Tater Condos

 I've been reading how easy it is to grow potatoes - in a bag, in a stack of tires, even in a clothes basket - or something called Potato Condos.

I didn't have a bag, and I'm kinda not really comfortable growing food in tires, nor was I very excited about growing taters in a clothes basket. Mostly because I use my clothes baskets and I didn't want to go to the Dollar Tree and spend a dollar to buy any.

What I did have was a pile of straight up garbage pieces of wood.
We save and hoard wood/scrap wood like it's gold, but sometimes some of it really just isn't re-usable for most building projects. Some are just too rotted, or too filled with nails/screws, or other miscellaneous reasons we feel they can't be used.  But turned out a lot of it was good for this project.
I just love it when the unusable turns out to be usable after all.

The first one we made we used some short deck boards left over from the porch, which were 23" long, and approximately 4' tall, extremely weathered landscape timbers.

The next one we used some old scrap 2x4's that had been cut out of the window frame when we replaced the windows in Ryan's room last summer, rotten landscape timber, and the trim from around the windows we replaced as the slats on the sides.

See that nice, dark, rich soil? That ain't store bought garden soil. No, sirree, ma'am.
That's grass/weed clippings, Fall Leaves, shredded junk mail, and kitchen scraps (ie. tea bags, egg shells, banana skins, cabbage/lettuce cores, tater peelings, etc.), all chewed up and pooped out by our resident earthworms.
Aka, Compost.

There's our compost corrals, made out of pallets, down in the corner of the backyard. (Yes, the grass/weeds is still long, for the Bees.)

I filled both tater condos with compost soil about halfway, or 4 inches. I bought a bag of seed potatoes that I'll cut up and place on the soil, then cover with another 4 inches of soil.
I would have done it today, but we're expecting some rain (potentially bad weather) tomorrow. If I put them in today I'll have to water them, so I figured I'd wait and let it get rained on tomorrow, then plant the next day.

When they sprout, or grow about 8 inches, we'll add another slat and another 4 inches of soil, until we get as high as we can, or the end of the season, whichever comes first.