How to grow Potatoes In Containers - Complete Growing Guide

[Music] well hello everyone welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the mi gardener channel i'm really excited for this episode because in this episode we're going to be talking about how to grow potatoes in containers it's going to be a continuation of our container growing guide series and i really do hope you're going to enjoy this one because it's definitely been one of the most highly requested growing guides for containers that we've ever had so let's get right into it the first tip to getting successful potatoes is obviously the elephant in the room seed potatoes here we have some seeds potatoes that we did ourselves we do have a video on how to make your own seed potatoes it's quite simple but it is definitely something that you're going to want to either purchase certified seed potatoes or make your own seed potatoes we've just taken our potatoes that we harvested last year and we store them in a five gallon bucket with some sand and a tiny bit of moisture they don't like to be exposed to air otherwise they'll start sprouting if you keep them cold throughout winter in a bucket of sand you'll have very very small eyes and that is the ticket to having great seed potatoes so we're going to be using our own sweet potatoes but just make sure you don't get them from the store if you get just regular store-bought potatoes that you know you'd be eating that are not seed potatoes they've been sprayed with a sprout inhibitor and that keeps the the eyes from forming and you will find that even though they do form eyes eventually once you put those in the ground they just don't form good potatoes your best tip for success is to get some seed potatoes now the next thing that you're going to need is the container since this is a container growing guide container is the pro i mean aside from the fact that the seed potatoes are the most important i would say containers are the next most important because if you have too small of a container you're just not going to have good luck you want to keep depending on how many plants you want to grow per container you want to keep it at a minimum of uh of five gallons and you can go on up from there i typically get go no more than 10 gallons and i can get three plants in this 10 gallon container here because of the fact that when you're moving around containers or at the end of the season you have to harvest the potatoes you have to dump them out and things like that you can see pretty heavy to lug around and so i find a 10 gallon container is very manageable for me and that's why i go to them no more than a maximum of 10 gallons now the next tip to having successful potatoes and containers is the soil the soil could not be more important potatoes are a crop that really needs good root development because they are a tuber they need to be able to put their roots down throughout the soil so they have room to set tubers if the soil gets compacted you'll find that your potatoes will be much smaller or almost non-existent because if soil compact it takes all the air out of the soil and that actually will compress things down that's a lot that's a big reason why gardeners don't have nice size potatoes is they just have too hard too much compaction in their soil and it gets too hard over time another thing that does is it doesn't drain well as we talked about with containers the container type definitely can help you out also with the right type of soil you want to be able to drain freely so as you can see here in our soil our soil is very loose it is very rich in organic matter and it's something you can compress but it breaks apart it also has perlite in it and that's because we are using actually uh it's per it's a pro-mix that we've used from last year and pro-mix is mostly sphagnum peat moss and as it breaks down it creates a beautiful rich compost but it still retains a lot of its texture that made it great in the first place so we are actually recycling a lot of our soil from last year and that's something that you can do with potatoes a lot of times people are always worried about potatoes you always want to change out the soil year after year and that's true to a certain extent if you have disease if you don't have disease on your potatoes and they stay very healthy you can reuse your soil year after year and we do and we just keep it we just keep it in a in a bucket and then we just use it in our containers year after year or we'll throw it on our beds and top it off the fertilizer we're using is trifecta plus it is our all-purpose fertilizer of choice and it's been that way for many many years now it is just a great once and done all-purpose fertilizer if you happen to go with trifecta plus you won't really need to worry about any specific nutrients but if you do go with something else you need to make sure that you put a good amount of potassium in your soil potassium is the most crucial component to having successful potatoes you can worry about the nitrogen you can worry about the phosphorus but at the end of the day it has actually been found in studies that potassium is the is the nutrient of choice for potatoes they will actually do better with more potassium in their soil in fact a recent study was done testing out different amounts of potassium in the soil and found that when when nitrogen phosphorus remained the same they remained constant the only thing that increased production in potatoes was the potassium levels so make sure that you add a lot of potassium in your soil it's going to help with plant health it's going to help with tuber development and it is going to help keep the plant growing nice and strong throughout the season stress-free because that's what potassium does so what we're going to be doing is we're going to be adding it to this soil and in a five-gallon container with trifecta obviously it'll be varying by how much you're going to add but for potatoes they are very heavy