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One of my favorite parts of writing this column is that it provides the perfect excuse for buying and trying gardening toys. Usually, I have three or four new tools or gadgets to play with, but the second one I purchased this year was such a whopper of an expense that I quit after two.

Let’s start with the least expensive, the potato pen. About the size of a half whiskey barrel, it is made of hard black plastic with holes the length and width of it. Three green “keys” can be screwed into the holes any place along the length of the plastic. So if you fold the material around and around itself before you screw in the keys to hold the two ends together, the center created for planting is pretty small. If you want a larger planter, you push the length of plastic around so the two ends just meet, fit the holes from one end so they align with the holes of the other end and screw one key in at the top and one at the middle and one at the bottom. The dozens of holes that aren’t plugged by the keys act as drainage holes.

You set the container in a sunny area, put about six inches of dirt in the bottom, and place your seed potatoes or potato pieces on top. Then you cover the potatoes with another two inches or so of soil. You wait for the stems to get about six inches tall and then you add four or so more inches of soil — so you end up with only about two inches of stem showing. You do that all season long, until the container is full of soil.

Essentially, you are hilling just as you would in a regular garden, but much higher. The bin is about 36 inches tall, so subtracting the first six inches of soil you put in leaves you with 30 inches of hilling in a season — far more than one regularly does with potato plants. The tubers are supposed to form all the way through the hilled soil, increasing your yield considerably for the small amount of garden space occupied by the container.

In May I planted four pieces of All Blue potatoes; not four potatoes, but four pieces that each had two eyes. My yield on August 23 was 12 pounds of potatoes, which I don’t consider very good in comparison to what I have managed to grow in my regular raised beds with normal hilling. I think the problem was the watering. It took a lot to soak things in the middle of the bottom of the container — and by then soil had started streaming out of the bazillion holes from the force of the watering. Additionally, it was difficult for the emerging plants to get proper sun because they were down at the bottom of a black hole.

On the plus side, the harvesting was easy because all I had to do was unscrew the three keys and pull open apart the ends so the dirt, stems and tubers could cascade out onto the ground. Then, since I had deliberately placed the container in a compacted and weedy area of my yard that I hope to turn into a raised bed at some point, I simply pulled out the spuds, rerolled my container for winter storage, and raked the leftover soil flat.

The product is available in various catalogs, and cost me about $50 with shipping. But it is not worth it; the truth is that I have had much better luck with a potato square I wired together from four recycled wood pallets.

If you purchase or inherit some other container that is about the size of a half whisky barrel, I would advise drilling holes along the length of a piece of PVC pipe and sticking that in the center of the container when you first plant. I did this with the pallet box, and all I had to do was put the hose in the pipe and fill it several times and my watering was done.

And now, the most expensive toy of the season: the indoor composter. As I wrote back in March, since I started writing this column about two decades ago, I have received a lot of letters and emails from renters who don’t have space for composting. When I read about the NatureMill composter, an electric device that was billed as composting up to 120 pounds of organic remains a month, it seemed like the proverbial answer from heaven. In fact, better than my wildest composting dreams, since it also digests meats and fish.

I ordered one, to the tune of more than $400 with shipping. In short order I had a bright yellow box, 20 inches high, 20 inches deep and 12 inches wide. It weighed 17 pounds, and used (cost) about five kilowatts per month to run. It was guaranteed to be capable of producing a fully decomposed batch of compost every two weeks.

Only it did not. As I wrote when I reviewed it for Amazon.com (the only time I have felt driven to post on that site, such is the power of fury over wasted money), “The organic ingredients have to be practically pre-chewed into one-inch squares before the machine will not jam up while composting it (jamming was literally a daily problem). The mixing blades are completely feeble and not up to the task. The machine is louder than the ads claim. The compost does not automatically and easily drop down to the lower chamber. And the entire machine is made of Styrofoam and plastic, so it both looks and feels very cheap.”

About the same time, another reviewer wrote, “I have had this composter for a year … It’s getting jammed on a regular basis, and unjamming it required getting dirty and stinking up the house. To work, the composter requires just the right combination of “green” (and) “brown” items and baking soda. Water drainage is constantly plugged up, so water ends up in the cure tray; from this, mold starts to grow if you don’t completely clean out the machine (messy and stinky again). The design of this composter is very frail, if this is the right term: the main housing seems like dense Styrofoam, and internal parts either break or bend severely. Mixing and emptying processes frequently get jammed. Composting materials seem to get stuck in every little crevasse inside the mixing chamber. … The composter is not as odor-free as advertised, and keeping this machine working is very very difficult. … I would not recommend this product to anyone.”

Later reviews have been more positive, so perhaps the company has changed the manufacturing specs to address some of the issues. However, I have had worm boxes. They were a lot less stink and mess, and I didn’t have to shop the ingredients into minute pieces.

So, this year has been pretty much a bust as gardening toys go. I would urge you to save your money: make your own potato container and use a compost heap, worm bin or the plastic storage container method that I have cited previously from www.frugalgirl.com.

Linden Staciokas has gardened in the Interior for more than two decades. E-mail: dorking@acsalaska.net.