DIY potato digger from trash

When the rains have passed, it’s cold outside and there’s no desire to pick potatoes by hand, the inventive idea begins to work. Invention of a special addition to the potato-digger. An idea came to mind to use an old metal mesh from the bed to collect the dug up potatoes. The path from concept to implementation.

A few words about what a potato digger is. A design feature is a vibrating table. A plowshare is used to cut off a layer of soil along with potato tubers. And due to vibration, the soil is cleared and the tubers are moved. The efficiency of this design is up to 98%.

How to make a potato digger on a walk-behind tractor from what you have on hand

Let's start refining. First, you need to disconnect the metal corners from the armored mesh.

You will also need two pieces of steel wire with a cross section of 6 mm. And also the wheel axle from an old baby stroller. The essence of the modification is that the dug up potatoes do not remain in the garden bed, but end up on the net. A kind of harvest bunker. From which it is easy to transfer the potatoes into buckets or directly into bags.

It is necessary to secure the structure to the potato digger using wire.We stretch it through the edge of the mesh along its entire length. Due to the rigidity of the wire, we will later form curved edges so that the potatoes do not fall out of the mesh. We fix it in such a way that the potatoes dug up with a rumble digger do not fall on the ground, but are collected on the mesh. We attach the wheel axle from the old stroller to the other edge of the mesh.

Let's start testing. The structure turned out to be a decent length and does not fit on the garden bed. We start from an almost vertical wall. After passing through one row of potatoes, the net is full of potatoes. Yes, it’s not entirely ideal - there are clods of earth and remnants of stems from a potato bush. But the effectiveness of this device is obvious. All the potatoes are collected in a net, eliminating the tedious work of collecting them.