Under the Choko Tree By Nevin Sweeney

The Potato Cage

Potato Cage

No, I do not grow really vicious potatoes that need to be isolated from the other vegetables, but I use this handy technique to maximise my potato yields while not taking up space in my regular veggie beds. First a bit of theory.

Potatoes have an interesting habit; if you heap up soil or mulch around a growing potato plant they will form more potatoes. If you keep up the process you will cause the plant to produce many more potatoes than if they were just grown in a field in the normal way. My father taught me this by showing me how to grow a potato in a 20litre steel bucket many, many years ago.

There are a number of ways to accomplish this, planting in the bottom of a 20 litre bucket or 200 litre drum, then adding more soil or mulch as the plant grows, or planting in a tyre, then adding tyres and filling them with soil or mulch as the plant grows. I personally haven’t had much success with the tyre method, the potatoes tend to die on me, and there have been some questions about the tyres leaching toxic materials that I haven’t seen resolved to my satisfaction. So I will tell you about the way I do it – constructing a potato cage.

Potato Cage showing wire, star pickets and gate

When I took some time off work a few years ago, one of the things I did was to stop growing potatoes in the regular veggie patches and install two potato cages. These are constructed by getting hold of four star pickets for cage you intend to build and then hammering them into the ground to form a square about 1 metre on each side. Any flexible wire mesh will do to make the sides but I had some 1 metre wide chook mesh so that is what I used. You will still need access to the inside of the cage to add more organic matter and harvest the potatoes so wrap the free end of the mesh around a star picket and then run the mesh around three sides to form a three sided box. Cut the mesh to size allowing enough overhang to wrap around the end star picket. You can then make a gate for the cage by attaching the free end of the remaining mesh to one of the star pickets at the open end of the box and then running the wire across the open and of the box. Cut the mesh off so that there is enough overhang to be wrapped around a piece of wood, pipe, steel or whatever you have to secure the free end of the door.

I used a piece of tomato stake but anything solid enough will do the job, just measure and cut it to the same width as the wire mesh and then wrap the free end of the mesh around the wood or whatever and twist any available strands of mesh around it so that the wood stays at the end of the mesh. You can then pull the mesh to the star picket and just wrap it around so that it forms an access gate into the potato cage.

Now that your potato cage is complete, it’s time to prepare for planting. Around here we tend to plant out potatoes in August or September. Dig the area of soil within the cage over and add some compost or well rotted manure to give the potatoes a kick on. Then dig down a bit, remembering that the new potatoes will form above the originally planted one, and make four equidistant holes so that they are evenly spaced within the cage. Grab your seed potatoes, if you have left them out to give the eyes a chance to sprout, so much the better and pace one in each hole, ie four per cage.

Potato cage + potatoes

I will digress here slightly, but one of the issues that I have had is making sure the potato plants are well watered after lots of organic matter has gone into the cage. With that mass of organic matter over and around the potato plants I can’t be 100% sure that the roots are getting watered no matter how much time I spend pouring water into the cage. So this year I have constructed two watering tubes, one for each of my potato cages. I did this by getting hold of a 3 metre length of 50mm PVC water piping and cutting it in half, giving me two 1.5 metre tubes (1.2 metres would have done the trick but excess would have been waster anyway so......). I drilled four lines of five 3mm holes a centimetre apart vertically up the tube so that each line was at 90° to the next, and then put a cap on the end of the pipe so that water pumped into the tube will come out the holes and water the potatoes. Initially there is not enough mulch to suppost the pipe so i have tied some blue bailer twine between two diagonal star pickets and the tube to keep it upright. Well, that is the theory and so far it seems to work.

Buiness end of the watering spike

To use your potato cage, plant the four seed spuds of your choice in the pre-prepared holes as previously mentioned and then cover with soil and mulch. Once the potatoes start to sprout through the mulch add another layer of mulch so that the shoots are just covered. Straw will work but hay is better and you should also mix in some high nitrogen stuff like chook poo or compost to provide some nutrients and help the mulch break down. Once the potato cage is full of mulch, let the potato plants mature while keeping them well watered, the mulch will reduce in volume as it breaks down so this is normal. When the potato haulms (the green bits) die off, open up the gate and pull out your organic, super tasty spuds. Protect them from light to prevent them from greening up and they are ready to eat and enjoy.

Ready to start growing potatoes

Update 2013

Unfortunately the potato cages were never as productive as I hoped. A large part of the problem was the need to find lots of organic matter while the potatoes were growing rapidly in spring and early summer, and for us this meant buying it in. The cages were removed last weekend and we will be putting a veggie bed or two in to replace them, and they can be used to grow veggies all year 'round. I still have intentions to grow veggies but now in self watering containers and in the normal bed rotation.

Before the clearing out

Afterward

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