Potato Cages

Last years potato harvest was less than exciting despite the three cool varieties of spuds I had ordered from the Maine Potato Lady. I planted too late, neglected the spuds, and chose a bad location for my potato buckets. The boss, is hell bent, on helping us achieve a successful garden this year and that includes potatoes! The wife found a neat idea on Pinterest about potato cages, straw and soil. that you can use to make a potato tower. This is very similar to my bucket attempt, but currently more successful. I think the success is due to the new location in the yard…

I made the cages out of hardware cloth and tie wire. I used one of my 5 gallon buckets as a template and rolled the mesh around the bucket, cutting the mesh to length with snips, and then tying the mesh together to create a cylinder. Fun times.

Wen was then in charge of locating the potato cages in the front yard, removing the grass/sod, and setting the cages. She wrapped the perimeter with some news print from our local rag and added approximately 6” of my awesome, premixed, homemade, soil concoction, before adding the spuds.

This year I went easy, I picked up a bag of red bliss potatoes from our local Tractor Supply and Wen arranged a layer of spuds around perimeter of the cage. She covered with some more of my awesome dirt and in no time we had our first sprouts. The photo below is from May 9th, 2012.

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More potato progress, we keep adding newsprint and soil as the plants grow taller. You can see below that as of May 16th, 2012 there are shoots pushing out of the newsprint.

Potato cages as of this morning May 26, 2012. Wen has asked for more dirt. Sounds like a good Sunday project.