How do I grow potatoes in containers like garbage cans?

[Shoelace]

I saw how this was done several years ago on tv and do not for the life of me remember how they did it. Seems to me they said we could use hay, lawn clippings (mulched already), leaves, etc. As I remember, no soil was used and we are short on extra soil but have some compost. Just not sure if that's the best use of compost if I can use leaves which we have in abundance.
I will need to do this pretty soon as it's getting late but still so cold in Oregon. Anybody?

[Inchworm]

1. Was mentioned a few threads down

It looks like a cool idea

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=246&topic_id=7310&mesg_id=7318

:hi:

[Shoelace]

5. thanks Inchworm!

okay, looks like I've got all the info I need to go for it. Gosh, I need to remember to scroll down the list of posts more often. :7

[Inchworm]

7. Yup- I am definatly taking in all the knowledge I can from here

I am a total rookie.

I have been around farms and worked them all my life. I just followed direction though. You know, like "get up in the top of the barn and we'll hand you these 'baccer sticks full of 'baccer and you hang them in the rafters," or "sit on this seat and every time I stop the tractor you put in a seedling and hit it with water."

I never paid attention to what they were doing, only focussing on my part of it. :P

:hi:

[Shoelace]

9. we can never learn too much about gardening

I've been at it since I was a young girl, watching my Grandma grow gigantic Zinnias. That was more years ago than I care to admit and I learn as I go.

Welcome to the wonderful world of "growies"! It's an endless world of fascinating knowledge and so good for the psyche too. :grouphug:

[Richard Steele]

2. Hi, Shoelace. I have a few answers for you.

First the bad news- you do need soil. Good rich soil,
and as much as you'd use for any other plant.

Good news is, growing them in containers uses LESS soil
than any other way of growing potatos. And, while many
vegetables do well in containers, potatos seem to do better
than most- the folklore is rife with tales of 30, 40, or
even 60 pounds of taters coming out of a trash can in a single season.
(the "60lbs" claims might be just a fluke, or even a LIE,
but there are so many thousands of folks saying they get 30-40lbs
that there's little room for doubt.)


The thing about potato plants is: they don't make potatos
in the ground where you plant them. They make potatos ABOVE
the original ground level, but only if the stem is buried
by new cover. It's the "burying the stem" phase where the
hay, mulch, or grass clippings come into play.

In the wild, a potato plant will grow about 12-18 inches tall
and the "potatos" form as small green berries along the stem.
(POISONOUS berries, by the way- potatos are amember of the "nightshad" family))

But if you BURY that same potato plant, leaves and all, it
will grow taller to seek sunlight, and the potatos will grow
to hundreds of times their normal "wild" size. And without
sunlight on their surfaces, the potatos don't form toxic compounds,
but stay sweet and edible.

Sorry to ramble on; I've just done so much "reading up" on potatos
these last 2 years and I find them a lot more interesting than
most folks do.


ANYWAY:
Potatos don't mind cold weather as much as many veggies.
If they get good sun during the day, and don't get below 40 degrees at night,
they'll hang in there and grow for ya.

You need to prep your can to DRAIN well. A couple inches of gravel
or some such at the bottom. If you can elevate it on some bricks,
drill multiple small drain holes in the bottom.
If it will sit on the ground, drill multiple drain holes in the sides
near the bottom.
(I suspect that "fast drainage" is the KEY to why plants do better in
containers, but that's a subject fo a whole other thread!)

For something the size of a garbage can, you need a good 10-12 inches
of good rich soil at the bottom to plant your seed potatos in.

How many you plant depends upon how many "eyes" they have. Each eye
will become a stem. You'll want at least 10-12 stems to start out,
because not all will thrive or survive. 12 fresh stems might give
you 5 or 6 strong plants in the end. And those 5 or 6 will produce
a lot of taters in a garbage can.

Once the plants are 10 inches tall or so, you start burying them,
leaves and all. You need something that will block sunlight, but be
loose enough to let a pea-sized potato bud expand easily to the size
of an apple.

In the ground, you bury them once and then wait. In containers, they grow
much taller, so you have to bury another six inches or so every other week.
After 2 months or so, start leaving 12 inches aboveground, and stop burying
any more when that top 12 inches starts to flower.

