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In this article I will share some tips and tricks to grow those large potatoes in pots and increase your potato yields!
The last few years, I have been trying to grow large potatoes in containers and also get a massive potato harvest from pots, meaning, I want a LOT of potatoes and I want them to be large. I was getting an ok harvest, but the potatoes were always small, and never as big of a harvest as I had hoped.
So I was left with two questions. How can you grow the biggest potatoes? And how do you increase the yield of a potato harvest grown in containers? Read on to find the answers and tips on what worked for me!
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And then I figured it out. A while ago, I stumbled upon someone on YouTube, who was having absolutely amazing results. Dan from Allotment Diary who is from the UK. The video I watched, he harvested over 25 pounds from a 13 gallon (50 liter) pot, and some of these potatoes were HUGE!
The Tutorial on How to Grow a Massive Potato Harvest In Pots
Thankfully Dan from Allotment Diary, has made a lot of videos on his process. This is the video I originally watched:
My Results Last Year Growing Potatoes in Pots
This was my 12.8lb harvest from a small 10x12 pot last year! This pot is almost ⅔rd full of potatoes!
So last year, I grew my potatoes his way. The results were AMAZING! I actually had, that massive potato harvest from pots that I had been trying to achieve! So I am here to share how I did it, following Dan's advice.
I did not weigh all my food harvested last year, but I did weigh my best pot. It was only a small pot, about 10" wide x 12" high, so approximately 2-3 gallons I am guessing? My harvest from that single little pot was 12.8lbs!!!!
And the potatoes were HUGE compared to what I have been getting in the past! They were the German Butterball variety. Dan has different varieties of potatoes in the UK than we do in the US, so I am having to experiment a bit to see which varieties do well with this method. A new variety that I grew for the first time last year, also did very well using this method, they are called Ciklamen. Yukon Gold also did well.
Weighing my largest potato haul last fall. The scale reads 13.8 lbs, but the pot itself weighed 1 lb!
How to grow potatoes in pots and containers
The bed that I planted my pots into, was a bed that was developed two years ago using Back to Eden gardening methods. First I layered cardboard over the grass. Than we moved our goat barn manure and used bedding pile, onto the cardboard. It was about 6"-8" thick after spreading it evenly over the entire bed.
Than I covered that, with a thick layer of straw, maybe another 6". We did this in the fall, and let it just sit over the winter. By spring, the soil was and still is, amazing. This is where I decided I would plant my potato pots.
digging a hole by spade close up in summer day
Instead of planting in rows, like Dan shows in the video, I dug a large hole for each potato pot. I placed the pot in the hole, and moved the soil back up around the potato pot, covering the bottom 8-10" of the pot, so the roots can grow out of the pot, into the soil. I couldn't find the same fertilizers Dan used in the UK, so I used an all purpose organic vegetable fertilizer with the highest phosphate number I could find.
My potato garden, covered in straw for the winter, with new potato growth peeking out this spring.
Growing potatoes in winter
This year, I added a new spin on growing the potatoes this year. As you all may have figured out, I am a huge Paul Gautschi fan from the Back to Eden gardening method. Check out my article on the Back to Eden Gardening method here: The Secret to Easy Gardening, No Weeding!.
Paul does plant his potatoes in the ground, but he harvests his potatoes and then immediately plants his BIGGEST potato from the harvest, back into the same hole. The thought being, the potato you plant, is actually the food, for the new potato plant. So why would you plant small one's? Or cut them into smaller pieces?
Planting large potatoes instead of pieces
Paul harvests and plants all of his potatoes for the year in about 5 minutes in late September. So when I harvested last fall, I used this method, and replanted my largest potatoes straight back into the pots I harvested from.
I added more fresh home made compost mixed together with a little bit of store bought organic compost and mixed that together with the compost the potatoes were planted in previously. Than I covered the whole area of pots with a thick layer of straw to help insulate them a bit for the winter.
Fertilizing Potatoes in Containers
New growth on the potatoes peeking out!
To be honest, I wasn't sure if this new twist of planting the potatoes in the fall would even work. With our very wet winters here in the Pacific Northwest, I thought there was a very high likelihood that the potatoes would just rot. But this week I noticed new growth starting to poke out of a few of the pots! So I am very excited to see now how this works out.
I did not fertilize last fall when I planted them. So I immediately went and grabbed the fertilizer when I saw the new growth, and sprinkled maybe 2 TBSN's over each pot.
When the new growth is more consistent across all of the pots, I will remove the straw that is on top of each pot, and add some more fresh compost to the top of each pot with maybe another tablespoon of fertilizer mixed in. I will than cover the pots with another layer of straw. I am only adding the top layer of straw, to prevent the uppermost potatoes from getting sun scald.
Last year, the potatoes were literally bursting up out of the soil and the pots! They were so full! Anyway, stay tuned. I will definitely post an update on my harvest for this year! Let me know if you are going to try this method! I am anxious to hear about your results. 🙂
Successfully growing plentiful large potatoes in containers
In case you are wondering about WHY I choose to plant potatoes in pots instead of the ground, it is because it is easier to harvest them. Lay out a tarp and dump the pot, or dump the pot in a wheel barrow, and you can easily find all the potatoes.
If you plant in the ground, it is often difficult to find them all, and then you will have more potatoes coming up in that spot forever! It is also easy to nick the potatoes with the shovel or garden fork you are digging them up with.
It is not too late to plant your own potatoes using this method. In the past, I've usually aimed for St Patrick's Day in March, as a target date to get my potatoes planted here in the Pacific Northwest. In colder climates, you can plant into April. If you plant much later than that, consider planting some early potatoes like Red Norland or Caribe and you should still do ok.
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Karen
Did you ever post the results of this winter potato experiment? I used the search feature and couldn't find it.
Tamara
Hi Karen, No, I don't believe I ever did post an update, but it worked amazingly well here for me! In fact, I've kept at it and will keep doing so! Hope that helps!
Kay
Do you cut the bottom out of the pots, so the roots can grow into your soil? You did mention roots going into the soil.
Tamara
Hi Kay, you want to use pots that already have large drainage holes in them, and that should be adequate enough. No need to cut the pot.
Lisa Davenport
Amazing harvest!! How many potatoes do you plant per pot?
Tamara
It depends on the size of the pot and the type of potato! It also depends on if you cut up your seed potatoes or not. I choose not to do that, and I plant the potatoes whole. So for a 5 gallon pot, I might plant 4 fingerling potatoes, but maybe only 1-2 russet or larger potatoes, depending on their size. My best advice is to take notes on what you do, when you do it, and how they did in the end. If it worked well for you, repeat next year! If you feel like your potatoes were small or you didn't get as big a harvest as you had hoped, maybe do less potatoes per pot, maybe add more fertilizer, water more often. Make notes again that year and eventually you will be happy with your formula enough to keep repeating it!