How To Grow Potatoes In Containers

Imagine spreading butter over a plate of hot steaming potatoes that were growing on your patio only an hour or so ago – the taste is far removed from supermarket spuds. The humble potato is probably our most popular of vegetables: easy to grow, and so versatile, they are the mainstay of many tasty dishes.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need a big garden to grow your own crop of potatoes; you don’t even need particularly green fingers, nor have to fuss too much.

Those of us with limited space in the garden, or no garden at all, can easily grow vegetables on the patio. Potatoes are easy to grow and you can produce a good crop for very little cost. All you need is a flat surface in a sunny spot.  Any container that is large enough to hold at least 8 litres of compost will suffice.

Potato bags are the ideal solution where space is restricted – they are robust, deep, take little surface up, and are large enough to give the plants plenty of room to grow. They are also equipped with handles so are easy to move around.  One of the many advantages of growing potatoes in containers is that they suffer less from pests and diseases.

There are lots of different varieties of potato available and it is much more interesting to plant something that you cannot buy readily.  ‘Pink Fir Apple’, ‘Charlotte’, and ‘Salad Blue’ are unusual varieties and well worth growing in containers. Potatoes are grouped under Cropping Types; ‘First Earlies’ would harvest in 10 weeks, ‘Second Early’ 13 weeks, ‘Early Maincrop 15 weeks and ‘Maincrop’ 20 weeks.

If you filled your container with good quality compost and plant the seed potato about 13cm below the surface, you would get a crop. However, the traditional way of planting is to ‘earth up’ the plants as they grow and below is listed the 5 easy steps to harvesting a bumper crop of your favourite potatoes.

• As soon as you have your seed potatoes to hand, place in trays or egg boxes and leave in a cool bright position and allow the shoots to grow up to 25mm. This process is called ‘chitting’.

• Add about 15cm of compost to your potato bag and place in 3-5 chitted seed potatoes. Cover with about 10cm of compost and water.

• Green shoots will soon emerge and these should be covered with more compost. Continue covering the shoots until the compost reaches 5cm below the rim.

• Water well and feed according to the manufacturer’s instructions and don’t be tempted to overfeed.

• The potato plants will eventually produce flowers which are quite attractive. If you have planted first or second earlies wait until the flowers die before harvesting your crop. For main crop varieties let the whole plant wither before digging up.

When space is tight, as a gardener, one has to optimise what’s available – many gardeners use their patio in addition to having a plot for growing. For more information and ideas on container growing go to our website, we have all you’ll need to get you gardening on your patio.

Published April 13th, 2015 by Jordan. Article ref 3754

Tags: potato containers, potatoes

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