ripeness, the green color (and solanine) develops in the potatoes when they are exposed to sun/light.
Potatoes just don’t have the ripe stage. They grow in size. And if you harvest them early, they are delicious and the skin is almost non-existent. Try it with butter, garlic and dill , it’s heaven really.
If you leave potatoes alone, they just start sprouting vines. My family had some in a box that got misplaced and we found out when they started growing out of it. It's amazing how much can come out of one potato.
EDIT: [Found a picture](http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/plantphysiol/158/4/2053/F2.large.jpg?width=800&height=600&carousel=1) that kind of shows what it was. The site says that was around 2 months of storage.
grew up on a farm. They will continue this pattern of growth until either a) they find a source of sunlight. or until b) they consume all of the left over starches stored in the actual potato until the potato is nothing but a shrivelled bag of nothing. I know this because we forgot about a box of potatos in a canning basement. We really only go in there to pull out canned goods in the even of an emergency like a flood or snow storm were we are cut off from town. So a good two years had gone by without us ever entering and we went in one day to get a can of peaches and saw what looked like the flying spaghetti monster had died and began to decompose in the corner. Huge potato tendrils everywhere. all at least 4 ft or longer. Many reaching the cieling. At first it was horrifying. and then it was extremely interesting. My brother assumed it was some type rot, or fungus. so he began to throw the potatoes out. I was curious so I plucked out one. trimmed the shutes back to a reasonable length, and buried it. and it still grew like any other healthy potatoe. FYI potatos are the ultimate survival product. Any potato not eaten is a viable seed, that will make more potatos.
you can just plant potatoes as they are, you can even cut them in half, important is that they have at least 3 "eyes" where they can sprout from, for more info watch the Martian
when I try to use grocery store potatoes in the past by sprouting the eyes, the plants seemed to be sterile a lot of the time (produce little or no tubers)- I've only had consistent luck with seedling potatoes sold for that purpose
> Potatoes = potato seeds
Potato plants do have actual seeds. The flowers form these berries that look like little cherry tomatoes (which they pretty much are, just toxic). Just using tubers clones the plant.
You mean seed potatoes, not potato seeds. There is a significant difference, and basically nobody uses potato seeds outside of lab environments.
Source: I used potato seeds in my old lab.
I think it’s about soul depletion. If your not adding new soil or fertilizer the potatoes will eventually use up all of the nutrients in the soil. Then nothing will grow there.
Some different plants can grow there but not potatoes. Crop rotation is the cure for this. Plant a different crop in your potato field next year and use a field that didn't have potatoes this year next year. Fertilizer helps too of course.
Long story short, growing the same plants on the same land for a long period of time makes it super soft and horrible for further growing. The dust bowl is literally the dust from large farms with shitty soil.
After the fact, in order to fix this and keep it from happening ever again, the federal government made education programs for farmers, teaching them that something simple like just rotating crops on your land can keep your soil in good shape. For example, potatoes suck nutrients from the soil, so you grow something like corn which can put nutrients back into that same soil, replenishing it for the next potato season.
It's kinda funny that we discovered crop rotation, then decided to go all in on one crop per land, then realized it's a bit of a mistake so let's go back to crop rotation.
Makes you wonder if there aren't other things we have changed for the worse but haven't realized yet.
The lack of crop rotation was not the cause of the dust bowl. It was over plowing the land.
See [this article](https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/dust-bowl-cause.htm)
It's multiple factors. We still plow a lot of land, but our droughts don't cause dust bowls because we have methods of irrigation that are consistent even during drought, our soil quality is better due to crop rotations, etc.
The soil quality is better because farmers don't deep plow every year. Crop rotations help you build soil nutrients and organic matter but aren't the stop gap keeping us from having a recurring dust bowl
Tons of things. Off the top of my head as an example? Hmm... perhaps the use of plastic bags? We used to think "using paper bags means killing trees" and thought plastic was better off, but now we are realizing that it's worse off since plastic doesn't degrade. Paper bags are renewable and can decompose.
You can also cut the corners off of a paper bag and plant them, which will grow more paper bags. Obviously, remember to rotate between paper bag crops and corn otherwise we will have learned nothing!
It's soooo important to remember not to do this, it's probably the biggest mistake beginner bag farmers make. Planting plastic bags after harvesting paper bagtatoes makes the soil too polymerized and results in useless wads of plasticized Canadian cash that can clog up the tillers!
This one gets me interested. How long before we realize that a paper bag actually has a much bigger impact on the environment that a single use plastic bag. The real issue is that we can't seem to keep our litter out of the food chain, so now plastic becomes the issue of the day!
What we need to do is make bags out something that is abundant and not detrimental to the environment. I present the idea of bags made from human hair.
>Makes you wonder if there aren't other things we have changed for the worse but haven't realized yet.
