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Post by gilbert on Dec 30, 2015 0:09:30 GMT -5
Hello All, Over on permies I'm tossing around ideas for an experiment in urban food sustainability for my locality. I'm trying to generate ideas for a first round of experiments come spring. If you want to know more about the project in general, I will post a link at the bottom of this post. Anyway, one of the ideas was for a potato tower. To meet my goals, I would have to consistently get five pounds of potatoes per square foot of tower base. Joseph Lofthouse pointed out to me that I had better remove the dependency on commercial potato seed from my system. Also, he thinks that the best way to meet the goal is to breed varieties for it, and by starting with true potato seed, I will be killing two birds with one stone. So here I am for advice, ideas, etc. I basically have no idea how to start the project. The end result would be a potato that produced copious true seed, grew in such a way as to fill a tower with spuds, tolerated Colorado's heat while still making tubers in a tower which will be hotter then the ground, coped with the more irregular water supply in a tower, didn't mind the less the ideal chemistry in a tower full of wood chips, and ideally is blue or purple fleshed to maximize nutrients. Where should I start? Here is the Permies thread if you are interested in the context. www.permies.com/t/52193/urban/Building-idea-urban-sufficiency-food
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Post by billw on Dec 30, 2015 1:54:03 GMT -5
It won't be easy. Potato towers disregard how potatoes form stolons. I think there are two approaches that one could take:
* Find potatoes with long stolons that fork and then engineer some way to force them to grow out the sides of the tower. It happens sometimes and could be a way to increase yield, although very often the secondary branch doesn't form anything. If you can get a variety to produce stolons that branch several times before the end of the stolon exits the side of the tower to grow foliage, it is almost like growing multiple plants. * Find varieties that reliably form aerial tubers. Their tuber yields usually are poor, but they have the advantage that they form tubers up the stem. You might be able to breed that trait into a real tower potato.
Keep in mind that heavy yielding, late season potatoes already are putting substantially all of the energy that they take in into forming tubers. So, you also need to increase the size of the plants or grow them longer or increase the amount of light that they take in. This is perhaps the biggest problem with the potato tower concept.
Some problems are better solved with culture than breeding. I think you could easily get more than 5lb per square foot of tower base by using a one of the wire mesh tower designs and just planting a bunch of potatoes in it. Make it four feet tall, and in each cubic foot from bottom to top plant a late, a mid season, and then two earlies. You could potentially do a 2' x 4' tower with six plants at each level (none on the shade side). No breeding required. Finding the unicorn potato that will fill the tower from a single plant is going to be a serious challenge.
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Post by keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) on Dec 30, 2015 2:15:21 GMT -5
Hello gilbert , always nice to see another Coloradan. I've skimmed the permies thread briefly and it looks like you have some interesting ideas floating around. First I've never heard of a "potato tower" before, so i didn't know what that is, but based on the description i imagine it to be some sort of vertical growing system similar to those stackable strawberry baskets, but instead of strawberries it's potatoes. An interesting idea. I've got a few ideas/suggestions, take them or leave them as you see fit. First, while i haven't done much experimentation with potatoes i would highly suggest finding varieties that do well for you in your conditions, in your soil, with your organisms, and with colorado friendly genetics. I haven't had much success with potatoes yet (they always seem to die miserably), but at the same time i haven't put much effort into it (yet) either. This next season i'm hoping to experiment with sweet potatoes. Here is some Colorado specific information regarding potato breeding efforts next door at CSU: webdoc.agsci.colostate.edu/aes/AES/News/FFT_potato.pdfpotatoes.colostate.edu/wp-content/uploads/pdf/Potato_Breeding_Photo_Essay.pdfpotatoes.colostate.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Holm-Research-Progress-Report-for-2014-20150519B1.pdfIn addition to potato variety i would also suggest looking into diversity into other crops as well. It looks like you've already become acquainted with Joseph Lofthouse. I really like his methods and breeding objectives. I don't think you could go wrong by listening to what he has to say. If working with root crops specifically, then branching out to sweet potatoes and other root crops may help as well. Have you considered something like Lathyrus tuberosus? A perennial sweet pea variety that produces edible tubers. I haven't tried it myself, but it is one i would like to someday as i suspect it would be easy to grow here. Other types of perennial sweet peas really do grow as weeds here in the forested and/or country areas. I like your idea of trying to use fish in a sustainable fertilizing symbiotic relationship. If you make progress on that front i'd love to hear about it. I've seen videos of sustainable japanese water gardens and/or hydroponic systems where the plants help the fish, and the fish fertilize the plants etc. The use of algae to feed daphnia and the daphnia to feed the fish is an interesting idea. At the local mini maker faire this fall there was a small boy who had a mini hydroponic system with little plants and little fish. It was a neat little science project. His mother was very proud of him. Instead of fish (or maybe in addition to) have you thought about algae eating shrimp? I've wondered if they would be big enough to harvest and eat. www.carolina.com/freshwater-animals/algae-eating-shrimp-pack-of-5/145285.prAnd in closing you mentioned briefly about copper tubing and electrical currents to help plant growth. There is a patent i blogged about on my blog awhile back that has a similar and interesting application like what you mentioned. I actually was thinking of building a small one to tinker with this next summer too. keen101.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/do-plants-really-need-sunlight/p.s. one last idea i had would maybe to combine the potato tower inside a greenhouse or cold frame to increase yield during the winter.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Dec 30, 2015 9:42:41 GMT -5
