Potato Box

I finally got around to building a potato box this week.  This has been on my to-do list all year, but has been forgotten or out-prioritized until this week.

I am way behind schedule for planting potatoes here in Georgia, but I am going to give them a shot anyway.  I won't have too much time or effort invested, even if they fail.

If nothing else, this will have me better prepared for an earlier start next year.

This is a variation of growing potatoes in a stack of tires or any other approach where the container containing the potato plants is expanded (primarily vertically) as the potato plants grow.  This allows for a larger harvest from the same set of plants.  [At least for some types of potatoes -- I've heard that early season varieties, such as Yukon Gold, do not continue to set fruit throughout the season and so this tower approach would be wasted on them.  I wasn't planning to grow any early season varieties anyway.]

The old school way to do this would be with a mound and "hilling" the mound larger as the plants grow.

My only reason for building this was to avoid having another plastic container in the yard (more for the neighbors benefit than mine).

Materials:

6 8-ft 1x8"

2 12-ft 2x2" (this was more than necessary)

construction screws

stain

There were no detailed plans or set requirements here.  The construction could have been with 1x6 or 1x10 or 1x 12 lumber -- or even 2x8 instead of 1x8, etc. -- but the 1x8 seemed to be the most cost-effective for building a tower roughly 4 feet tall.

An expensive long-lasting wood like cedar or redwood would probably be ideal for this.  I went with just cheap white pine and gave it a cedar-colored stain to provide it some water protection and make it look a little nicer.  It won't last forever this way, but I am betting it will make it through a few seasons.

The basic construction is just a series of simple 2x2 ft boxes built in a way where the individual boxes are fairly solid and then they are capable of stacking up one above the other in a tower which is also reasonably solid.  Nothing fancy.

Tools were nothing more than a circular saw for cutting the lumber to length and a screwdriver or drill for driving the construction screws.  A chop saw would have made it easier to make all the cuts, but a circular saw was what I had available.

I stained the pine first.  It is an oil-based stain and will bead water on the wood after it is applied.  It is not exactly an "all-natural" product, but it is probably better than using pressure treated lumber.  I have used the same product on my raised beds and haven't had any problems with it.

After staining I lined the boards up side by side so I could mark the cutting lines across multiple boards all at once.  Again, a chop saw with a little jig would have made this even easier, but I'm not building anything fancy -- cutting by hand with the circular saw is fine.

After cutting the 1x8s into 2-ft lengths and cutting the 2x2s into 7-in lengths, I got the stain back out to stain the freshly cut ends of the lumber.

Next came construction of the boxes.

This is the first completed box.  Note that it is upside down in this picture.  And the plywood is just the base I am building on, it doesn't have anything to do with the construction.

The second box was built right on top of the first box, but it is not attached (other than by friction) to the first box.

The tower is complete.  Note the yard stick for a rough indication of the height of the tower.  Boxes are still upside down.

All of the completed boxes (right-side up for the first time).

And finally getting down to business with the first box set in place, leveled, soil added, and seed potatoes planted.

I saw someone doing potato container gardening in perlite, which kept the potatoes nice and clean (no dirt on them).  But that required very regular feeding of the plants (because the perlite  is basically sterile and does not contain nutrients) and I didn't want to mess with regular feeding.

It occurred to me when I was about 75 percent done with the whole thing that I may have made boxes fit together too tightly.  I'm wondering if the boxes that are filled with potting soil and exposed to the rain, etc. might swell enough to make it challenging to stack additional boxes on top later.  I guess I'll find out in a month or so when I am (hopefully) adding a new box to the stack.

Anyway, the potato box is certainly not any sort of finely-crafted woodwork, but my goal was to have something better looking than another plastic container in the yard and I think this tower of boxes will accomplish that.

I think for the next one I may go with a 3'x3' box rather than 2'x2'.  The larger box would be more expensive for the materials, but would require almost no additional effort to build and deploy compared with the smaller box.  A 3'x3'x4' tower would have more than double the volume of the 2'x2'x4' tower.  Maybe it would help produce more than double the amount of potatoes...