I have decided to try, once again, to make gardening a little easier on us this year.
I hope it works. I have given over more space to the blueberry/strawberry patch the last couple of years and space is getting tight in the garden, which is already plenty big enough, in terms of taking care of it. We always try to grow enough potatoes for the entire year and they take up a lot of room grown in the 10-12 single rows. It is also a lot of hard work to keep them weeded and hilled up and then digging them up
at the end of the season. I have been using cardboard between the rows as mulch and covering that with barn cleanings and we had a great crop in 2014.
I have been reading about growing various vegetables vertically instead, which seems like a great idea because it will make them easier to dig and also less prone to being smothered with weeds, besides taking up less space in the garden. So today, I hauled out some old pallets from the front barn and tied them together with bailing twine to form two bins out in the garden. I loaded each bin with a wheelbarrow load of composted barn cleanings and dropped hay and set the already sprouted taters on top, rather thickly.
Then I covered them with another load of fairly dry chicken bedding. The plan is to keep adding soil, compost to cover the potatoes as they grow, so that they grow a very long stem with space for the tubers all along it. We should be able to harvest a lot of potatoes in a much smaller space by going up instead of each plant only making a few in the shallow space of the rows.
We always plant Yukon Golds, they are the best tasting potato I have found and we had enough left from last year so we don’t have to buy any. However, from what I have been reading it looks like Yukons are not the best choice for growing vertically, as they are “determinate” and won’t produce spuds the entire length of the buried plant
stem as I had hoped. So, it looks like I will have to buy some seed potatoes of another variety after all and plant a third bin, just in case. They will
still take up far less room than usual and we will just have to see how it goes.
-Wendy lee, writing at: https://www.edgewisewoods.com
Some useful links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukon_Gold_potato
www.motherearthnews.com/diy/no-space-potato-barrel-