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Built A Build-As-You-Grow Potato Bin Today

For as long as I can remember, my parents have always grown a garden each year, whether a small one in our backyard, or a much larger one on their piece of land in McCaysville.  They do it mostly for the fun of doing it, and of course enjoy the fruits of their labor later on.  So today when I ran across Build-As-You-Grow Potato Bins, I was sure that they would like to give it a try and see what the results would be compared to the traditional garden.

The way it works is as the potato plant grows taller you build up the bin and cover the stem with more dirt.  Covering the stem with the dirt causes the plant to turn it into a root, and since potatoes grow underground, the more roots you have the more potatoes will be produced.

It wasn’t but a few hours after showing it to my dad that we were out in the carport putting one together.  We took the basic plans from that site, and sort of modified them to suit what we had available on hand to use.  Rather than using regular 2x6s, we had some tongue-and-groove boards left from a roofing project, and figured that would work great since they would lock in place on top of one another.

We cut the boards 30 inches long and just nailed them together to make a collars like the one pictured below.

We went ahead and nailed some vertical framing to the bottom collar so that for the future collars we could just slide them over it and lock onto the bottom one.  We’ve almost decided that on our next one we will just leave out the vertical framing and see how it works to just let the collars  lock and support themselves.

Once the bin was placed where we’re going to grow the plants, we poured in a 5 gallon bucket of top soil and spread it out. Next came the potatoes that will become the plants.

Afterwords we covered them in about 2 buckets of the top soil and let the rain do it’s job.

The way they grew potatoes before would yield them about 4:1 pounds.  So it’s definitely going to be neat to see how much these grow into when it comes time to dump it out at the end of summer.