gilbert, a good resource you should consult for your potato tower breeding project is Curzio Caravati and his Kenosha Potato Project, especially his very impressive database of varieties in the Kenosha Potato Catalog. Curzio has extensively tested a huge number of varieties for a variety of traits including their suitability for use in grow bags, which would likely be highly relevant for your tower breeding attempt. You might also consider reading Rebsie's book, The Lost Art of Potato Breeding. Also useful reading is Raoul Robinson's Potato Breeder's Manual.I skimmed through your permies thread, did not read it in its entirety. It is clear you've done a lot of research, but you are in some ways focussing on the wrong things. I noted your dismissal of tilapia due to their omega 3 profile? I think this is wrongheaded. The benefits of an efficient aquaculture system are multifold, and omega 3 content of your fish should be so far down the priority list it is difficult to even consider it as a variable. In a food production system designed to produce enough food for a person or a household, their should be a tiered priority list of requirements. #1 should be Calories. Not far behind should be adequate amounts of Protein. The polyunsaturated fatty acid profile of the food is irrelevant basically.
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Post by gilbert on Dec 30, 2015 12:12:50 GMT -5
Hello All,
Billw, no, I'm sure it will not be easy. That is an interesting idea about forking stolons, I will have to look into it. Even more interesting about the aerial tubers. So with the stacking idea, would you think I should plant the late varieties, hill them for a while and then stick them through the cage, plant the mid season, hill a bit, etc? Or plant them all at once?
Keen, yes, always great to find another Colorado grower! Nothing like Colorado crazy weather! Those sound like excellent resources, I will look them all up. I tried sweet potatoes in the ground with some black fabric, using the short season varieties from Sand Hill Preservation Center. If you have not seen that catalog before look them up, they are great. And I did get a few sweet potatoes. The year after, I planted standard varieties in a tower made of black plastic and fence wire. I got ten pounds from the tower, despite hail and a horrible growing season, so that shows some promise. I've got a permies thread on that somewhere.
I'm ordering Jerusalem artichoke, Apios groundnut, and Chinese artichoke for next year. Most of the standard root crops like carrots or turnips are surprisingly low in calories.
I'm still researching the fish ideas. That is interesting about shrimp, I wonder if if crayfish would be easier to work with. Another thing to look up. Somebody on permies said that raising meat rabbits instead of fish would be a much better idea, and then using the manure to run a worm bin to feed the plants. They said it would be less energy intensive and produce more protein per pound on cheaper feed.
If you try any of the electrical stuff, let me know how it goes, I'm very interested in that sort of thing.
Potato towers come in many different shapes and sizes; wooden stacking things, fence wire rounds, plastic barrels, etc. Lots of different ideas. Most people report dismal failure. A lucky few report yields of up to 160 pounds in 30 square feet. Hard to figure out what exactly they did right; probably some combination of weather, soil, varieties, management, watering and tower design.
Oxbow, more great looking resources, especially Kenosha. I will have to look into that.
You may be right about the tilapia, etc. The reason I was worried is that theoretically if tilapia were the main source of protein in the diet you would quickly have a bunch of very sick people. But they might be worth including anyway.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Dec 30, 2015 13:04:22 GMT -5
Potato towers come in many different shapes and sizes; wooden stacking things, fence wire rounds, plastic barrels, etc. Lots of different ideas. Most people report dismal failure. A lucky few report yields of up to 160 pounds in 30 square feet. Hard to figure out what exactly they did right; probably some combination of weather, soil, varieties, management, watering and tower design I view the very poor yields of potato towers to be typical of the tower grow system. Poor yield is what I'd expect when a plant is grown so far out of it's normal ecological niche. 160 pounds of potatoes in 30 square feet is 10 times the typical yield for potatoes. If anyone/anywhere was getting that kind of yield from potatoes, then it would be such a fabulous return on investment that I'd expect it to be a widely practiced technique. It isn't widely practiced... While there is value in trying new ideas, the idea of potato towers has been around since before I was born, and we're still waiting for a teacher to appear that can teach others how to reliably get fantastic yields from potato towers. There is only so much sunlight that arrives in a garden during a growing season. That much sunlight can produce about 1/2 pound of potato tubers per square foot. When my ideas, of what I'd like, clash with the laws of physics, so far the laws of physics have always won.
