Are Wooden Potato Towers Fake?

This style of potato tower is a little different to the one I posted earlier. That one was made for determinate potatoes planted in several different layers. This wooden tower is designed to plant indeterminate potatoes and let them go wild!

You will see a certain post on Facebook going viral almost daily, it claims you can grow 100lbs of potatoes in 4 square feet with one of these towers. The idea is simple, the potatoes grow up the tower and you add compost as and more wooden panels as they do. The plants then produce potatoes all the way up - but is this true?

So before we get into the meat and potatoes... of this article, let's look at the differences between determinate and indeterminate potatoes.

What Are Determinate Potatoes?

Determinate potatoes are varieties that grow in a more compact, bushy manner. Unlike indeterminate potatoes, which continue growing upward and require deep soil or mounding, determinate potatoes set all their tubers in a single layer beneath the plant. This makes them well-suited for growing in containers, raised beds, or shallow garden beds.

Key Characteristics of Determinate Potatoes

Shorter growing season – Typically mature in 70–90 days
Compact growth – Plants stay smaller, reaching about 1–2 feet in height
Single-layer tuber development – Potatoes form in one layer below the plant
No excessive hilling required – Unlike indeterminate potatoes, they don’t require continuous soil mounding
Ideal for small spaces – Great for container gardening and raised beds

What Are Indeterminate Potatoes?

Indeterminate potatoes are varieties that continue growing and producing tubers in multiple layers over an extended period. Unlike determinate potatoes, which have a compact growth habit and produce a single layer of tubers, indeterminate potatoes grow taller and require hilling to encourage continuous tuber development.

Key Characteristics of Indeterminate Potatoes

Longer Growing Season - Indeterminate potatoes take 90 to 120 days or more to mature.
Continuous Growth - They continue to grow and produce new tubers throughout the season.
Multiple Layers of Tubers - Unlike determinate varieties, they develop tubers at various depths.
Require Hilling - Regular hilling (adding soil around the base) encourages more tuber growth and protects them from sun exposure.
Ideal for Deep Beds and Towers - They perform well in deep garden beds, potato towers, and bags due to their vertical growth habit.

The Potato Tower Myth

If you've been around the online gardening circles for a while then you may know that there are quite a few videos debunking this idea. Here's one such video.

Creating Our Potato Tower

So with all that info in mind lets talk about the potato tower I will be building. This is a stacking tower designed for growing indeterminate potatoes. As your spuds grow, you add more wood and then compost to your tower. This should allow you to grow huge harvests in a very small footprint - or so people say.

Theres only one way to find out if its true or not - test it. So that's what I will be doing this year.

I will be growing three different potato tower styles as well as some in the ground and comparing the harvests of all these towers.

Type 1

The classic potato tower that we all see in that viral Facebook post. Plant a few seed potatoes in the bottom and build your tower up as they grow. They should create potatoes all the way up the tower, giving you a huge harvest.

Type 2

The same type of tower but my own idea, following the science a little more. Apparently potatoes only produce tubers fairly near to where the seed potato is planted - they don't grow just anywhere on the stem. So I will plant a potato at the bottom, let it grow and add compost, then plant another potato on this new layer, then I will do the same at the next layer. So on and so forth until I reach the top of the tower.

Type 3

The short tower. Does all or possibly any of the benefit of a potato tower come from the first few feet? Sort of like a mini raised bed. This will be the same design of tower but only two wooden planks tall.

All the towers will have 6 seed potatoes in and I will use the same compost. I will be growing an ideterminate type to follow the instructions properly.

Let me know your predictions in the comments below, id love to know what people think will happen.