Spuds

The other day I was in the grocery store and noticed the fingerling potatoes. I thought all the different colors and varieties of them were pretty good looking. I even commented to Claire, "man, these are some good looking potatoes." She said "yeah, why don't you grow some."
Hello. My light bulb of brilliant ideas must have burnt out.....of course I will grow some. Why didn't I think of that. I am not a real big potato fan so I never really thought about growing my own, but little fingerling's I could definitely enjoy now and again. But, I wanted it to be easy. I didn't want to dedicate a big space of the garden to the starch and I had read somewhere that you can grow them vertically with ease using even something like an old tire. I found some great resources online and found a wood vertical system through website TipNut and decided that I would try that this year. I went ahead and built it yesterday. I used two x six cedar and omitted the  long two x two's on mine because it ended up being pretty stable when stacked.  The whole idea is to start with the lowest stack and plant the seed potatoes. As the plants grow, I add another stack and then cover the plants with more soil, compost, etc. When I want to harvest I can just unscrew one of the sides and dig around for the potato on the lowest stack. In the end, we should end up with an abundance of potatoes. Seems easy enough.