How to Grow Potatoes in a Small Space - no hilling required-

Would love to grow potatoes in your garden, but don't have the space to dedicate to hill them? Give potato boxes a try.

I know it's been a while since I was here. Be assured, however, that just because I temporarily let blogging go to the wayside, it is not because nothing is happening over here.

Quite the opposite, in fact. We have been busy expanding on, and tending our little homestead since the first signs of spring, and haven't really stopped.

I will be putting another post out - hopefully sometime next week - updating you all on our exciting additions, and all the high hopes we have for this growing season.

***You can find that update here.***

I love potatoes (being Irish, that is pretty much a pre-requisite), but when we were planning our garden, I knew we wouldn't have room to have any.

Starting off, our garden was going to be fairly small, and we just didn't want to take up so much space with having to hill potatoes.

If you are in an urban gardening situation, you know what I'm talking about. When your yard is the size of a postage stamp, and you are trying to make room for kids to play, a place to sit and enjoy your outdoor space, and have room for a garden, potatoes are pretty quickly scratched off the list.

When I first heard of potato boxes, I knew this is what I wanted to do for our garden.

The idea is pretty simple. Potatoes grow underground. As a potato plant stalk grows, if you can cover it with dirt, it will stimulate the plant to grow more potatoes. Hence the concept of hilling. (Forgive the basic potato biology lesson, but I didn't know the purpose of hilling until I started looking into growing potatoes, and I thought you might be in the same boat.)

The idea with the box is that you are still covering the stalk as it grows, but in a much more space-efficient manner.

You make a box base, plant potatoes, and as they grow you add more dirt and more sides to the box.

There are a few different methods to making the box and harvesting. Some will have you have four big supports that you screw the sides into as the plant grows. To harvest with this method you start unscrewing boards at the bottom, and harvesting from the bottom up.

The other method, the one we used, is where you have four supports, but screw the boards to each other making a series of levels, if you will. As your plant grows, you slip another box layer over the supports.

At the end of the season, you pull out your supports, and knock the whole thing over (preferably over a tarp or something that will contain your soil so it can easily be reused next season.)

So here's the official breakdown of how we built it.

We cut salvaged 2x4s to 22in lengths.

The length we chose was in order to plant a number of seed potatoes. You could probably go smaller if you were just planting one.

The more boards, the higher your potato tower can be. We started with about 20 boards. Drill 2 pilot holes on one end of each board. Screw two boards together in an L shape. Take two L's and screw them together, making a square.

We took 4 1x1 stakes, and drove them into the ground where we wanted our box to sit.

Next, plant your seed potatoes (about 5 inches deep).

Then, you wait. Once your plant starts sticking out a few inches, start to cover the bottom third with more soil. Once it grows a little more, start adding more side layers.

Since this is our first year trying this, we haven't harvested, or seen how well it actually works, but we will give you an update in the fall!

Hopefully, you've found this helpful, and if you end up adding potato boxes to your garden - or if you have used them in the past - let me know how they work out.

Until next time.

God bless!