I’m sure the gardening books are right when they advise us to test the pH and plant this plant early and that plant later and rotate the crops and don’t put these plants together etc. etc. But I’m impatient. If I’m in charge of the garden I put the seeds in the ground on one spring Saturday and hope for the best in the fall. (Jessica is much more careful than I; she loves to play in the dirt, and last year’s yields show that it’s better to follow instructions.)

Into this miserable category falls the advice to plant your potatoes in a mound of soft dirt, and keep adding to the mound as the plant grows. That way, in the fall you can harvest a whole grundle of potatoes because they grow out from the stem or something like that. It’s too much work. Who wants to spend time throwing dirt on potato plants? My uncles farmed potatoes in southern Idaho, and they never had to mound the dirt up. (Of course, the planter thing they dragged behind the tractor would mound the dirt up as it went, making tall rows of soft deep earth the entire length of the field.)

Enter Backwoods Home Magazine. Last year I read an article suggesting that I grow potatoes inside old tires. The idea is that you start them out inside a single recycled tire, and as the plant grows you stack tires up around it and mound up the dirt. The potato will grow up out of the tires and sprout tubers in the soil you dumped around it. Then in the fall, you just unstack the tires to harvest the spuds.

I liked the idea, so I went to a couple of tire places in town and it turned out they were glad to get rid of them. I hauled home a couple of loads (I could fit 17 tires in the Jeep, with the back seat down) last summer, and let them sit since the growing season was already well advanced. I hoped the idea worked; otherwise I’d have to get rid of the tires and the dump charges $4 apiece to get rid of them.

So far, it’s working. Here’s how the spuds look as of this morning; we just added the latest tier of tires a couple of weeks ago, and the plants are already bursting out the top. Jess and I will have to go down early tomorrow and fill them up again. I’m about out of tires, so I hope they don’t grow too much more. But they seem to like it. We’ll see how they’ve produced in the fall.