Create your own Potato Towers

How to Plant and Grow Potato Towers for a Fun, Easy Harvest

Potatoes are a fun crop to grow, but they also take up a lot of space in the garden. If you are gardening in a small space or looking for creative ways to grow potatoes, growing in potato towers is an option you should consider. We’ve grown potatoes in two different types of towers shared below and there are many other designs for growing potatoes in towers.

Contents

What Are Potato Towers?

Potato towers are used to grow potatoes off the ground. The plants will grow out the side of the tower and since you are using a vertical garden you can grow more plants in a small footprint. Potato towers have the advantage of growing potatoes in a small space (instead of letting the plants sprawl) and as the potatoes grow up, there is more space for tubers to form.  You can build towers in many different ways (tires, reclaimed wood, fencing, etc).  We chose to re-purpose some items from around the yard.

The last 2 years, our potato crops have been a flop.  They would develop lovely green leaves, but when we dug them up, we would barely harvest what we planted.  I do believe that most of the blame rests with me and my lack of care and maybe a bit of poor soil, but those 2 poor crops were just the motivation I needed to try some potato towers (if you’re looking for a great article that discusses 7 different methods for growing potatoes go here).  

Start with Good Seed Potatoes

To start, find some good quality seed potatoes and cut them into sections so there is at least one eye on each piece.  Let these pieces sit out for a day before planting them. Each of these sections will grow into it’s own potato plant with it’s own set of potatoes to harvest.

Seed potatoes cut into sections

Build Your Potato Towers

You can find many different potato tower designs online. We planted potatoes using a chicken wire tower and a straw bale garden.

Chicken Wire Potato Tower

For our first tower, we used chicken wire for the outside frame. We then built up the inside materials and layered in the seed potatoes. We started by adding about 6 inches of compost-soil to the bottom of each tower and placed a layer on top of this soil. To keep the soil from falling through the holes in the chicken wire, we lined the edges of the tower with straw.

After placing the first layer of potatoes, we mixed soil and straw together and covered the potatoes with about a foot of straw and soil mixed together.  You can do this a few times and for multiple layers, or just keep the one layer in your potato tower. It’s important as the potatoes grow to keep them covered with soil and/or straw or you will get green, poisonous potatoes.  Because the tower is more exposed to the air, keep it well watered throughout the growing season.

Straw Bale Potato Tower

In addition to our chicken wire potato tower, we also created a special potato section of our straw bale garden.  This potato tower uses the same method as the other tower, only is in the center of 4 bales of straw. Since the sides of the space don’t get sunlight we didn’t layer the potatoes but just did a single layer. As the potatoes grew, we added more straw and dirt to cover them.  This method required lass watering but it still required consistent car.

Potato Tower Results

For 2 years, our potato crops grown in traditional potato meds had been a flop.  They would develop lovely green leaves, but when we dug them up, we would barely harvest what we planted.  Some of the outcome may result from a lack of care and maybe a bit of poor soil, but those 2 poor crops were just the motivation I needed to try some potato towers.

So what happened with these two different potato towers?

The potatoes inside the hay did the best.  If I were to make the towers again I would make them a bit bigger so they didn’t dry out quite so much.  The hay bales were easier to manage and since we used both the area inside for the potatoes and on top of the bales for planting it was a big win.

The chicken wire towers didn’t produce many potatoes and took a lot of water to keep them from drying out. I still think chicken towers are worth it if you have a small space. I would recommend using more soil and less straw to decrease evaporation and perhaps making the towers slightly bigger.

19 thoughts on “How to Plant and Grow Potato Towers for a Fun, Easy Harvest”

  1. Thank you so much for this post. We are growing potatoes for the first time this year & I still haven't settled on the method I want to use. (I really need to do something about that; it's high time I got them planted…) I'm looking forward to seeing what ideas are linked. (I'm loving the pallet tower. We have a neighbor who regularly puts pallets out for the trash; I think I may ask him if we can have some & try this way because it would be free!) xo

  2. This is our third year growing potatoes. The first year was on a whim when I found a ten pound bag of potatoes from the grocery store that had been forgotten and started to sprout. We put then in a prepared garden bed and as they grew we just added more dirt and leaves on top of them. We got about 30lbs of potatoes that year. Last year I bought seed potatoes and tried to plant them in straw on the ground and then just hill them up. It was an epic fail. This year we put the seed potatoes in a raised bed and they are growing great. My husband and son added some green plastic fencing around the bed so I can continue to add soil and leaves. It will be interesting to see how much gets harvested.

    I don't know if you know but potatoes like slightly acidic soil so if you have oak leaves or pine needles those would be great additions.

  3. I'm trying the "bag method". So far the plants seem to be happy. Of course the proof of the method will come at the end of the potato growing season. We also have some volunteer potatoes growing in our compost! It's a race to see which one does better!

  4. I have been thinking about growing potatoes. I have a whole bag of seed potatoes and after reading this post I feel encouraged to give it a try! Thanks for sharing the many methods for growing them.

  5. We're trying the potato tower method this year. We've got two towers planted, but only one has green foliage sprouted out of the side so far. How long should it take for the potato foliage to poke out the sides of the tower?

  6. Wow, the idea of planting the potatoes in the straw bale enclosure is genius! I am definitely going to try this method. Thanks for the wonderful idea!

  7. Great idea with the pine needles – we have lots of those in the woods, looks like I'm sending the kids out for some collecting tomorrow. We grew them in a raised bed last year, but didn't heap them up enough. Good Luck!

  8. I'm not sure – it's odd that one has growth and the other doesn't – did you do anything different? We planted a few weeks ago and still don't have anything, but it's been cold so I'm expecting something everyday.

  9. We were just talking about growing potatoes in a barrel with some friends who have done it they say it works great.
    Have my fingers crossed. Thanks for the additional ideas!

  10. Well, I've already planted our potatoes, but I'm fascinated with these two different methods. I can't wait to see what happens! Thanks for sharing.

  11. I planted two trash cans in potatoes this year. In one, I just put the whole seed potatoe in soil and the other, I put the cut/scab potatoes in. Both grew really well. I harvested one can shortly after the plant began to lay over. It had an OK yeild, but I did note many, many tiny potatoes in the mix. I'm wondering if anyone has constructed a tower with a trap door to make harvesting mature potatoes easier and allow time for the little ones to continue growing?

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