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Post by billw on Dec 30, 2015 15:04:17 GMT -5
Hehe. I view the poor yields of towers to be typical of the disappointment one feels when confronting expectations that were set by people who were lying. Towers don't necessarily have bad yields; they just don't have better than normal yields. I had some good results with earlies on top of lates, but I also live in a very potato friendly climate.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Dec 30, 2015 18:46:15 GMT -5
Oxbow, more great looking resources, especially Kenosha. I will have to look into that. You may be right about the tilapia, etc. The reason I was worried is that theoretically if tilapia were the main source of protein in the diet you would quickly have a bunch of very sick people. But they might be worth including anyway. Can you direct me to an article detailing the dangers of tilapia protein? I couldn't find anything via Google. There was some stuff about omega 3 vs omega 6 ratios but it was all very clearly typical media hysteria over very limited understanding of a study taken out of context. People have been eating tilapia in large amounts since the Stone Age. I am very skeptical that they are dangerous to eat, and should be quite safe in combination with other sources of protein, like potatoes.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Dec 31, 2015 11:50:33 GMT -5
Hehe. I view the poor yields of towers to be typical of the disappointment one feels when confronting expectations that were set by people who were lying. Thanks, That's what I had meant to say!!
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Post by gilbert on Dec 31, 2015 15:09:15 GMT -5
Hi Everyone,
About the potato project; looks like I'm in for a tough project, whether I do breeding or not. I totally realize that the goal may be impossible; I set it sky high on purpose.
I looked up Kenosha and Robinson. Both very interesting, but wow, I'm certainly not going to be growing 10,000 potato seedlings in the first generation!
As per bill W's suggestions, I will be using the layered potato method in my main towers this year. Also per his suggestions, I will be including sweet potatoes and some apios cultivars from Oikios farms in the experiments. The layered towers will allow me to do some experiments with management techniques, soil type, etc.
Now, here is what I'm thinking of as far as the experimental breeding design. I acquire tubers or true seed of as many interesting potato varieties as I can afford to start the project; I also acquire a few apios selections from okios tree crops and some of the northern adapted sweet potatoes from Sand Hill.
To help me differentiate yields, especially on seedlings that could produce unexpected colors, making it difficult to tell tubers apart, I'm thinking that I will want one plant per tower. Smaller towers are a more hostile environment then bigger ones, but breeding in a harsher environment might actually be a good thing. I'm thinking of setting up the towers like this: I would use the food grade five gallon buckets that the delis discard. The bottom bucket would be left intact, filled with gravel, and used as a water reservoir, with a fill and overflow pipe installed in the side. Then a piece of landscape fabric would be placed on the gravel, and another bucket with the bottom cut out placed on top. This bucket would be filled with the very best potting mix I can get, and potatoes or seedlings inserted into the top of it. Then, every time the plants reached 6 inches, I would place another section of bucket, this time cut down to maybe half height, and fill it up with mulch, probably rotted wood chips. To keep the towers from collapsing, I would sew each bucket to the one below with wire through a bunch of drilled holes, and I would have driven a five foot t-post behind each tower to wire them to as well. If the stems branch, I would guide a few of them through the gap in between the buckets at each level. (Due to the sloping sides of the buckets, there will be a rim of soil or mulch exposed at each level. ) Once the plants started to flower, or the tower reached 5 feet tall, I would stop adding buckets and wait till the plants died down.
Sweet potatoes in their tower would have two differences; slips would be placed in each tier of the tower, which would be completely built from the start, and the containers would be black.
Does anyone know, would Apios work like sweet potatoes, or like potatoes? (Are they roots, or stems?)
Do you think it would help the potato stems to branch if I snipped the growing point at each level?
Come fall, here is how I would sort the harvest; a clone would be successful if it produced more then the Burbank Russet potato in a similar tower. A seed would be successful regardless of yield if there were potatoes at each level. In the next round, seeds from all successful plants would be grown, and clones of each successful seedling from year one would be planted to evaluate total yield. (Thus avoiding disadvantaging the seedlings due to less stored food then the clones have.) I might do some fertile x fertile crosses of the potato flowers, if I don't see many pollinators around them.
Anything you would do differently as far as the setup?
A final point; I know a lot of you are wondering why on earth I don't just grow potatoes in the ground. The point of the project is to allow inner city folks with paved or contaminated land to grow food. So if the best I can do is half of what can be grown in the soil, that is still a success. And I think that whatever the current feasible yield is in towers, I could increase it at least somewhat with the perfect cultivar and the perfect design.
