Houston High School and the Great Potato Project!

In addition to the Wicked Raven Farm duties, I may have mentioned that I also work at the local High School, Houston High (www.matsuk12.us).  I am the Secretary at the front desk for  school housing about 400 students and about 50 staff members.  One of the great classes the school offers is Culinary Arts.  It's a beginner cooking and food prep class and the instructor is wonderful!  He makes it fun, and he also makes it cool for the guys to learn to cook - I'm pretty sure that's why his wife married him!  Anyway - when he asks most of his first time class members where their food comes from nearly all of them will say "The grocery store"!  And you know how silly teenagers can make you feel just with a tone of voice! 

Our school is in an area that is given the designation of "Title I", which means that, in our case, about 54% of our students live at or below the poverty level as defined by the federal government.  What it means in real people terms is that we have a lot of hungry kids a lot of the time.

Last school year a contractor began replacing our football field with artificial turf (totally different money from feed the kids money - thats why), and we asked them if they would be willing to let us have the topsoil they were taking out.  Being as it saved them money by not having to haul the dirt away, they were happy to comply - thank you Davis Constructors http://www.davisconstructors.com/ for the great community you showed us while building the field.  We decided to use some pallets that had been donated to our project by 3 Bears Alaska (www.threebearsalaska.com) and upcycle them into a raised garden area to plant potatoes in.  We would plant the spuds in the spring with the students (that was our plan) and then harvest them with the students in the fall.  The best laid plans and all - it snowed 6 inches the day before school got out so not only did we not have our pallet potato bins built we ended up with all our plantings being 3 weeks behind.

Here are our stacks of pallets to build our bins.  Mr Johnson, our principal, brought his cordless drill and helped me put them together.  I brought the wrong kind of screws the first time around so we only got one done - make sure you use a good sharp decking screw - not a sheetrock screw.  The screws make a big difference in how fast the bin goes together! 

 

Here is our first completed bin.  We were able to use a flat spot that was opened up when the local gas company put a new line through.  So far so free!  The bins are easy to put together - just stand them up (either direction is fine - we put ours this way so they would accomodate my short stature), and then screw the bigger wood parts together in a couple of places.  You may have to use an extra slat or two on the ends as some of them have big spaces where the dirt will fall out.  Try to use pallets that have the slats as close together as the can be - otherwise you have to use other slats or rocks to hold the dirt in.  Rookie mistake on my part to not do it at first - I had to add them later.

Here is the inside of the bin.  It ended up being about 4 feet deep.

 

The great top soil hill!  They really thought we were going to have a lot of potatoes.  The little yard cart is a back saver and so easy to use and load into the car!  It rolls over uneven ground and hauls a pretty big payload for something you can put in the back of a GMC Acadia by yourself. 

It doesnt show up well but we wrote the variety of potato that we planted in each bin on the front of the bin with a Sharpie marker.  It worked great.  We put about 6 inches of dirt in the bottom of the bin and then planted our spuds.  We had Yukon Gold, Purple Peanuts, and Gold Finger seed potato.  Big thank you to Snowfire Gardens (www.snowfiregardens.com or www.snowfiregardens.net) for the donation of the seed potatoes for this project!

The above photo shows our seed spuds before we  buried them, below you can just see the spuds coming up in the bin.  We put 9 spuds in each bin.  Potatos are like tomatos and they grow up and out instead of down.  So as they grow in the bin you continually bury them and they continue to grow up through the dirt.   I did have to use a couple of bags of Promix soil to make the top soil a little less dense.  Ours had been buried under the football field for so long that it was super compacted and heavy so to lighten it up I used about 1/3 Pro mix to 2/3 top soil.

 

Below are the Yokon Golds that came up much better than the finger or peanut spuds.  The bin they are in is about three times as deep as the others now.  In defense of the other types - once when I got to the bins (I live about 10 miles away so I would come every other day through the summer to tend and water) the purple peanuts bin was full of giant rocks that someone had thrown in there so we pretty much started over there and one of the Gold Finger bins was full of footprints like maybe someone had used it as a babysitting bin while they loaded topsoil!  So two of the bins were a little traumatized before the spuds even came up.  All 9 of the Yukons came up and look great - it is the bin farthest away from any potential traffic

I have stopped putting more soil on top as we only have about a month before we should be starting to harvest and I want them to grow some spuds and not just be trying to grow more plant.  Ill update the post as we go and show you the harvest (hopefully a big one).  Ill also share some of the things the kids think about the project - they will have been school for about a month by the time we harvest.  I'm excited to see how this worked and make notes about what we need to do differently next year (like have the soil prepped and a better system for watering - during the summer I had to bring it myself in buckets and watering cans).  Now that we have the bins up though we should be able to have the students help plant - as long as it doesnt snow in late May! 

The above shows the Yukon Gold spuds - we were able to bury them about half way up the pallet and all of them look great.  Below are one of the bins of the purple peanuts - only able to bury them about 1/4 of the way up the pallet - one of our time savers for next year will be that a lot of the soil is already mixed so we can just shovel it in as we need to.

 

 

Also look for a post soon about upcycling used tires into potato growing bins!  I did that at Wicked Raven this year and it seems to be working great!  Stay tuned!