Growing Potatoes and Yams in a Container

With this garden season coming to a close it was time to harvest my potatoes. This season I decided to try growing potatoes in a bin that I’d layer with new soil throughout the season.

I setup this bin with a layer of twigs and rocks on the bottom to allow proper drainage through the holes I drilled in the bottom. The soil is mostly made up of clay with a bit of topsoil. In reality the quality of soil in this bin wasn’t very good but it was all I had. For this test I grew potatoes in one bin and sweet potatoes in another.

You can see the progression of the plants here over a month.

It’s time to harvest, through this process i realized these plastic bins become horribly weak after the 5 month growing time. If you want to try this method of growing potatoes make a container from wood or use a garden bag and place the container somewhere you can just tip it over to harvest it. Having my placed on my deck didn’t allow me to just dump it out, let alone the bin would shatter to pieces.

I have some unique ideas for a new container potato garden but you’ll have to stay subscribed for that. Here you can see the final potato harvest. The sweet potatoes first off produced next to nothing. Just 1 real sweet potato and a bunch of small roots. If I had left the sweet potatoes until april they may have fully developed.

As for the potatoes the harvest was not bad, I only placed a few sprouted potatoes or sprouted eyes to create all of this. I wanted to test the difference of planting a whole potato vs just a sprouted eye and it seems to not make a difference. For less than $1 worth of potatoes I produced $25 worth of organic potatoes. Share any thoughts you have on this process or if you have any unique ideas how improve this process.

#potatoes #containergardening #potato