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andyb
gardener
Posts: 179
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Post by andyb on Dec 31, 2015 16:55:29 GMT -5
Gilbert, fun project and fun thread. First off, a couple of references. There's a forum that's relatively inactive right now but that has some great information: tatermater.proboards.com. Also, if you want to get into the weeds on potato breeding, an excellent technical reference is: "Potato Genetics", by John E Bradshaw and George R Mackay. You can probably get it through interlibrary loan. I encourage you to try making fertile x fertile crosses, though it takes some practice. Increasing the heterozygosity in the TPS you grow would be good. I'd suggest first using tuber-grown plants of varieties that are known to set berries well. I spent one summer making hundreds of crosses with Rose Finn Apple and only got two berries. It was pretty frustrating. My experience is also that first-year plants grown from TPS don't set seed nearly as well as second year plants. Others might have different experiences. The nice thing is that if you get any berries at all, you should have more seeds than you could possibly grow out. It's probably too late for this coming summer, but one trick is to plant TPS in small pots late in the season. The plants will be stunted, but most should produce one or more very small tubers. You can screen them for color, keep them in your refrigerator over winter, and plant several easily-distinguished potatoes in each tower the next season.
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Post by gilbert on Dec 31, 2015 19:08:45 GMT -5
Hello Andy,
Thanks for the advice! Since I have some florescent light fixtures, I might just do what you suggest and grow out some mini tubers. Or do you think I would have enough time? I would have to get the tubers grown, chilled, and planted by Late April.
Per your comment about first year plants not yielding well; my research (limited) shows that it is generally true. However, there is one variety, Diamond Toro, bred by Tom Wagner, that can produce 11 pounds of potatoes per plant in the first year. I need to get a hold of TPS or tubers for it, because it is also blue/ purple, and produces seeds.
Not to raise the bar any higher on this crazy project (most people I have talked to have said that it is already WAY too high) but I would like the seedlings to produce the 5 lbs per foot in the first year. That way folks who might not have the facilities to store tubers even for one year can still feed themselves with my potato towers; they could dry the potatoes.
Just another crazy thought.
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Post by gilbert on Dec 31, 2015 23:35:56 GMT -5
I'm working through the Kenosha potato project database, and doing some independent online research, looking for interesting varieties. I already mentioned Diamond Toro. For me, interesting will mean: heavy production in containers, heavy seed production, branching stolons, purple, blue, or red flesh, aerial tuber production, fast growing/ large vines, and pest resistance.
I will post a list here when I get it done.
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andyb
gardener
Posts: 179
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Post by andyb on Jan 1, 2016 0:18:05 GMT -5
I'm not sure if you'd have time to grow minitubers, break dormancy, and plant by late April. Probably not, but if you have the seeds and the time it might be worth a try.
My comment on yield was actually about TPS yield. I've had almost no success with hand pollinations where the pollen recipient was a first-year plant. In contrast, the second-year plants I grew this year produced prolific numbers of berries and were quite easy to hand pollinate. Just my limited experience, though. There's a good chance it's a selectable trait, and I think it might be one that Joseph is selecting for.
I grew out some Diamond Toro seeds from Tom Wagner's store this year. Of the five sib groups I grew, they were my favorite, but none of the plants were wildly productive in their first year and some just produced one or two small tubers. I think that's perfectly normal with TPS; there's just a lot of variability.
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Post by nathanp on Jan 1, 2016 1:31:30 GMT -5
That's going to be pretty impossible. I've been experimenting with a few varieties a year in towers, changing the varieties each year and the most I've ever had in a single, tall (35") tower is about 2 lbs. I'm not saying it can't be done, but the genetics to make it work in a tall tower are just not there without extensive breeding efforts. I have had exactly one potato variety produce anything close to a decent harvest in a tall tower. The others all waste too much energy just growing through layer after layer of soil, that they don't produce much yield. I will post more here tomorrow about this, but will give you a few links to look at in the mean time. The one potato I can recommend is Papa Chonca, and it does have long stolons. It is a VERY long season potato, does produce aerial tubers off the stem. However, I have ever only had it flower one year (and that was in the ground, not in a tower). And no berries formed despite attempts to make crosses. So that one may be a dead end, though it appears to have some of the genetics you would want for something like this. With that said, the Kenosha Potato project (I am a member of the FB group) and Curzio's research is mainly geared towards varieties that do well in grow bags, which max out at 18" high. Anything higher decreases yield. He has the research to back that up, and to breed for a potato that does otherwise, is to fight against the several thousands of years of how potatoes have been bred. Even his grow bags rarely match yields for the same potato varieties grown in the ground. Growing potatoes with long stolons2014 Potato Bins
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