I doubled the size of the pot that I was using for the first potato tower but besides that, I didn't like the way it lost soil volume as it got taller and taller. So I think I'm going to use solid walls all the way up this time. I just had to think on how to do that.
Today I am punching a hole in the current pot and pulling the plants, that are already quite big, through this flared piece of pipe. I am going to show you what and how I am doing this process in this post.
Here's what the pot looks like at the start of this day. I will bring these plants to the outer perimeter right through the wall, and then I'll start planting more in a completely different way.
If I do it correctly, I will have a much larger, taller tower and I will be able to disassemble it in order to do the harvest. Then, I can reassemble it, bit by bit, as I plant new potato buds by simply dropping the bud down the tubes and into the soil. I will not need to pull plants through the tubes because they will just grow up the tube and out from the very start.
I already do this exact thing with the first potato tower. The only difference is that I bring the plant to the wall and cut a little bit of the netting so that they can get through.
Step one: I bend the plant over to the wall and see where the main stem begins, before the leaves bush out, and I Mark that on the wall of the pot.
inside
outside
The next part is a bit sticky!
a heat gun makes the plastic like rubber
Then anything can just poke right through the wall of the pot!
I bought a new broom handle while I was out, and I'm just going to use that to poke a hole from the outside. I start by pushing it straight through, and then I angle it upward on the outside. I am pointing the wooden broom handle toward the spot where the stem comes out of the ground.
Notice that I put a steel plate, stuck in the dirt, right next to where the plant is growing out of the ground. I did not want the pole to go through and right into the plant, thus breaking it.
The PVC pipe that goes next is not the same size around as the wooden stick. I will need to re-heat the hole to make it soft again in order to get the PVC through. Without that metal plate, the heat would fry the plant. We want to avoid that.
The whole in our pot is now the right size for the pipe we are using. But we are not done. This pipe is really long and the plant will need sun.
Next we cut the pipe. If I were doing this without plants, I could just cut the pipes and put them all in the walls of the pot at even patterns. Then fill the pot and put potato sprouts into the pipes from the outside. I could even plant the entire tower in an afternoon.
It does not need to be perfect. I actually need it to be slightly longer - not just up to the wall of the pot.
I said longer. Why?
We don't want the pipe falling into the pot, so we have to make the end that comes out just a little bit bigger than the whole we punched through the pot.
We will use the heat gun again to make the beveled end just a little bit gummy and we will increase its size making it slightly bell-shaped at the end. You will see that shape after we pull the plant through!
We do not have the pipe installed yet. It needs to be loose and will not be in place until we pull the plant through.
We have to wrap something, a paper towel, around it at the base of the plant, and wrap the plant from the bottom up, then twist the top end of the paper towel in order for the whole wrapped stem to be pushed/pulled through the pipe
You will never break a branch off of a plant by folding the leaves upward, so we will gently feed the whole plant up into the tubing. And we push the pipe toward the dirt at the same time.
"So, how is this even a tower at all?" I hear you asking.
Well, I will be stacking these pots, top to top as you see above. I will bolt them together as it grows higher and the plants will come out through the walls. At harvest time, I should be able to take the whole thing apart and harvest.
Then I can bolt the whole thing back together, fill it with the same dirt, and plant all of the potatoes at one time if I want to.
The hardest part about these potato towers is having to wait for store bought potatoes to start growing eyes. I also had some animal stealing my potatoes before they even grow a plant. This new design will keep that animal out of the picture, unless it is small enough to get through a one inch pipe.
These kinds of ideas keep me up at night. I cannot sleep well unless I start the project. It's a curse!
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