Potato Cages

When it comes to food, we are often encouraged to try something new. I like to apply the same idea to growing food. It’s all food related, right? One of my favorite parts of gardening is trying out new ways to grow things and improving my skills as I go along. I got the nifty idea to build some potato cages this week because we are almost out of storage potatoes and the garden is nowhere near ready for planting, and because rodents have been getting to our potatoes the last couple years and reducing yield anyway.  This project seemed simple enough, requiring only fencing, straw, soil and/or compost and potatoes. We have PLENTY of old fencing around (you have no idea), and straw on hand for the chicken coop, so there was definitely no shortage of materials for this project. I got some fingerling seed potatoes and decided to give it a go.

I set the cages up in the back part of the garden next to where we have planted potatoes in the past. I figure we can just til and prep the garden around them. My goal is to harvest these as summer eating potatoes and also plant some storage potatoes in the ground later in the spring.

 

I got one cage all planted with Russian Banana and Red Thumb Fingerling potatoes, and plan to put Ozette potatoes in the other once I get more soil together. It was a very simple layering process. I put cardboard down first to keep out weeds, then some straw in the bottom and pushed up around the sides, then soil, a ring of potatoes around the outside edge, more straw, more soil, more potatoes, and so forth. The idea is that the potato foliage grows out the sides of the cage and the middle fills in with potatoes. I am hoping this is true. Our cats were immediately pro-potato cage, deeming this the perfect cozy spot to curl up, and someone has been napping between them every day since. 

Potato cages, as it turns out, were a great new thing to try!