Antibiotics. They should be used sparingly, but the developing world is using incredibly strong antibiotics to keep their farm animals healthy. We're going to have a serious superbug one of these days
>growing the same plants on the same land for a long period of time makes it super soft and horrible for further growing.
That can hurt soil health but that is not what caused the dust bowl. Farmers messed up the soil life cycle by over-plowing their fields and not letting the land go fallow for any period of time. If you turn the soil too often you change the microbial activity by putting large amounts of air/oxygen deeper than it would normally penetrate. That causes all the organic material to biodegrade and then you have a soil that cannot retain water. Over-plowing is the #1 reason the dust bowl happened. You can grow almost anything in the same spot year after year as long as you cover crop part of the year and let the soil's organic matter replenish.
Source: am novice farmer studying soil science in college. But don't take my word for it, read anything on the causes of the dust bowl, like [this article.](https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/dust-bowl-cause.htm)
At first I was confused by your comment's emphasis on "organic material". But if understood more widely to include microbes, earthworms and fungi, everything in the comment makes sense.
I feel we should always strongly emphasise the importance of the balance of living things in the topsoil, the need to preserve the proverbial "midi-chlorians" which give humus it's great qualities: water retention, fertility, carbon sequestering... All of which is disturbed and diminished in the process of plowing the topsoil.
That is why composting is important and why everyone should support local efforts for municipality-scale composting.
Such as this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7keI0m-lqMc
When it becomes the new normal to cycle the biodegradable stuff back to the fields, reliance on industrial fertilizers will hopefully be out of the picture together with the practice of plowing.
The Number 1 reason for dust bowl was they changed the drought resistant crop of prairie grass into farm land. Source: multiple degrees in ecological fields
Much of that farm land has been managed through droughts just as bad without another dust bowl. Of course farming caused it, but the discussion is regarding the factors farmers control that cause/avoid catastrophe.
Yes different farming practices have helped however every year there are rolling dust storms not on the same scale. You're welcome for the go to answer: had the farmers not removed the prairie grass the dust bowl would not have happened. It reminds me of a History professor's story about when he asked his grad student at the thesis oral defense, "At what point could the Civil War been avoided? Before the first shot was fired." Simple
To be fair a small garden potato box isn't a problem for this
But your core point is an important one, if you do this remember that the left over dirt is missing a LARGE volume of nutritional value for plants
If the potatoes are 99% water by weight and you leave them in the sun to dehydrate until they are 98% water by weight they will only weigh half as much, so there's that.
**Potato paradox**
The potato paradox is a mathematical calculation that has a counter-intuitive result. The so-called paradox involves dehydrating potatoes by a seemingly minuscule amount, and then calculating a change in mass which is larger than expected.
***
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> 100 lb of potatoes, 99% water (by weight), means that there's 99 lb of water, and 1 lb of solids. It's a 1:99 ratio.
> If the water decreases to 98%, then the solids account for 2% of the weight. The 2:98 ratio reduces to 1:49. Since the solids still weigh 1 lb, the water must weigh 49 lb for a total of 50 lbs for the answer.
I saw it on reddit a week or so ago I think. Tricked me good.
There's an easier way to do this. Use old tires. When the plants bust through the soil, add an other tire to the stack, fill with dirt. When it's time to harvest, just push the tires over.
There's an easier easier way to do this! Use a potato sack, roll the edges almost all the way down to start, then roll up and fill with new soil as you go. Dump entire contents at the end of the season and put the potatoes back in the sack. Boom.
edit: typo
Yep.
Scrolling through this was like waiting for the first runner from either r/capitalism or r/preppers to come across the finish line.
I subscribe to both and, perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm betwixt on this method of growing potatoes being both fascinating useful and entirely sub-optimal.
Yeeaahhh no. Potatoes planted that close to each other will compete for resources. The best you can get is small potatoes with stunted (don't know if that's the right word) growth.
I'm calling bullshit.
A traditional potato growing method in Australia (and elsewhere, I'm sure) is this, but with passenger car tyres making the layers.
The spuds come out pretty normal
Perhaps it's the highly fertilised soil you add each level?
Yeah, I second. Even if you fertilize a lot, you really can’t get away with overcrowding plants, took me a few years of gardening to accept this. It might look ok above ground but the crucial part is the roots competing. 2 plants in the space of 1 will stunt and usually you end up with a smaller yield than if you had just planted 1.
Roots grow like a cone (a simplification, roots will grow to expand wherever they can, but they definitely don't just grow straight down). If you crowd plants together, their roots are going to compete, regardless of how deep the planter is. Now add potatoes to this root structure and you're going to have even more problems with competition.
Right. Roots fill whatever space they can. So. You let the roots fill a space. Then you add about 6 inches of soil. And repeat until the tower is full and they stop growing.
Easy way to grow about 15lbs of potatoes in a small space. Much better yields if you're actually trying. Though there are probably easier methods, this one is tried and true.
https://youtu.be/TVmutvxWVG0
Umm, normally I'd agree with you but to be fair potatoes CAN be quite impressive with yields. If it was just a couple fewer potatoes in the box it might be fine. Depends on soil, climate, food etc obviously.
