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Old December 18, 2013   #26
aletheia
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It's a little bit OT but I gained the same experience.
There are several discussions and documentations about potatoe towers in the net. They all claiming huge amounts of potatoes but never show the results. My opinion is that the mentioned yields are completely unrealistic.

I also gained the experience that plants which produce long stolones and lateral branches are not the best choice for potatoe towers. (before my attempts I thought the same like you) But I made the experience that this cultivars grow outside sideways the bins and also the tubers. So what you get is a huge quantity on green tubers on the outside of the bin and less tubers in the center of the tower. The next problem with bins is the pressure of the soil on the bottom of the bin. It leads to a damage on the Root system and the primary shoots and the plant starts rotting. This year I will start another tower experiment again with some adjustments. But my experience is that conventional plants also in bins produced higher amounts of tubers than this cultivars which produce long stolons do.

Btw. I got a crop of about 20 to 30 pounds each tower and this was quite good. With other cultivars like my blue wonder on the last post maybe you can rise the yield up to 50 or 60 but never 100 pounds.

So my result is that cultivars with long stolons and many secondary branches are a good choice in the field but they do not really good perform in towers. Some quite good results with such cultivars I got in wooden boxes which were more wide than deep
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