Loose soil is used to cover them in garden plots; Finely-shredded bark mulch works;
hay and straw have been used for centuries.

But I don't know anything about leaves or grass clippings. You'll have to try
that yourself and see.
Last year when I did my first "container potato experiment", I buried one
bucket in cedar shavings, because they are a natural insect repellent.

The plants grew just as well as all the other containers, but when it came time
to harvest (a week after the visible stalks have died and fallen over)
that bucket had -NO- potatos in it. Not even a pea-sized one. :shrug:

So I guess there's something about cedar shavings that inhibits potato production.
Now I know.

This year, I plan to use leaves in one of my buckets as another experiment,
because I also have plenty of them. We'll see how that turns out.

[Shoelace]

4. thanks, I'll print your reply

and pin it up so I can follow those instructions. I've got a couple of bags of cheap potting mix so I could use that along with some loose soil I could find around the garage. Oh I can hardly wait to see how they grow.
I'm a potato fan too. There's nothing like the taste of a freshly picked, raw potato!!

:bounce:

[Richard Steele]

12. You sound like we're cut from the same cloth!

Cheap potting mix + whatever is handy- that's EXACTLY how I like to do things!
Make the most of what you have, toss it all together and mix it up!

My big free "score" this year came last month when we installed our rain barrel.
I went up on the roof to clear the gutters for the first time in a year, and they
were full of leaves & crap. But underneath the layer of SOLID leaves was 3 inches
of the most dark & fragrant black compost I ever did see.
I got a 5-gallon bucket full of the stuff from 45 feet of gutter, and into my
dirt-mixin wheelbarrow it went!

I added a bag of generic potting soil, a half bag of fine mulch that was so old
I don't remember buying it, and 2 buckets of random dirt from here and there
around the yard.

And then about a gallon-can worth of THIS STUFF:


I can't recommend "Black Hen" enough. It's chicken poop composted until it has a neutral PH,
then compressed into pellets. It's mild mannered and slow-dissolving, so you can just
mix assloads of it right into your dirt with no worries about overfeeding or "burning".



Sorry my last post was so long. I seem to be getting a bit "potato crazy" lately,
and I don't know why. I -DO- have other things growing, y'know- basil, onions, oregano,
habañeros, cilantro, tomatos, zucchini...
But for some reason, I can answer questions about them in one or two sentences,
while the mere mention of the word "potato" sends me into a typing frenzy.

Maybe, after all these years, I really am "just a Spud Boy".

[Shoelace]

17. wow, that "Black Hen" fertilizer sounds grrreat!

yea, I grow lots of other stuff too but somehow those little spuds are absolutely the most fun to harvest of any veggie I know. We have a pretty small lot so not much room which is why I will try the potato barrel thingy.

Thanks for the tip about the Black Hen fertilizer, sure hope I can get it in Oregon.

Oh what a find to get all that black gold out of your rain gutters!
I'm always looking for goodies to throw into the compost heap and/or garden.

Happy trails fellow Gardener!

[ThomWV]

8. Thank you for an excellent and certainly informative synopsis - Great!

Thank you ever so much. Your interest in the growing of potatoes exceeds mine by a good bit but this saved me scads of reading, seems what you were good enough to share with us will be about all I need to know. By the way, somewhere in my scant reading I hit on a pH of 8 as the point where scabbing becomes a problem, but I don't know if that is universally true or not.

We planted two rows in the ground but I dud trenches a foot deep to plant them in and have been layering on soil as they have continued to emerge. The moment I see green they got another shovel full right on their little heads. Last week I had got the trenches up to ground level and two days ago I pulled up hills over them. They began emerging from the hills this morning so I'll start covering the ground with heavy mulch beginning this evening.

For whatever its worth I didn't bother to cut up my seed potatoes. I bought a 5 pound bag (a red variety) at Souther States and let them lay out by a sunny window for a week before we planted them. That lets the eyes get sprouted nicely. I only planted the 2 twenty-foot rows, which should be more than enough for my wife and I as well as our son and his family, so the 5- pounds was far more than I needed. I gave what was left to a neighbor.