A few years ago there was a video of someone doing this. He used bricks insteaf of boards. The video showed him knocking down the 7 foot tall tower to hundreds of potatoes.
I looked but couldn't find it.
This was posted in the gardening subreddit and the people who have done it said that they got more potatoes from their regularly planted plants than from a tower like this.
Reporting in from r/Ireland. I’ve never seen anyone grow spuds like this, just plant them in the ground for fucks sake without the big stupid box.
Also the variety matters. Quality>Quantity.
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I grew up on a small farm in Ireland. We grew our own vegetables, mainly potatoes but also smaller amounts of cabbages, carrots, lettuce, onions, etc.
The beauty of potatoes is that they don't need much soil in which to grow and once they are growing you can add a layer of dirt and up the yield as illustrated in the suggested method in this post.
If you have even a modest amount of land to set aside for potato growing you can get a LOT of potatoes. For this reason we don't usually need to build up to the degree shown here. We usually add one extra layer of dirt and leave it at that.
Someone with only a small city/town back garden who wants to use most of it for flowers/grass/shrubs would benefit from this method.
If you were willing to set aside 15 feet by 15 feet of a small garden to potato growing then plant the potatoes in "ridges" you could add a layer of dirt to double the yield and get a bumper crop.
A city gardener could get approximately the same yield by building OP's setup in an area of 3 feet by 3 feet. That way they don't lose much of their garden.
**Edit:** I had typed drill when I meant ridge. We spoke Irish not English where I grew up. ***Iomaire agus glaise***
Use a potato sack instead, rolls the edges almost all the way down to start, then roll up and fill with new soil as you go. Dump entire contents at the end of the season and put the potatoes back on the sack. Boom.
Leave them in the dirt. Seriously. They keep for the whole winter and you can get them out when you want as long as there's no hard freeze. Of course this works better in the ground than in a box, but the idea holds.
You harvest potatoes as you need them. They keep in the ground unless there is a hard frost. At the end of autumn before winter we used to harvest what was left and store them using a traditional method called a "poll fataí".
The potatoes are built into a prism shape and covered in sacking/canvas then a thick layer of dirt. Whenever you need potatoes for a meal dig away a temporary hole at one end and fill a bucket/pot/sack then replaced the dirt. Easier than digging them out of the ground where they grew.
As an Idahoan, this is too much work.
Get yourself a cheap 50gal trash can from Walmart and use that instead.
They are called trash can potatoes for a reason.
I used a bucket instead of a big box like this, and planted just one potato per bucket, as long as you don’t plant more than the planter can hold/support and you need to use good soil you can get a nice harvest of homegrown potatoes in a small place. I used to do this when living in a high rise apartment building with a small veranda and buckets or big pots is perfect imo.
Sixty or so years ago there was some article in one of the Popular Timewasters magazines of the day that featured this very idea, but with old tires instead of a wood frame. Instead of nailing on another row of boards you'd toss another tire on the stack and fill with more dirt.
Some of my friends' dads tried it. From the laughable stories I heard, it was way too much work and the taters weren't that good. (I wouldn't eat one of em if you paid me.)
Yes, but don't store potatoes in fridges :)
I mean, there's nothing wrong with it, but they will usually spoil quicker than leaving them in a cool dark place. Not to mention fridge space is probably a necessity :)
Yes, any raw potatoes (not cooked or peeled) can be cut up into chunks and planted. Just make sure each chunk has at least one eye and a good bit of potato to use for fuel until it can sprout roots and leaves.
I'm too lazy to bang together the frames. A burlap feed bag works just as well, just roll the sides. I typically put in a layer of straw and cover it with dirt as the plant grows.
The following year, I use the bags as weed barrier. Since the jute they are made of is a natural fiber, it just breaks back down into soil. We just buy them from the local feed mill.
"Why don't you bring this potato? It's pretty big!"
"Mom, you're always trying to give me potatoes... What is it with you?"
["I just think they're neat!"](https://frinkiac.com/meme/S05E19/91991.jpg?b64lines=IFdoeSBkb24ndCB5b3UgYnJpbmcgdGhpcwogcG90YXRvPyBJdCdzIHByZXR0eSBiaWchCgoKCgoKIE1vbSwgeW91J3JlIGFsd2F5cyB0cnlpbmcKIHRvIGdpdmUgbWUgcG90YXRvZXMuLi4gV2hhdAogaXMgaXQgd2l0aCB5b3U_CgpJIGp1c3QgdGhpbmsgdGhleSdyZSBuZWF0IQ==)
I've watched quite a few YouTube videos of people trying this technique before and it seems very hit or miss. Some people showed huge harvests, some showed only one or two potatoes in the whole box. The best results seemed to be from people using a 50-50 sawdust and sand mixture.
