Potato towers are a hot topic, probably because a lot of people have smaller backyards and they want to produce as much food as they can. The ads are very seductive; “grow 100 pounds of potatoes in a 4 x 4 ft tower. ” And then there are the pictures of someone opening a small container and having dozens of large potatoes falling out. I never knew gardening was so easy.
There are two approaches to finding out if potato towers actually work. One is to look for actual studies that compare potato towers to other forms of growing potatoes and the other is to try and understand how potatoes grow. After all, humans have been growing them for hundreds of years so we do know something about them. I’ll take both approaches in this post.
