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Growing huge and beautiful potatoes is easy. Just follow these easy steps and you too will have huge beautiful potatoes that your neighbors will envy.

Take all those old tires in the shed and drag them out. Be careful and watch for spider webs. We don't want anyone to be bitten by a spider while planting the perfect potato garden.

Now, mix up some compost from your compost garden and soil from your garden.

Locate a nice partly sunny location and place one tire down and fill it with your compost and soil mix.

Take your sprouted spuds and cut them into chunks allowing for at least 2 sprouts (some people call these "eyes") per chunk. Now plant them with one chunk in the center of the tire and 4 around the outer edge of the tire.

Now, throw another tire on top of the first one and repeat the above process. Keep stacking your ties in this fashion and filling them with compost and potato chunks until you have them stacked 3 or 4 ties high. Then begin another stack of tires.

Water your potatoes from the top tire down. Just keep the top well watered and the water will filter down and water the other tires. You don't need to remove the tires to water them or anything like that. Its a very simple "trickle down" theory.

Weed the top tire as needed and don't worry about the others. The weeds won't form in the lower tires as they require sunlight, your potatoes on the other hand like the dark warmth of hiding in the tires to grow. In fact, they will grow bigger and better because of it.

At the end of the growing season, about 3 weeks after the tops of your potatoes seem to keel over and start to whither up, simply tip the tires over and harvest your newfound bounty.

I filled 3 large wash tubs full of potatoes this way last year. I only used 13 ties total. Talk about saving garden space. I didn't do anything special to the potatoes, no fertilizer and little weeding since I only had to weed the top tires of each stack. It worked wonderfully.

To store your potatoes, first lay them on a tarp to "dry" as some of them may be a bit moist. roll them over a few times and allow them to dry thoroughly in the sunshine. Do not wash them as this could cause them to rot quickly. Simply brush the dirt off with a brush or put on your gardening gloves and wipe the dirt off with your gloves. Store in a cool dry place in a single layer. Mine were harvested in mid September and lasted through February. Now wasn't that an easy, low labor way to grow the best potatoes ever?

Learn more about this author, Linda L Kinyon.
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