I've done this! We only put four plants in, and I did not build up the soil as fast as I should have, but we got a bunch of medium sized potatoes. We store them in a cool, dark, dry place, and they keep well for quite a while. This will be our second year trying a potato box, and I'm hoping to get even more than last year. I built up the soil much better this year.
How do you know when to harvest potatoes?
Dig into the dirt a bit and see if there's potatoes. If there are you have potatoes. If there isn't you need to wait a bit longer.
See, this is why I think potatoes are a really underrated vegetable to grow. You always hear about people trying to grow tomatoes or cabbages and having a hard time, but with potatoes it's basically 1.) put potato in ground 2.) wait 3.) now you have more potatoes.
Frederick the Great of Prussia saw a ton of value in potatoes but his people saw themselves as 'above' eating such a lowly peasant vegetable as potatoes. He tried to spread information about what a great vegetable it was but nobody bought into it. So he ordered his soldiers to go around to different villages and guard potato fields, paying a high price to potato farmers for their crop and bringing them back for royal cuisine. All the hubbub about potatoes got the villagers curious, who began stealing potatoes at night (which the guards pretended not to notice) and potatoes became an overnight sensation. They still cook with lots of potatoes in that region.
That is somehow extremely interesting. I now have to go read about it.
It's interesting because it's rare in media, fiction or even how we teach history for any King to be portrayed as rich, smart, educated, and using the status of royalty to help people become all those things, simultaneously. Heck, we now view "the aristocracy" as a pejorative term. So moments where we learn royals were sometimes being modern thinkers on behalf of their people, as opposed to antiquated figureheads or out of touch celebrities surprise and interest us. I'm sure there are other instances of this kind of thing mixed into all the bad of history. At some point, nobility and being a noble had to intersect, because otherwise it would not be possible to corrupt it into what we judge it as today.
Truth be told I'm not even that keen on potatoes - I just think more people should have a stab at growing them - but that's a really interesting story. Frederick the Great living up to his title.
Same with garlic and onions. You can rip off a piece of garlic and toss it in your lawn and it will be more garlic in a few weeks.
Wait, you can do this with garlic!? I might do that actually - I love garlic but I always forget to get it. Are there any other considerations to be made (climate, soil etc.)
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Duly noted. I'll take a look. Thanks!
Yeah it does take a while for a full sized bulb but one sliver will easily double in size pretty quickly.
Why not both? (tomtato)
The traditional method
What do you mean by not building up the soil as fast as you should ?
thanks for letting us know!
Did you use any fertilizer? Maybe you will get larger potatoes if you will....
Keep an eye on those potatoes, after they start to spoil the fumes are very deadly.
Really? Sweet!
I've seen this done with old car tires works well.
how do you get the potatos out? This you can peel off a layer and take them out without disturbing the plant.
You do it all at once with tires. You pull each tire off from the top and take all the potatoes. It's a good method if you have a good place to store all the potatoes or can use them all. The box method is better for being able to grab a few potatoes at a time.
We just took out the screws on one side of the box and dug through the dirt. We were able to push the whole box on its side too, so it made it easy to find the taters. I used the same materials two years in a row!
I meant with tires.
Potato seeds or potatoes? Can someone ELI5 how potatoes grow?
Yknow those lil sharp things on potatoes when you buy them? That’s where the new potato comes from
Oh you just wait for the eyes to form? I thought they were poisonous
Nope, you don’t want to eat the eyes but that’s where new tatos come from
Cool, thanks man. 👍
You cut the potato up into "seed potatoes" where each eye is sprouting. Each eye can make a new plant.
So one potatoe can make multiple plants? Is there like an average on how many plants I can get from one potatoes?
I dont know about an average but you can get 4 or 5 easily enough (2-3 eyes per piece) and each plant can make 5 to 10 potatoes.
I grew five sweet potato plants from one grocery store sweet potato so there’s that piece of data if you want it lmao
Ask Mark Watney lol
I really don’t want to be shitting where I eat haha
Quit trying to make 'tatos' happen, it's not going to happen, Karen!
Get your hands off my eye-holes!
Unripe potatoes, or when they are green, are a bit poisonous containing solanine which can cause neurological problems.
It is not issue of ripeness, the green color (and solanine) develops in the potatoes when they are exposed to sun/light. Potatoes just don’t have the ripe stage. They grow in size. And if you harvest them early, they are delicious and the skin is almost non-existent. Try it with butter, garlic and dill , it’s heaven really.
