getting fresh potatoes from your garden is both enjoyable
and rewarding let's see how to grow potatoes in containers
on
so for the potting mix
I used ProMix HP which is a great potting medium
and this has peat moss
and perlite mixed in with a PH neutralizer
you can find seed potatoes in your local garden center
and they're pretty cheap I paid about two or three bucks for about 10 seed potatoes
So this is the container we'll be using far growing our
potatoes
this is called a rope bucket and I got this from Walmart
So our first step is to add some soil at the base of the container
And what this does is that it prepares the base for the seed potatoes to send out their
for the seed potatoes to send out their roots
and now what we do is we take our seed potatoes
and what we need to do is plant them
here in this soil base that we created
so these are the seed potatoes there are five of
these seed potaoes that we will be planting in this container
and it doesnt really matter which way you plant them
but I usually look for these nodes that come out of the seed
potatoes and then plant them accordingly
however you cannot go much wrong even if you plant them
in a different way upside down
the potatoes will start growing and start sending out shoots
now if you still see some seed potatoes
exposed outside
what you can do is add some more of your container mix
now the reason I like to use a container mix
with peat moss and perlite is that it's really soft and fluffy
very easy for the plants to send out roots
and then you make sure that you add some water so that the
potting mix is adequately moist which helps the seed potatoes to grow
so so it takes about 15 to 20 days for
the potatoes seed to start sending out the shoots
and after about 25 days you can see a little new growth which means your
a little new growth which means you'll seed potatoes have started growing
and in about 30 days you will see that
the potatoes have now started growing a little larger
and once you see about six to eight inches of growth
you're ready for the next step of covering them with potting mix
since I had limited amounts of the Promix HP container mix
I decided to create a little bit of my own
potting mix as well so that I could top off the potato plants
the potatoes are growing in a very large container
so I needed a lot more potting mix than what I have done in my
potting mix bag so what I did was I combined some peat moss and perlite as
you can see here
and what I'm gonna show you now is how to cover
the seedlings with the potting mix that we just created
now why do we do this? potatoes grow in such a way that
the plants will get nutrition from all around
the areas where it connects with the soil
and by adding more soil here you give the potato plant a chance to
send out potatoes right from the bottom of the container
through quite a little distance upwards
so you get a bigger harvest if you follow this method of
what is called as growing potato in trenches
so forty days into the growing season we are seeing
that the potatoes have now formed some nice lush growth
and the nutritional requirements for potatoes is pretty high
especially with nitrogen now that may be quite surprising because
potatoes are a root vegetable and
and they're grown mostly for their roots or tubers however
the potatoes do need a lot of nitrogen
to create this lush foliage
that you see here the green leaves the stems and this is why
a high nitrogen fertilizer is recommended so you can
use either of these options that you see on your screen you can go with
an organic fertilizer
like fish or seaweed or compost tea
I've used a lot of compost tea this season to very good effect
and you also need to keep covering the plans with
the same mix that we created as the plant grows
and till you fill the the container with the potting mix
now when you're adding the soil just make sure that the leaves are
clean of any dirt this helps reduce the number of diseases that the plants can
get
and one thing to watch out for at this stage is
any insects on the plants now for me for this potato I didn't find any insects
attacking this potato plant so I did not have to use any kind of insecticide or
pesticide
however if you do see any insects you can just use a soap spray
and that'll take care of most now as the plant
grows you need to make sure that you add fertilizer at least every four weeks
and you can see that the potato plant has now grown
really big and almost out of the container
now to make your potato plants look better what you can do is just use a
string to tie them together
and they will grow really large so by a using just a little string like this
you can keep them in place
so how do you know when your potato plant is ready for harvest?
now usually if you want large potatoes
you'll wait for all the foliage to
dry and then read for two to three weeks more
before you start harvesting your potatoes now if you wanna get a mix of
all potato sizes
like small potatoes also called baby potatoes
some medium potatoes as well as large potatoes
then what you can do is just wait for all the foliage to dry
and after waiting for two to three weeks you can go ahead and harvest at
after the foliage dies so it's been 133 days since we started the
seed potatoes
and you can see a little bit of damage to the leaves here
and the foliage has pretty much died all around you can see some brown leaves n
dying stems
so it's time for the grand finale the
harvest so I just used a tarp here
to collect all the potatoes and I'm harvesting from this
rope bucket and let's see how our harvest looks like
the thing I like about the ProMix
HP container makes as well as the border late then
HP container mix as well as the perlite and peat moss mix that I just showed you
is that it's so light and so fluffy that
once you harvest your plant from it
you can just toss the soil back into
the pot and then after adding some nutrients
you can actually reuse a lot of the potting mix
now potatoes do need warm weather
to grow and produce potatoes so you need to make sure that the temperatures are
definitely greater than forty-five degrees
in your area before you plant potatoes now
in Southern California where the winters are not
that cold you can start potatoes anytime and fall
through winter and then once spring and summer sets in
the plants will grow and produce all these big potatoes
that you can harvest says you can see here the potatoes are formed all around
the
soil or the potting mixed that we added in the container
and this technique works really well this trench technique or
growing potatoes in a trench you can
use this matter on the ground as well as in containers
and what you're seeing here is the white superior hybrid variety of potato
and you can use the same technique no matter what kind of potatoes you're
growing
the red potatoes are another one of my favorites
they grow really well and really fast just like these potatoes
and you can also grow the baking kind of potatoes which have a thicker skin
so no matter what kind of potatoes you grow
these potatoes are gonna be a lot healthier than what you buy at the
supermarket
because just in case you did not know the ones in the supermarket have growth
inhibitors
sprayed on them so that they don't sprout on the shelf
and I had no clue of what these growth inhibitors are
until I looked it up and the names look scary to me
so here are potatoes and as you can see
we have a mix of all potato sizes we have some large potatoes
some medium and also some small baby potatoes
so once the potatoes are harvested just clean them very thoroughly
and then once the potatoes are clean they will store on the shelf for
quite a long time now if you wanna store large number of potatoes
you can use a place like your garage and keep it well ventilated
so I know that there are many ways you can grow potatoes
you can grow them in rows, in containers, in trash bags or
pretty much anything that you can think of so how do you grow your potatoes
I would like to know what varieties of potatoes you grow
and which ones are your favorites and what container medium do you prefer to grow
potatoes or do you just grow them in the ground I'd love to know your opinions
and I'll see you again soon happy gardening
