We Have Potatoes!

For two summers now I've been bound and determined to make growing potatoes in tires work. The anticipation was large the first time we started this garden project. As was the disappointment when it utterly failed.

There were a few factors I guessed contributed to the failure. I have this tiny itty bitty stubborn streak, and I really wanted to make this work. So
this spring we made some adjustments and planted again. We also planted some the traditional way.

Shortly thereafter, a commenter mentioned that the variety of potatoes I'd planted may be the problem. Quite honestly, that had never occurred to me. I checked out the article on growing potatoes in bins that the commenter referred me to. Unfortunately the url to that article is no longer working, but the key for me was that to grow potatoes in stacks (like using tires) you had to use a late season potato. I had been using Yukon Golds, an early variety.

After I was struck over the head with that piece of information, I decided to not stack the tires, but just let the potatoes all grow as they were. I was already onto other things I didn't feel like starting the tires over with another variety. I pretty much ignored all the potatoes the rest of the summer.

Apparently the ones in the ground could have used a little attention. I didn't get them mounded up very well, and my mom harvested them when she noticed some green ones growing out of the dirt. Wasn't she the lucky one to dig the potatoes out of our clay soil?

Awhile later, I had the easy job of dumping the tires and sifted through the nice light soil for potatoes. I should have weighed the harvest, but at a rough estimate, I'd say the two methods produced about an equal amount of potatoes. We did plant quite a few more potatoes in the dirt than in the tires, but most did not grow. I'm blaming our super wet spring and summer for that.

The potatoes in the tires were a lot nicer than the ones in the ground. They were shaped better. For the most part, they were bigger, and of course none of them were green. They also were a lot easier to clean, not to mention dig, because they weren't in the heavy clay soil.

So no, I can't call this year's potatoes in tires experiment a success. I must chalk it up as yet another garden learning experience. Now I do know that the potatoes will grow in the tires. I do know that the potatoes that grow in the tires are nice. I know that caring and harvesting them is very easy. And most importantly I know that I need a different variety to make stacking the tires work to produce a lot of potatoes in a small space. Next year I am expecting success.