Raw Materials
Lured by the promise of harvesting 100 pounds of potatoes from four square feet, I decided to build myself a potato box, with the plans provided here, by LifeHacker. After gathering the lumber last weekend, I found an hour (it might take less time if you’re handier than I am) after work today to cut my lengths of cedar to size and screw them together. It’s very important to use untreated lumber when building for an edible garden, and cedar lasts longest. Tomorrow, I’ll give the box a coat of linseed oil to protect it from the elements and give it a nice sheen. All in all, it’s a quick project that ended up costing about $50 in supplies – cedar doesn’t come cheap, but this is a multiyear investment.
The box is a pretty ingenious but simple concept for potato growing. New potatoes grow in the soil above the seed potato. This box grows with the potato plants. I’ll start by uprooting some sod and digging in the long legs of the box. I’ll remove all of the side boards of the box, except the lowest course, giving me essentially a 6″ deep planter. Once the potato plants fill that space, I’ll add the second course of boards and fill it with more soil. It’s kind of like blanching leeks or celery, except instead of keeping the stems tender and white, the new soil will encourage the plants to send out more potato tubers in the new soil above. I’ll continue, adding a course every month or so, until the box is complete, and the potato leaves are coming out of the top.
The coolest thing about this box is that I don’t have to wait until the end of the season to dig up the whole potato plants and kill them to get at some potatoes. I can remove the lowest course, steal some potatoes out, and replace the course while the plant still thrives.
The finished potato box
I picked up some seed potatoes last weekend as well (a whole bunch of Yukon golds – my favorite, red skins and white baking potatoes for less than a dollar), but I still have to figure out the ideal number to plant in the box, and the right kind of soil to add. That’s on the docket for later this week, as my window for potato planting is getting short. Stay tuned!
Inside the potato box
Are you going to sink those legs into the ground a bit to stabilize the assembly a bit? I can only imagine, and you might be using much heftier screws than I’m guessing, that this will be quite wiggly and top-heavy after it has 350 pounds of soil in it.
Absolutely – the legs will be buried until the bottom board is flush with the ground. It’s actually a pretty sturdy planter. I just need to prepare a spot for it in the yard, and I ran out of daylight yesterday.
That makes me want to try one this year, but I missed my potato window by two weeks already.
You may have missed the window for new potatoes (the small early summer ones) but you can plant some of the starchier varieties into early July for a fall harvest. Yukon Gold or Caribe are great for that!
[...] Easter Sunday, I found a little bit of time to clear out some grass, dig a few holes and get my potato box to work. First, I sealed the potato box inside and out with linseed oil. Linseed oil is non toxic [...]
[...] easy to grow – hell – they fed Peru, Ireland and Poland for centuries. But somehow, my finely crafted potato box didn’t do the trick. The potato foliage was robust, but I got 2 3/4 pounds total. Delicious, [...]