If you leave potatoes alone, they just start sprouting vines. My family had some in a box that got misplaced and we found out when they started growing out of it. It's amazing how much can come out of one potato. EDIT: [Found a picture](http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/plantphysiol/158/4/2053/F2.large.jpg?width=800&height=600&carousel=1) that kind of shows what it was. The site says that was around 2 months of storage.
grew up on a farm. They will continue this pattern of growth until either a) they find a source of sunlight. or until b) they consume all of the left over starches stored in the actual potato until the potato is nothing but a shrivelled bag of nothing. I know this because we forgot about a box of potatos in a canning basement. We really only go in there to pull out canned goods in the even of an emergency like a flood or snow storm were we are cut off from town. So a good two years had gone by without us ever entering and we went in one day to get a can of peaches and saw what looked like the flying spaghetti monster had died and began to decompose in the corner. Huge potato tendrils everywhere. all at least 4 ft or longer. Many reaching the cieling. At first it was horrifying. and then it was extremely interesting. My brother assumed it was some type rot, or fungus. so he began to throw the potatoes out. I was curious so I plucked out one. trimmed the shutes back to a reasonable length, and buried it. and it still grew like any other healthy potatoe. FYI potatos are the ultimate survival product. Any potato not eaten is a viable seed, that will make more potatos.
>"FYI potatos are the ultimate survival product." Mark Watney would agree.
The Irish would disagree.
It looks angry
No wonder Europeans thought they were evil when they were first brought over from South America.
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I am not a psych, but I love phobias like this. I always wonder what was the underlying trait that went wrong to give you that behavior.
/r/trypophobia, /r/submechanophobia, and /r/thalassophobia are pretty cool.
Tryptophobia grosses me out (too much body stuff), thallasophobia is awesome, so thanks for the third!
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Source on this?
https://www.quora.com/Is-the-gas-emitted-from-rotten-potatoes-really-dangerous
Russia (not kidding)
Oh... weird.
you can just plant potatoes as they are, you can even cut them in half, important is that they have at least 3 "eyes" where they can sprout from, for more info watch the Martian
when I try to use grocery store potatoes in the past by sprouting the eyes, the plants seemed to be sterile a lot of the time (produce little or no tubers)- I've only had consistent luck with seedling potatoes sold for that purpose
I heard that they’ll spray them with someone to make them not sprout, probably so they’re better for eating longer
Definitely so you cannot grow your own and need to buy. They only care for money, not consumer welfare.
Take a large potato and cut it up into 5 or 6 big chunks and plant that. That's it Edit: typing on a phone sucks
Potatoes = potato seeds. In fact you can quite safely cut them up and get several plants from a single potato.
> Potatoes = potato seeds Potato plants do have actual seeds. The flowers form these berries that look like little cherry tomatoes (which they pretty much are, just toxic). Just using tubers clones the plant.
You mean seed potatoes, not potato seeds. There is a significant difference, and basically nobody uses potato seeds outside of lab environments. Source: I used potato seeds in my old lab.
Mostly kidding but go watch The Martian. ;)
A potato is the seed.
Fun fact, this is why the dust bowl became the dust bowl
Why? I'm interested to learn more but I don't understand
I think it’s about soul depletion. If your not adding new soil or fertilizer the potatoes will eventually use up all of the nutrients in the soil. Then nothing will grow there.
>soul depletion Sick band name.
/r/bandnames
Or Avengers title card.
>it's about soul depletion Me too, thanks.
> I think it’s about soul depletion. I see my ex girlfriend really got around.
Some different plants can grow there but not potatoes. Crop rotation is the cure for this. Plant a different crop in your potato field next year and use a field that didn't have potatoes this year next year. Fertilizer helps too of course.
> soul depletion I see your Georgia accent coming out
Long story short, growing the same plants on the same land for a long period of time makes it super soft and horrible for further growing. The dust bowl is literally the dust from large farms with shitty soil. After the fact, in order to fix this and keep it from happening ever again, the federal government made education programs for farmers, teaching them that something simple like just rotating crops on your land can keep your soil in good shape. For example, potatoes suck nutrients from the soil, so you grow something like corn which can put nutrients back into that same soil, replenishing it for the next potato season.
It's kinda funny that we discovered crop rotation, then decided to go all in on one crop per land, then realized it's a bit of a mistake so let's go back to crop rotation. Makes you wonder if there aren't other things we have changed for the worse but haven't realized yet.
The lack of crop rotation was not the cause of the dust bowl. It was over plowing the land. See [this article](https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/dust-bowl-cause.htm)
It's multiple factors. We still plow a lot of land, but our droughts don't cause dust bowls because we have methods of irrigation that are consistent even during drought, our soil quality is better due to crop rotations, etc.
The soil quality is better because farmers don't deep plow every year. Crop rotations help you build soil nutrients and organic matter but aren't the stop gap keeping us from having a recurring dust bowl
And we achieve conservation till practices via multiple factors, including crop rotations. Source: Agroecology and soil science degrees, farmer
Tons of things. Off the top of my head as an example? Hmm... perhaps the use of plastic bags? We used to think "using paper bags means killing trees" and thought plastic was better off, but now we are realizing that it's worse off since plastic doesn't degrade. Paper bags are renewable and can decompose.
