Sunday, April 22, 2012

Garden How To for Earth Day!

Happy Earth Day!  I hope you fill the day with activities such as gardening, learning, cleaning, or nurturing.

If you find yourself with some free time and a love for potatoes (quite obsessive in this household)- than this project is the one for you!

3' x 3' Potato Bin- with this potato bin it is said that one can grow up to 200lbs of potatoes!

Materials needed:  4- 2x8x12' lumber, 4- 2x2x8' lumber, 3" galvanized screws, sandy top soil, compost, sprouting potatoes.

Step 1: Cut lumber-  Of course I had the manly men at Home Depot do this for me.  Have the 2x8x12' cut into 3' lengths.  Cut the 2x2x8' into 42" lengths.


Step 2: Screw Together-  Start with the screwing two 2x2's to each side of a 3' piece.  Do this one more time.  Stand them up and screw two more 3' pieces to connect it all and create a square.


 
NOTE! As you can see, we built the potato bin in the basement only to quickly find out we couldn't get it out of the basement.  Learn from our silly mistake and build this potato bin OUTSIDE!



Once you get the bottom 4 boards put together, we can start adding boards up the sides.  We designed this box to have 5 boards per side.  HOWEVER, we are only going to screw together portions of each side.  For the back of the bin screw all 5 boards on.  For the remaining sides only screw on 1 more board.  **We left one side with only one board so when the time comes we can easy shovel in more dirt**


Step 3: Install Bin- Place the bin in an area that is in full sun.  Also make sure it is on the north-side of your property or away from other growing vegetables so the height of the box doesn't block the sun.  Level and fill with soil & compost.  Potatoes love sandy soil, so if need be add a bit of sand to the mixture as well.


Step 4: Plant Potatoes-  The best step of all (besides harvesting)!  Last year we went to the garden store and bought sprouting potatoes.  This year we had left over potatoes from our crop last year that sprouted, so we gladly used those.  Do not go to the grocery store and buy potatoes and plant them... they will not grow!  They are sprayed to deter sprouting.

These potatoes are really small, but if you have larger potatoes with multiple sprouts you can cut them in half and plant the halves.


Plant the potatoes sprout up and cover with soil.


Potatoes grow a beautiful green bushy type plant.  Once they get to about 6" in height, add more dirt to the box.  Add more layers of boards as the summer goes on and the dirt level goes up.  Eventually you will have dirt as high as 4-5 boards high (30-40")

When it comes times to harvest (the leaves start yellowing and dying off) unscrew boards from the bottom and start digging in!

This is our first year doing this so I will update as the season goes on and let you know how our harvest did.

1 comment:

  1. I feel like I need to just tuck these posts away somewhere for when I actually have the space to, you know, DO some of this stuff! It's so inpsiring.

    I'm gonna direct my sister to your blog (once she has internet again) because I think she would DIG it. (pun intended... I am hilarious.)

    ReplyDelete