Who doesn’t love a good potato? If you live in an apartment or city home with a backyard, you may think that potatoes will never happen in your container garden. But au contraire! Potatoes may actually be the best-suited plants for garden on your deck, balcony or even front porch.
The actual type of container you use doesn’t matter too much—just make sure it’s deep enough for the potatoes to grow. You can use a wooden box, a 5-gallon bucket or old kitty litter buckets (cleaned out, of course). Here we use grow bags. Your grow bags or containers can be any size, but bare in mind, that the bigger your container, the bigger your potato yield.
The steps to growing potatoes in containers are super simple. First fill your container with compost. (If you have soil in a container from last year’s container garden, just scrape off the top 4 inches or so and add fresh compost as a top dressing. Your soil should still have plenty of nutrition to feed the potatoes.) Cut the potatoes so there’s at least one eye per section, and allow the cut side to seal over to prevent insect or disease penetration. Plant your potato seeds evenly spaced in the container—for the 20-gallon grow bag we used, we planted three seeds. Fertilize the top of each planted potato with bone meal and then cover with some additional compost.
As you water your potatoes throughout the season, the bone meal will release phosphorus into the soil to feed your growing root vegetables. After 90 to 100 days, once the leaves of the plants start to die back, it’s time to dig your potatoes!