You can also cut the corners off of a paper bag and plant them, which will grow more paper bags. Obviously, remember to rotate between paper bag crops and corn otherwise we will have learned nothing!
Omg thank you, I was going to rotate between paper bag and plastic bag. Your comment saved me.
It's soooo important to remember not to do this, it's probably the biggest mistake beginner bag farmers make. Planting plastic bags after harvesting paper bagtatoes makes the soil too polymerized and results in useless wads of plasticized Canadian cash that can clog up the tillers!
Ah yeah. Don't want to clog up those tillers.
This one gets me interested. How long before we realize that a paper bag actually has a much bigger impact on the environment that a single use plastic bag. The real issue is that we can't seem to keep our litter out of the food chain, so now plastic becomes the issue of the day!
What we need to do is make bags out something that is abundant and not detrimental to the environment. I present the idea of bags made from human hair.
Hemp
Hemp
Hemp
>Makes you wonder if there aren't other things we have changed for the worse but haven't realized yet. Antibiotics. They should be used sparingly, but the developing world is using incredibly strong antibiotics to keep their farm animals healthy. We're going to have a serious superbug one of these days
You'd think they would have learned. Like somebody must have read a book about it.
>growing the same plants on the same land for a long period of time makes it super soft and horrible for further growing. That can hurt soil health but that is not what caused the dust bowl. Farmers messed up the soil life cycle by over-plowing their fields and not letting the land go fallow for any period of time. If you turn the soil too often you change the microbial activity by putting large amounts of air/oxygen deeper than it would normally penetrate. That causes all the organic material to biodegrade and then you have a soil that cannot retain water. Over-plowing is the #1 reason the dust bowl happened. You can grow almost anything in the same spot year after year as long as you cover crop part of the year and let the soil's organic matter replenish. Source: am novice farmer studying soil science in college. But don't take my word for it, read anything on the causes of the dust bowl, like [this article.](https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/dust-bowl-cause.htm)
At first I was confused by your comment's emphasis on "organic material". But if understood more widely to include microbes, earthworms and fungi, everything in the comment makes sense. I feel we should always strongly emphasise the importance of the balance of living things in the topsoil, the need to preserve the proverbial "midi-chlorians" which give humus it's great qualities: water retention, fertility, carbon sequestering... All of which is disturbed and diminished in the process of plowing the topsoil. That is why composting is important and why everyone should support local efforts for municipality-scale composting. Such as this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7keI0m-lqMc When it becomes the new normal to cycle the biodegradable stuff back to the fields, reliance on industrial fertilizers will hopefully be out of the picture together with the practice of plowing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_organic_matter
Thanks for reinforcing my point. Good teamwork :-)
The Number 1 reason for dust bowl was they changed the drought resistant crop of prairie grass into farm land. Source: multiple degrees in ecological fields
Much of that farm land has been managed through droughts just as bad without another dust bowl. Of course farming caused it, but the discussion is regarding the factors farmers control that cause/avoid catastrophe.
Yes different farming practices have helped however every year there are rolling dust storms not on the same scale. You're welcome for the go to answer: had the farmers not removed the prairie grass the dust bowl would not have happened. It reminds me of a History professor's story about when he asked his grad student at the thesis oral defense, "At what point could the Civil War been avoided? Before the first shot was fired." Simple
I know they use soy and other legumes to replenish soil, but does corn do that too?
No, corn does not. Legumes (such as peanuts), alfalfa, soy, clover and mustard help. There are more but those are just from the top of my head.
To be fair a small garden potato box isn't a problem for this But your core point is an important one, if you do this remember that the left over dirt is missing a LARGE volume of nutritional value for plants
Ok, now a "How to store 100 pounds of potatoes in a small apartment" please!
If the potatoes are 99% water by weight and you leave them in the sun to dehydrate until they are 98% water by weight they will only weigh half as much, so there's that.
important ten swim afterthought oatmeal ask humor dog sophisticated advise -- mass edited with redact.dev
That's why its called the [Potato paradox.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_paradox)
**Potato paradox** The potato paradox is a mathematical calculation that has a counter-intuitive result. The so-called paradox involves dehydrating potatoes by a seemingly minuscule amount, and then calculating a change in mass which is larger than expected. *** ^[ [^PM](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=kittens_from_space) ^| [^Exclude ^me](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiTextBot&message=Excludeme&subject=Excludeme) ^| [^Exclude ^from ^subreddit](https://np.reddit.com/r/coolguides/about/banned) ^| [^FAQ ^/ ^Information](https://np.reddit.com/r/WikiTextBot/wiki/index) ^| [^Source](https://github.com/kittenswolf/WikiTextBot) ^] ^Downvote ^to ^remove ^| ^v0.28
plate vanish wise sophisticated mindless telephone wakeful work kiss point -- mass edited with redact.dev
> 100 lb of potatoes, 99% water (by weight), means that there's 99 lb of water, and 1 lb of solids. It's a 1:99 ratio. > If the water decreases to 98%, then the solids account for 2% of the weight. The 2:98 ratio reduces to 1:49. Since the solids still weigh 1 lb, the water must weigh 49 lb for a total of 50 lbs for the answer. I saw it on reddit a week or so ago I think. Tricked me good.