Anyway, what I wanted to say, was that an old friend of mine used to grow his potatoes in a pit. His was about 2 feet deep and he used very little soil as he covered them on emergency, he just used straw until about ground level, where he topped it off with a couple of inches of soil. I've never seen anyone else grow them that deep or anyone else to plant them only in straw, but his results were very good. What suprised me even more was that he used the same spot repeatedly rather than rotate to another part of the garden. Didn't sound like a good way to do it to me, but like I said, the results were pleasing.

[Richard Steele]

13. PH test- that's the thing I've been kicking myself about since last year's bucket-potato experiment.

I had meant to get a test kit, but all the plants started growing
so well & so quickly, I figured "why bother ?"...

I mentioned that my bucket of cedar shavings produced -NO- potatos at all.
I just assumed that whatever "cedar chemicals" repel insects had also inhibited
the growth of potatos...

Until about two weeks after I had gotten rid of the cedar shavings,
when I was suddenly struck by the thought: "Hey, what if those cedar shavings
just had some crazy PH level?"
D'OH! :silly:

That's something else I'll be looking into this season.
I lives, I learns, knowhutimean?

[ThomWV]

14. This might interest you

The cedar shaving should have had the effect of acidifying the soil as they decomposed. I don't know but I think you were probably right on your first guess about the chemical makeup of cedar shavings having something to do with it. I'm not trying to say that with an authority, just that I suspect you are right.

When we first moved up here we had read far to many copies of Mother Earth News, but we did save quite a few potatoes back in those days. We packed them away in a cold dark basement and as I recall they were stored in wood shavings, as per something we had read somewhere.

That was the last time we grew them before this year, and that was nearly 30 years ago. It just never did make much sense to grow them to me. The way it worked out was that you paid $5 for a 50 pound sack of seed potatoes. Then you killed yourself digging trenches in the rocky ground to plant them. When they emerged you got to watch the beetles eat them all summer long and in the fall you got to dig up 100 pounds of potatoes alright but by that time the grocery store price had dropped down to four and a half cents a pound and you could have bought the crop for less than the seed cost. At least that was how it seemed. So we quit growing them. It just did not make sense to me to devote garden space to a crop that I could buy for a lot less than it cost to grow; a situation that seemed to get even worse when my labor was considered. Now in my old age I've gone back on good sense once again; but at least this time I limited myself to just a couple of short rows to satisfy that urge for 'new potatoes'.

[Gold Metal Flake]

15. Could you use an old bathtub as your container?

[Richard Steele]

16. I don't see why not. It'll hold dirt, won't it?

It's not as DEEP as a garbage can, but still deep enough
that you could mound quite a bit of dirt or mulch over the plants,
so it should work fine.

Since a bathtub only has the single drain hole, it would be
even more important to put that layer of gravel on the bottom
to allow water to escape freely.

[Gold Metal Flake]

19. I get it.

Layer of gravel, elevate the bottom and angle ever so slightly so that drainage through the drain hole is facilitated, and maybe even make a sort of boxed riser on top to hold an additional amount of dirt/mulch. I can put it behind my shed. If it works, I have room for more. Right on up the hill. Time to prowl the local illegal dumping areas!

[Joanne98]

20. Thanx for the informative post...

I planted potatoes in a raised bed of cider blocks. I wish I would have used a trash can cause now I'm trying to fiqire out how to make it higher. I think I'll used boards.

[Kolesar]

3. Don't lime the soil, you will get "scab"

Or, more correctly, your potatoes will get scab. I have been reading up because I am going to plant a pound of seed potatoes this year.

Dick Steele's post was a good read :thumbsup:

[Shoelace]

6. ah, that might have been the problem last year

because I did lime my whole garden and my potatoes didn't produce much at all and the few I did get didn't look healthy. Thanks!

[ThomWV]

11. Bad for tomatoes too.

[CC]

10. Great info everyone.

My FIL used to grow potatoes but never really shared what he was doing. Said it relaxed him. I miss Poppy's fresh grown potatoes and decided I wanted some in the garden this year. He also used to store them outside under a pile of leaves for the winter and we would still have very good potatoes by planting time the next year. Hoping we can do that too.

[Shoelace]

18. good luck to ya CC and let us know how they grow!