As part of our Hayes Valley Farm Earth Day festivities, site designer and educator David Cody lead a hands-on tutorial in DIY potato towers. Once we learned the basics, a crew of us built more than a dozen towers for our rapidly growing Freeway Food Forest.

Potato towers are vertical structures that provide a practical, no-dig, high-yield way for folks to grow and harvest potatoes in limited space. What do potatoes towers have to do with Earth Day? Potatoes are a high-calorie crop, which means they can feed a lot of people while using little of the earth’s resources. They’re also a great way to build soil. Potato towers = earth care, people care, and fair share!

To make a potato tower:

Get a roll of three-foot-wide chicken wire (or “poultry fencing,” as the more avian-inclusive folks call it these days) and wire cutters. You’ll also need some soil, or if you don’t have soil, use mulch and horse manure, as we do at Hayes Valley Farm. If your soil or mulch is fine, you should have some newspaper on hand to line your tower. You may also need a shovel to load your tower, or just use your hands. Lastly, you’ll need seed potatoes, 20 to 30 per tower. You can either get a bag of potatoes from the grocery store, or you can order seed potatoes from a seed catalog. Seed catalogs offer a wide selection, and their potatoes will be less prone to disease.

Why do you need potatoes to grow potatoes? Potatoes are tubers, which are storage containers for starches, or plant energy. Tubers aren’t seeds themselves, but they can act as seeds when buried, using their energy to propagate a new plant. Those little growths, or “eyes,” you find on old potatoes are plant stems sprouting from the tuber.

1. Cut a sheet of chicken wire four or five feet long. You want your tower to be a couple feet across so that it’s stable.
2. Bend and fasten the ends of the chicken wire to form a tube.
3. Find a nice outdoor spot for your tower, ideally against a wall or planter that it can lean on if it needs to. It should be in a place with sunlight and water access and drainage.
4. Tear the newspaper into wide strips to bed the bottom of your tower. This will prevent your soil or mulch from leaking out the bottom and sides of the towers. If your mulch is doesn’t leak through the cage, such as leaf mulch, you can skip the newspaper.
5. Shovel in five or so inches of soil, or mulch followed by manure.
6. Plant about five seed potatoes in a layer, evenly spaced. Don’t plant cut or diseased potatoes.
7. Continue layering newspaper (if needed), soil or mulch and manure, and potatoes until you get close to the top, ending with a layer of soil. Your seed potatoes should be well buried, so they aren’t exposed to light.
8. Irrigate your potato tower by watering directly into the soil. You’ll want to saturate the tower, but don’t overwater. Water once a week or as needed.

To harvest, pull up the wire cage or knock it over, and let the soil and spuds spill out. Root around for the potatoes, being mindful not to bruise or cut them. Compost any potatoes that are damaged, as they will spread disease. Store your potatoes in a cool, dry place, out of the sunlight.

Photos: "Earth Day at Hayes Valley Farm" by Brie Mazurek and Zoey Kroll, April 22, 2010