Potato planter tower

[pepper1000]

There is a paul potato planting tower on amazon anyone tried one of these, wanted to try it but not sure if it would be suitable, I usually use buckets but they take up quite a bit of space

[Penellype]

I haven't tried this, but a few thoughts.

Each layer contains 14 litres of compost and they are suggesting planting 3 potatoes per layer. I normally plant 2 or 3 potatoes in a 30 litre bucket, so I suspect yields per seed potato will be fairly small.

Watering may be an issue - potatoes like a lot of water.

No earthing up required for the bottom layers, but with such a shallow container (each layer about 9 inches deep) you may struggle to keep the potatoes in the top layer from going green.

[burnie]

I think as with a lot of the "vertical gardening" ideas, they will be quite high maintenance, if you are able to do that I'm sure it may well work, I think I would go for small early potatoes like International Kidney or similar.

[pepper1000]

Thanks for your comments, I have ordered a planter to see how it goes, I am going to try epicure and pentland javelin in it, I usually plant in 30 litre buckets but would like to give this a go, if it is not a success I will grow something else in it next year,

[pepper1000]

Update on my potato planters. This is one tray of epicure, it was just over 4lb of potatoes, hope the other 3 trays are the same

[burnie]

Well done, keep us up to date with your progress, was that from one seed potato?

[pepper1000]

I put 2 seed potatoes in each tray, I never expected to get that amount from 1 tray as they are quite shallow , they were easy to keep watered and I put spuds galore fertiliser in them. I have Charlotte and pentland javelin in another one so will see what those are like when they are ready