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Post by reed on Jan 8, 2016 10:57:01 GMT -5
I was thinking too. I'v been struggling to find room for sweet potatoes any way and this might be an option. Also a relatively tall tower with the vines hanging down might have the same effect as the vines trellised up, as I saw suggested somewhere to help expose the flowers to pollinators.
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Post by paquebot on Jan 8, 2016 16:52:20 GMT -5
Coming in late here but experienced in growing potatoes since I was 4 and that was more than a few years ago.
A lot of information given here is useless in that it is good but will lead to failure, as many discovered. There is too much emphasis on what's used above the seed pieces. Straw works just as well as anything else IF it remains damp during the period of stolon development. If it dries out, so do the ends of the stolons and there will be no tubers. The most important factor is what's below the seed pieces. That's where the roots are and they are the ones which find the nutrients. No matter how the potatoes are grown, if there are only enough nutrients available to produce X amount of tubers, there will never be 2X.
I, too, found that growing potatoes in a compost pile produce massive vines but few tubers. At first glance, that would seem opposite of what it should be but I believe that the culprit is too much nitrogen. Always nice clean tubers but too few of them.
My best results came from a round wire cage where most of the material was coarse or woody stuff from the compost plus rotting tree bark and miscellaneous chunks of old wood. The wood retained the moisture throughout the growing season. Nutrients came from about whatever had leached down from the compost pile that had been in that spot for years plus the decaying coarse material. The wire ring was only about 2½ feet tall, about 3 feet across, and the seed pieces set about halfway down and about 6 inches apart. That was the extent of the care for the entire summer without ever watering it. They were strictly on their own.
Vines were crowded but not overly impressive and no more than if planted in the garden. Expectations were low since the whole thing was a means to find a place for the coarse compost and use up some leftover seed pieces. Eventually time came to see if there was anything decent inasmuch as even a couple tubers would have been a bonus. It was quite a surprise when I had to get a 5-gallon pail and almost fill it. I think that the variety was Superior and I never had a chance to duplicate it. And since this was before the Internet, knew nothing about potato towers.
Anyway, my point is that in order to get those advertised massive amounts from such a small place requires sufficient nutrients. I had that massive amount in the soil right under my tower and it was somehow in the proper proportion. And guess what? I've now set it up again for the first time in 20+ years with a lot of coarse woody stuff and shredded oak leaves. Just have to see what can be produced by actually trying! Probably use one of the yellow ones, either Carola or Yukon Gold, for the slower mid-season growth.
Martin
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Post by gilbert on Jan 8, 2016 19:36:26 GMT -5
Hello All,
I'm definitely going to be growing sweet potatoes in towers. I think it is the only way to grow them productively in our high plains climate without wasting expensive greenhouse or hoophouse space. One of the drawbacks to sweet potatoes in a tower is that they don't root up the stem if hilled at all. So I am going to insert slips at multiple levels up the tower as I build it. My sweet potato tower last year was a contraption of black plastic and wire mesh on my concrete patio. I filled it with rotten wood chips; interesting that Paquebot mentioned that medium as well. Only the potato at the top of the tower survived a hail storm, and the variety was some Beauregard. The handfull of plants that survived produced ten pounds of nice big sweet potatoes despite a cold wet spring, low quality slips, and a hot, dry summer without enough water. I will be optimizing the design next year.
A benefit of towering for sweet potatoes is that there will be no problem with them rooting at every node and producing lots of tiny tubers; they will be hanging down the plastic sides.
I also intend to build a brick sweet potato tower, which should be very ornamental.
As to why I want to work more with Irish potatoes instead of Sweet potatoes; Irish potatoes produce more when hilled, at least somewhat (i.e. less Irish potato plants are needed to fill a tower); even in a tower, our climate is marginal for sweet potatoes; sweet potatoes are even more reluctant to produce seeds then Irish potatoes; a heated greenhouse/frame or sunny window is needed to produce slips from the sweet potatoes in time for planting, which means that it does not scale well; Irish potato tubers are easier to store over winter in good condition then sweet potatoes; and a late frost, which is the most irritating thing about our climate, will damage but not wipe out Irish potatoes.
Also, I'm partially Irish!
Good information about paquebot's tower, thanks for posting! I have hill like piles of rotten wood chips from a tree clearing operation, and getting more is easy. As far as the nutrients, I'm going to use a potting mix amended with Steve Solomon's COF in the bottom two feet of the tower, (with less lime) then rotten wood chips above that. I may use straw right around the edge to retain things in the wire, but I think the wood chips will hold water a lot better, and they are free. For water, I am either going to have a bucket reservoir in the tower, or a clay pot olla. And at least the back (North) side I will wrap in plastic.
