Potatos in tires!!??

It's Tim again...

In the last post I mentioned "projects" so here is the other one. This one is still a bit of a work in progress.

I read somewhere that potatoes will grow in used tires, and it caught my attention. I decided to try it this year. Fortunately, Lisa needed new tires on her car late last year, and I was able to keep the old ones.

I've not planted potatoes before, so the whole thing has a bit of a learning curve. We normally buy organically grown potatoes to eat, so I just used some of those as my seed potatoes. I let them sit on our kitchen table in the sun until they had started to grow some shoots from the eyes. I only cut about three or four of them up with each piece having about two or three shoots on it. I had so many pieces that I probably planted way too many in my tire.

I filled one tire with a black dirt and peat moss mixture and just stuck the potato chunks in. It's been a few weeks now since I started and for about the first two or three weeks there was nothing happening. I started to worry that something was wrong. But then, low and behold, I happened to be walking by the tire one day and noticed just the tiniest plant starting to grow. I had to look closer now. That day I discovered about three plants growing and within a week there were ten.

As I understand it, once the plant itself gets tall enough, another tire is stacked on top and filled with dirt as well. Apparently, potatoes will grow in each tire and as the tops get taller, you just repeat the process with a new dirt filled tire.

I'm happy that I finally have some plants growing and hope to have pounds and pounds of potatoes by the end of the season. I'll try to give you and update as the plants keep growing.

Stay tuned!