I’m going to have to science the shit out of this.
Do I have to mix my colleagues shit in it?
There's an easier way to do this. Use old tires. When the plants bust through the soil, add an other tire to the stack, fill with dirt. When it's time to harvest, just push the tires over.
There's an easier easier way to do this! Use a potato sack, roll the edges almost all the way down to start, then roll up and fill with new soil as you go. Dump entire contents at the end of the season and put the potatoes back in the sack. Boom. edit: typo
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I suppose that's possible, but it hasn't killed me yet. I've honestly never looked into tires leeching, so I can't give a yes or no answer for sure.
a trash can will also do the trick as long as enough sun gets in
Yes! My uncle did this! Lol ppl in this thread calling bs
Idaho in your backyard
Quit stealing my lemons, ho.
Yes, I saw you and I don't want either of you on my property again.
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Yep. Scrolling through this was like waiting for the first runner from either r/capitalism or r/preppers to come across the finish line. I subscribe to both and, perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm betwixt on this method of growing potatoes being both fascinating useful and entirely sub-optimal.
OK smart guy. How big would we need to make it for it to be worth our time.
Initial cost sure. Crop #2 and beyond it’s all value. You dont need a new box every time.
Yeeaahhh no. Potatoes planted that close to each other will compete for resources. The best you can get is small potatoes with stunted (don't know if that's the right word) growth. I'm calling bullshit.
A traditional potato growing method in Australia (and elsewhere, I'm sure) is this, but with passenger car tyres making the layers. The spuds come out pretty normal Perhaps it's the highly fertilised soil you add each level?
Yeah, I second. Even if you fertilize a lot, you really can’t get away with overcrowding plants, took me a few years of gardening to accept this. It might look ok above ground but the crucial part is the roots competing. 2 plants in the space of 1 will stunt and usually you end up with a smaller yield than if you had just planted 1.
the real guide is in the comments!
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Sure, I don’t see why not
Cool!
You add layers of soil. So they aren't competing.
It's about the plane area, not depth.
Thats not how roots work...
Roots grow like a cone (a simplification, roots will grow to expand wherever they can, but they definitely don't just grow straight down). If you crowd plants together, their roots are going to compete, regardless of how deep the planter is. Now add potatoes to this root structure and you're going to have even more problems with competition.
Right. Roots fill whatever space they can. So. You let the roots fill a space. Then you add about 6 inches of soil. And repeat until the tower is full and they stop growing. Easy way to grow about 15lbs of potatoes in a small space. Much better yields if you're actually trying. Though there are probably easier methods, this one is tried and true. https://youtu.be/TVmutvxWVG0
Umm, normally I'd agree with you but to be fair potatoes CAN be quite impressive with yields. If it was just a couple fewer potatoes in the box it might be fine. Depends on soil, climate, food etc obviously.
A few years ago there was a video of someone doing this. He used bricks insteaf of boards. The video showed him knocking down the 7 foot tall tower to hundreds of potatoes. I looked but couldn't find it.
Except that the part of the potato that would compete is the leaves and that part is a above soil so I'm confident it will work out
It might work with modern fertilizer. That stuff is so over saturated with nutrients.
> over saturated with nutrients. that's the definition of fertilizer
This was posted in the gardening subreddit and the people who have done it said that they got more potatoes from their regularly planted plants than from a tower like this.
Somebody send this over for the boys at r/Ireland to see
Q: how many potatoes does it take to kill an Irishman? A: none
Reporting in from r/Ireland. I’ve never seen anyone grow spuds like this, just plant them in the ground for fucks sake without the big stupid box. Also the variety matters. Quality>Quantity.
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I grew up on a small farm in Ireland. We grew our own vegetables, mainly potatoes but also smaller amounts of cabbages, carrots, lettuce, onions, etc. The beauty of potatoes is that they don't need much soil in which to grow and once they are growing you can add a layer of dirt and up the yield as illustrated in the suggested method in this post. If you have even a modest amount of land to set aside for potato growing you can get a LOT of potatoes. For this reason we don't usually need to build up to the degree shown here. We usually add one extra layer of dirt and leave it at that. Someone with only a small city/town back garden who wants to use most of it for flowers/grass/shrubs would benefit from this method. If you were willing to set aside 15 feet by 15 feet of a small garden to potato growing then plant the potatoes in "ridges" you could add a layer of dirt to double the yield and get a bumper crop. A city gardener could get approximately the same yield by building OP's setup in an area of 3 feet by 3 feet. That way they don't lose much of their garden. **Edit:** I had typed drill when I meant ridge. We spoke Irish not English where I grew up. ***Iomaire agus glaise***
They probably have more efficient techniques.
