Potatoes

A couple of years ago (well 7 to be exact) we decided to have a go growing potatoes. When I was growing up we had a big potato bed and would end up with huge hessian sack full of potatoes. We didn’t have the space for something like that but I figured it would be nice to try growing a few.

Mr T came up with the idea of having part of the garden bed adjustable so it could grow upwards with the potatoes. Clever fella.

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We planted some seed potatoes in June and then in October harvested these

That’s probably not too bad for 4 plants, but it seemed like a lot of work and time that the garden bed couldn’t be used. So we didn’t grow potatoes again. Until this year.

This year I decided to try something different. Potatoes in tubs! I was going to use grow bags but this seemed even easier. I got the idea from the people at Tullamore Farm (they are on Facebook, check them out) as they plant potatoes in 20l food grade buckets with drainage holes drilled into them. They stagger plant from around March through to September, which would mean they are harvesting from June/July through to Dec/Jan. Growing in buckets has the advantage that you can just tip over the bucket rather than having to dig, and you aren’t using up valuable garden space if that is at a premium.

I have to admit that we didn’t use food grade tubs, I was impatient and just went and bought cheap tubs. But after doing a bunch of reading I decided the risk from leached plastic was pretty low. I was able to utilise a bit of garden behind the trampoline and next to the water tank so that was another benefit of growing in tubs.

The other day I noticed that the tops of the first lot I planted had started to die off. So today I dragged the tub over near the compost bin and tipped it out.

Ok so maybe not a huge harvest but that is just from the first tub and I have several things I will do differently next time.

• Source food grade tubs because I think they will be easier to manoeuvre
• Put in more drainage holes – I think I lost a few potatoes to rotting because the mix was quite wet.
• Choose a better spot because while they were nicely out of the way, getting in to them was a bit of a pain. So better access needed for watering and topping up the soil/mulch.