Growing Organic Potatoes
I thought I’d have a go at growing potatoes in old tyres to see how well they grow. I’ve read about it in various organic gardening books, but never tried. I have grown potatoes directly in the earth before, but this method seems so easy, with the added bonus of 
being able to “bandicoot” (grab your potatoes as you need them) them whenever you need them without digging up the whole plant.
OK, so what I did was cut up some potatoes that had started to sprout in the cupboard. It’s spring here in South Australia, the perfect time to grow most things.
If you have a potato that’s about the size of an apple, with three healthy shoots, just cut it into thirds – making sure that there’s roughly an equal amount of potato with each shoot. Let them dry (not in the sun) for a few days.
Place the tyres in their permanent position and just put three or four potato pieces on the ground inside each tyre, shoot side up – no need to dig or weed first.
Cover your potatoes with an organic mulch and water. Water twice a week if there’s been no rain and you should see them emerge within a few weeks. As they grow keep adding tyres for stability and just keep adding mulch.
See how you go!
Filed under: Uncategorized, vegetables on October 28th, 2007
We have raised beds with wooden frames. I think they look so much better than old tires, but each to their own.
I think it is just the appearance. The tires tend to look bad. Perhaps is you painted them or even covered them with more dirt.
As a kid on our farm we had raised beds for the potatoes so they were pretty much growing about ground level but the raised beds are not so packed making for what I think are better and bigger potatoes.
I do something like this for growing potatoes.Similar to building a compost heap structure, but the only different is that instead of 3 sides fixed with 1 side flex as door, I change it into 2 side fixed by nail with the other 2 sides slides from the top. As the plant growing taller, more soils will be adding in, inch by inch, until the plant growing enough potatoes then harvesting it is really a breeze by lifting up the 2 sides sliding door and the soils will fall to side with potatoes.