Save Garden Space with this Easy Way to Grow Potatoes

Reader Contribution by Ric Bohy
Published on March 29, 2012
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by Adobe Stock/vm2002

This is a cheap, space-saving, easy way to grow potatoes. Build your own tower garden growing system for your spuds so you have potatoes this fall and winter.

Last season’s potato crop, like all our other crops but chili peppers, was pretty much a bust.

We planted three varieties in rows in one of our raised beds after mixing two-year-old composted horse manure into the soil. It was a rich, black, loamy bed, and once the seed potato pieces went into the ground, hopes were high for some tens of pounds of Yukon golds, russets, and Peruvian purples in late summer or fall.

Nearly all of them sprouted, and as the sprouts grew, we carefully mounded fresh dirt around and up the stems, a maneuver meant to keep sunlight off the spuds that develop on shoots running off the mother plant. If the taters get light during development, and even after they’ve been picked, they tend to go greenish on and under the skin and turn toxic. For the science-minded, the green layer contains the alkaloids solanine and chaconine, which are related to and as strong as strychnine. Nasty stuff, of course.

But in 2006, The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry published a study in which researchers exposed four common varieties of potatoes to simulated grocery store lighting for 10 days, and then measured the toxic green. Most of it was in the skins in varying amounts, sometimes over the safe level for human consumption. But there were no dangerous amounts in the flesh. The conclusion was essentially what our mothers taught us: Pare off the green layer and eat the potato. (The researchers did offer one warning, though, saying that people who eat pared greenish spuds every day could still build up toxic levels of the alkaloids.)

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