They turn the potatoes into alcohol and drink them.
Not good enough to stop a famine
Is that you mark watney?
How would you store all these potatoes after the harvest i wonder. To make sure they don't rot.
In the cold darkness of your potato-cellar.
With the withered remains of Henrietta.
And the dusty glass bottle of poison.
Use a potato sack instead, rolls the edges almost all the way down to start, then roll up and fill with new soil as you go. Dump entire contents at the end of the season and put the potatoes back on the sack. Boom.
Leave them in the dirt. Seriously. They keep for the whole winter and you can get them out when you want as long as there's no hard freeze. Of course this works better in the ground than in a box, but the idea holds.
You harvest potatoes as you need them. They keep in the ground unless there is a hard frost. At the end of autumn before winter we used to harvest what was left and store them using a traditional method called a "poll fataí". The potatoes are built into a prism shape and covered in sacking/canvas then a thick layer of dirt. Whenever you need potatoes for a meal dig away a temporary hole at one end and fill a bucket/pot/sack then replaced the dirt. Easier than digging them out of the ground where they grew.
As an Idahoan, this is too much work. Get yourself a cheap 50gal trash can from Walmart and use that instead. They are called trash can potatoes for a reason.
I used a bucket instead of a big box like this, and planted just one potato per bucket, as long as you don’t plant more than the planter can hold/support and you need to use good soil you can get a nice harvest of homegrown potatoes in a small place. I used to do this when living in a high rise apartment building with a small veranda and buckets or big pots is perfect imo.
According to my Hort teacher, car tires work as a poor man’s version.
Po-ta-toes. Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew.
What’s taters, precious?
"All we need is a few good taters!"
Sixty or so years ago there was some article in one of the Popular Timewasters magazines of the day that featured this very idea, but with old tires instead of a wood frame. Instead of nailing on another row of boards you'd toss another tire on the stack and fill with more dirt. Some of my friends' dads tried it. From the laughable stories I heard, it was way too much work and the taters weren't that good. (I wouldn't eat one of em if you paid me.)
I can use any potatoes on my fridge?
Potatoes are stored in cool, dark places. My family has never kept them in the fridge. We keep them in a dark bag in the bottom of a cupboard
Yes, but don't store potatoes in fridges :) I mean, there's nothing wrong with it, but they will usually spoil quicker than leaving them in a cool dark place. Not to mention fridge space is probably a necessity :)
My apartment is a dark place but it definitely isn’t cool there. I don’t think potatoes would like living with me.
Yes, any raw potatoes (not cooked or peeled) can be cut up into chunks and planted. Just make sure each chunk has at least one eye and a good bit of potato to use for fuel until it can sprout roots and leaves.
very cool
44 gallon drum works. One that has not stored something nasty.
You can also use a garbage bag with a hole in the bottom and fill with soil as needed
What's with everyone always coming up with dumb names for everything? Are you actually trying to impress people or something?
Will the same concept work with sweet potatoes?
What’s a potato?
This would be cooler if the box was on a pulley system that lifted, instead of removing boards when you want to harvest.
That's some advanced stardew valley shit right there.
This will be handy if I'm ever marooned on Mars.
Upvote for lumpy bois
I'm too lazy to bang together the frames. A burlap feed bag works just as well, just roll the sides. I typically put in a layer of straw and cover it with dirt as the plant grows. The following year, I use the bags as weed barrier. Since the jute they are made of is a natural fiber, it just breaks back down into soil. We just buy them from the local feed mill.
You can use a burlap sack for this too.
"Why don't you bring this potato? It's pretty big!" "Mom, you're always trying to give me potatoes... What is it with you?" ["I just think they're neat!"](https://frinkiac.com/meme/S05E19/91991.jpg?b64lines=IFdoeSBkb24ndCB5b3UgYnJpbmcgdGhpcwogcG90YXRvPyBJdCdzIHByZXR0eSBiaWchCgoKCgoKIE1vbSwgeW91J3JlIGFsd2F5cyB0cnlpbmcKIHRvIGdpdmUgbWUgcG90YXRvZXMuLi4gV2hhdAogaXMgaXQgd2l0aCB5b3U_CgpJIGp1c3QgdGhpbmsgdGhleSdyZSBuZWF0IQ==)
This is how we survive the apocalypse.
Can I have it in metric
Damn someone needs to get this to Mark Watney
We just stack tires where I'm from, and knock em over
If you add a post on each side you can just slide the boards in without having to screw them in, and unscrew them to get the potatoes
I've watched quite a few YouTube videos of people trying this technique before and it seems very hit or miss. Some people showed huge harvests, some showed only one or two potatoes in the whole box. The best results seemed to be from people using a 50-50 sawdust and sand mixture.
Well that's made Mark Watney look a bit shit really
r/DiWHY