feeders we want to add about a half a cup to a cup depending on how many plants you have we're going to put a half a cup in our five gallon containers and that's good for the entire season um and you can you can reapply if you feel like it's needed as well but for us we're gonna put a half a cup and that's usually fine for the whole season in our five gallon containers and in our 10 gallon containers we're going to use a cup of fertilizer and that's just based on the volume of soil that's in your beds okay so we got our soil in here about three or four inches deep and the next thing we're going to do is we're going to fertilize this you want to fertilize right where the potatoes are going to be not above the plant not below the plant but right where the potatoes are going to be because that's where the roots begin to form and that's where they want the most nutrients so we're going to take our trifecta plus and we're going to simply put in about a cup for this 10 gallon container here and then we're simply going to work it in now you will notice that trifecta plus has some soil some or some some pelletized sulfur and you probably saw that on the surface of the soil there and it's just characterized by these little yellow almost like little yellow discs this is pelletized sulfur you can get at any hardware store or any you know garden center will have pelletized sulfur it does have some in there as you probably saw but we need to add a little bit more for potatoes because potatoes prefer a ph that is more acidic than any other vegetable in the garden like tomatoes they like a ph of around 6.5 slightly acidic potatoes they need a ph of around 5.5 to prevent scab scab is actually a disease that is caused from from two alkaline of ph even if the soil has a ph of seven that is two alkaline even though by our standards is considered neutral ph it's not even really alkaline there's just not enough acidity in the soil to prevent that scab and so by by adding about two tablespoons of pelletized sulfur here it's a it's an organic soil amendment you're going to lower the ph there of the soil to right around 5.5 and that's going to be great for for the potatoes and they're also going to be able to uptake nutrients better because when the ph is ideal the plant cannot take nutrients at its ideal rate so the next we're going to do is we're going to plant our potatoes now we've gotten the fertilizer and the sulfur incorporated in we're going to add our our seed potatoes here we prefer to go with a seed potato that has two or three eyes per plant and we're going to just set them right on top of the soil surface now what we're going to do is a little counter intuitive it's a little different than growing in ground typically you would heal them very slightly however when we're growing in this method we're going to hill all at once because we don't have the luxury of being able to hill up in a container we're just going to fill the container up at its top level and because these potatoes are going to be down in our container about four or five inches below soil level it's going to allow the plants to grow up and any root development will occur down here underneath soil underneath the soil level and that's going to keep potatoes from coming up and being exposed to sunlight and it's also going to allow a lot of room for root development and more tuber development so all we're going to do is just take some fresh soil and throw it on top i'm going to grab a little bit more just fill up our pots but that will be done so final tips for success with growing potatoes is watering and sunlight so the sunlight that these potatoes need to receive is full sun we make sure that when they're out on our patio here we make sure that they get around 10 hours of full sun they will love 10 hours they'll do fine with around seven or eight but the more sun you can give them the better because they're going to create more energy with those leaves meaning larger tubers and more of them for you so we give them around 10 hours of sun full sun exposure is great you don't have to worry about them scorching or anything in these pots they're large enough to where the soil is going to stay cool even in the hotter summer days and that does lead me to more to moisture or watering you want to make sure because they are prone to root rot and tuber rot you do want to make sure that you keep them well watered but only when they really need it what we'll typically do is we will dig down about two inches if it feels damp we'll cover it back up and we'll leave it if it seems dry or if the soil is is quite dry and separating from the edges of the container will give it a really good watering and that just makes sure the plant stays moist because if the if the water goes or if the soil goes very dry and it's lacking too much water the plants become stressed and the tubers will then become smaller because the plants are actually using up some of the water reserves in the potatoes so you want to make sure that you do keep them damp but not too damp that it causes rot and that's really all there is to growing potatoes they're a very fun plant to grow i wish you the best of luck with growing them and let me know in the comments box below if you uh if you are deciding to grow them this year for the first time and let me know also how it turns out uh over on facebook send us a message at the end of the season and let us know how we did and and the tips if they helped you out [Music]

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 1,199,227

Keywords: growing potatoes, watering potatoes, patio gardening, complete, how to grow potatoes, seed potato, container gardening, walk through, potatoes in containers, Premiere_Elements_15, patio garden, guide, harvesting potatoes, howto, walkthrough, migardener, scab potato, how-to, fertilizing potatoes, growing, tutorial, container garden, how to, potato

Id: co6iW_ji6sU

Length: 10min 30sec (630 seconds)

Published: Thu May 10 2018