Too many Irons, good points. The warmth will be a plus for me in the spring, but by July it will be a big problem. Then again, I do get cool nights all summer, which may help out somewhat. I might use white plastic to line a tower, which is the reverse of the Kenosha experiments. As far as the very high goals, yes, I will consider anything over standard soil production as a success.
Also I plan to use towers with a greater height to width ratio then the usual, which should keep temp swings down and keep a larger moist zone in the center.
I also may use apios americana in a tower, just to see what it does.
I have recently been seeing the idea tossed around online that container grown potatoes, without any type of hilling beyond what is provided by the pot, can produce large yields per square foot.
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Post by paquebot on Jan 9, 2016 1:25:41 GMT -5
All I will say about trying to grow sweet potatoes in a layered potato tower is don't do it. Sweet potatoes do not take highly to being hilled.
I do plan to grow sweet potatoes in a wire ring similar to the one previously mentioned. May not have enough old wood on hand to counter all of the nitrogen in the compost. I can get Christmas tree mulch but fresh wood chips or sawdust not good for sweet potatoes. Probably just mix 50/50 soil and compost for the medium. Had one Beauregard which produced just two tubers but one was exactly 4# and the other 5#. (Photographic proof was on Facebook.) Can't expect much better!
Martin
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Post by gilbert on Jan 9, 2016 16:13:40 GMT -5
I'm not planning to hill the sweet potatoes; the slips will be inserted through the walls of the tower at multiple levels, giving them a better shot at filling the whole thing with potatoes.
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Post by gilbert on Jan 22, 2016 23:07:37 GMT -5
So it looks like I will buy a mix of potato TPS from MARIANNA'S HEIRLOOM SEEDS. I'm still trying to figure out how to grow out hundreds of potato seedlings in such a way that I can correlate the TPS produced with the plants that have desirable underground responses to hilling.
In other words, let's say I have a tower with 5 different plants, and once the potatoes have died down, I dig the tower out and find a few spuds at upper levels. How do I know which plant produced them, so as to save the right seed? Of course, if I spaced them widely, there would be no problem. Or if I save the tubers, and grew them out again, there would be no problem. But I don't have much space, and I would rather not save tubers at this point, since one of my goals is to develop a population of seed to seed potatoes.
Any ideas?
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Post by nathanp on Jan 23, 2016 0:58:11 GMT -5
I have found it is best to only grow one type of potato in each tower. Otherwise the differences between emergence rates, growth rates, and other factors tend to favor early emergers at the expense of slower emergers or ones growing more slowly.
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Post by philagardener on Jan 23, 2016 7:37:49 GMT -5
I like the idea of screening large numbers of "TPS to tubers" in one season to select for that trait, and then use the best tubers to generate your next generation of TPS the following year.
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Post by gilbert on Jan 23, 2016 14:15:03 GMT -5
Hello Nathan,
Yes, I suppose that will be a problem.
Philagardner, I guess that might be the only way to go, at least a first.
I guess if I started a row with deep mulching or hilling the garden, then selected out all the potatoes near the surface, I would be selecting for plants that set tubers higher up when mulched. I wouldn't even need to build towers at that point. Once I had a population that set tubers all along the stem, I could then select them for suitability in tower conditions.
That would be easier then trying to build a mini tower for each potato seedling.
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Post by gilbert on Feb 4, 2016 23:11:27 GMT -5
Hello Tom,
I'm thinking that your setup looks excellent for my sweet potato experiments, and, with the substitution of white buckets, I would try it for Irish potatoes too.
Another question for you all; I'm thinking that warping a potato tower partially in white plastic would improve results. However, I'm trying to figure out how to combine that with potato stems sticking out at all levels.
What if I grew lots of potato seedlings (from TPS or seed pieces) and shaded them to grow long and skinny? Then inserted them through holes in the plastic as I built the tower. That way a leaf or two could be sticking out, with at the same time the main roots in the moist core of the tower.
(That is how I did sweet potatoes last year, with slips.)
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Post by nathanp on Feb 5, 2016 6:42:51 GMT -5
I'm not sure I understand how that improved results? Can you explain that? One other thing to point out. There is a finite limit to the amount of sunlight hitting the leaves, and that affects the plants being fed. When this is looked at, on end, you have 3 plants growing in a 2'8" wide space. I think you may find this is a limiting factor. See the items below for thought. There was someone in England (Simon Smart - U of Cambridge student) connected to the kenosha potato project doing research on plant spacing and yleld. Image - sunlight limiting factorAn analysi s o f growt h o f th e potato cropimage - potatoes with wide spacing
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Post by gilbert on Feb 5, 2016 13:53:10 GMT -5
Hello Nathan,
What I was assuming is that the water retention and sun reflecting effect of the (opaque white) plastic would keep things cooler and moister, and that the classic wire straw lined towers would be simply impossible to keep wet, particularly in this climate. Also for leaves growing in front of the plastic, they might get some reflected light.
Are you saying that 3 plants in a 2'8" wide space is too many for the space?
I'm wondering if modifying Tom's idea into a sort of potato pyramid would help; one big massive container instead of lots of little ones exposed to temp. fluctuations, but with the same advantage of stacking slope.
I looked up those links; interesting. I imagine that at a certain point, closer spacing would start to become counter productive, as yield per plant started to fall, dragging down productivity per square foot. I will spend some more time reading the more in depth article.
Steve Solomon has an interesting book about gardening without irrigation, simply be spacing plants very widely and keeping weeds down. Each plant gets so much more water. Yield per plant goes way up. Yield per foot goes down.
My limiting factor is space, not water or nutrients, so the closer I can pack things the better, within reason.
Looked at another way, the main thing I'm trying to do is figure out the absolute maximum amount of calories that can be grown per square foot. So, as many people on here have pointed out, I can't get to hung up on a particular idea, in this case potato towers.
The advantage of the potato for this project is that it is popular; everyone knows how to cook and eat it; it stores well; it is fairly easy to grow; cool summers won't ruin it; relatively hail resistant; etc.
But I am starting to think of a range of other experiments to work on. As already mentioned, I will be trying a range of other tubers in towers; sweet potatoes and cold hardy true yams look promising. Yams can also be trellised to gain more sun without taking up more foot print.
I'm starting to wonder about some sort of squash tower, using trellising to "stand up" a big sprawling squash or zucchini plant, and which would yield more calories, a summer squash for drying or a winter squash.
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Post by gilbert on Feb 5, 2016 14:04:58 GMT -5
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Post by gilbert on Feb 5, 2016 15:25:16 GMT -5
I looked up the field record for pounds of potatoes per foot. A farmer in India has harvested 108.8 tonnes of potato per hectare.
If I did the calculations correctly, this comes to 239,862 pounds per 107639 square feet, or 2.22 pounds per square foot.
Since I would assume that India would have plenty of sun, and a long growing season, this is probably near the theoretic maximum potatoes can capture from the sun per square foot, or at least it is the state of the art.
(As an aside, the farmer was using organic methods.)
So, let's just pretend everything is equal ( it won't be) and calculate how much a potato tower could theoretically produce. Let's take the much hyped square tower with a four square foot base ("grow a hundred pounds in four square feet!")
We have four square feet of top, and three sides that count; east, south, and west. The tower is about 4 feet tall, so each side is 8 square feet. The East and West sides get a little less sun; not as little as half as the South, but less the three quarters. However, we will pretend they get as much as the South, since in the summer the sun rises in the North East and sets in the North West at these Latitudes. (40 degrees North) And to make things fair, we will ignore the North side, which does get some sun. (Also, the sides will get more intense sun because of the angle, especially in the mornings, so the East and West sides probably do get as much sun as the South.)
So the surface area of the top and three sides is 28 square feet, which at the absolute maximum should produce 56 lb, NOT 100 lb, all being equal.
(If the calculations above don't work out, please let me know. Geometry is not my strong point.)
Of course, all will not be equal. Most likely things will be skewed in favor of in ground potatoes be a big factor; potatoes like even water supply and a cool, stead soil temperature.
Then again, we are using a farm field as comparison. A farmer simply can't afford to treat his soil, watering regime, etc. quite like a gardener can. However, this does not change things much, as far as I can see. The Biointensive folks predict a harvest of about two pounds a foot at an "intermediate" level, which means a skillful gardener. They think it can get better then that for a really super gardener with great soil, but I haven't seen any hard proof, so I will ignore that for now.
So, looks like my goal is to try to eliminate negatives generally associated with containers and towers, so that the plants can achieve the theoretically possible 14 pounds per foot of ground space.
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Post by keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) on Feb 5, 2016 15:47:15 GMT -5
I wonder if microorganisms and mychorozae fungi played a role in field vs container.have you thought about adding worms.
Your mentioning of india is interesting. It reminds me of a documentary i watched once where they turned a hard cracked nutrient deprived farm into an organic lush heavy producing one. Yes they used cow compost, but there was a unique way in which they used it that led to a high amount of microrganisms being cultivated dramatically increasing the nutrients available. I think they basically sprayed compost tea everywhere. The soil was literally black to the point i was envious. Anything could have grown well in that soil.
I will try to find it again. I think it was called "how to save the world". But im not sure.
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