Kitchen Garden Forum

I’m growing potatoes in 40L containers this year. A mixture of earlies and maincrop.

From people’s experience, what do you think is the ideal number of tubers per container?

I’m not looking for gigantic potatoes but definitely a good size. Especially for maincrop.

Any advice from your experience is welcomed!!

Welcome to the forum staceygrows.

I,too,am going to put potatoes in containers;my experiment for this year.I have been advised to put 3 inches of compost/soil in the bottom of the container and put two potatoes on top of this opposite each other.Turn container through 180 degrees top up with another 3 inches of compost/soil and put two more potatoes on top,again,opposite each other so that you have 4 potatoes placed in "4 corners" and top up to just below the rim to allow for watering.Grow on and enjoy when ready,which is usually after the flowers die back.

You need to find out whether the potatoes are determinate or indeterminate.

I believe the procedure Spooky is referring to is good for charlotte potatoes but do not know which type they are.

There are some great videos on you tube concerning growing in containers.

Good luck & lets us know how you get on.

Well Colin you surprised me!! I did not know that potatoes were determinate and indeterminate but coming from the same family as tomatoes it may be expected.Googling the subject First Earlies,Second Earlies are mostly determinate and do not need earthing up when in the ground just mulching.Main crop are indeterminate and require earthing up and mulching.I have Charlotte and Maris Piper planted in my plot but was given 3 x 35 litre planting bags and in which I am going to experiment with but might have to rethink which variety to put in them.Was looking for something different such as Blue Edzell.

Thank you both. I also didn’t realise there were determinate and indeterminate varieties of potatoes! I’m growing some in the ground too so it will be interesting to see what turns out best.

We,ve had mixed fortunes growing potatoes in containers. It obviously partly sepends on the size od the container but even in a large one I,d limit it to a maximum of 3 potatoes. We grew in 3 containers last year, two round and one spare old newspaper recycling box which had 4 potatoes in it. Each container produced several pounds of potatoes but they were all comparatively small. We just used "ordinary" potatoes which had started sprouting, to avoid wasting them.

I've never understood the growing of potatoes in containers as described on TV, they do it every year on Beechgrove. They seem very satisfied with what I consider ridiculously small yields in terms of quantity per number of seed tubers used. If you grow something like Charlotte in ground in the normal way RHS suggest 60 cms between the rows and 37 cms between the tubers, if you assume they go down 30 cms that is just over 66 litres per tuber and you would expect up to 2 kgs per plant. That would mean one in each growing bag would have less space than open ground but the normal advice seems to be 3 tubers in a 35/40 litre bag; they often seem to only yield 2 kgs in total, what a waste of seed potatoes!

New at growing potato, interesting to read this tread! Guess that I need to pay more attention to the container. Also I want to ask you all about using grow bags, like this, for example - is it useful for growing potato or I should use container instead? Thanks a lot!

I,d definitely use a deep container. Potatoes grow upward at quite a rate once the foliage starts appearing and if you use a growbag the foliage will soon start flopping all over the place.
You should use something of at least a normal size bucket depth, and if it,s bucket size plant one potato (and definitely no more than two) in the bottom third with a layer of compost below it. You can obviously use growbag compost gradually tipped into the container to cover the new emerging shoots as they. appear.
Don,t be too disappointed if you get only a few potatoes. My experience is that yields from this method tend to be on the low side.

If you really want to use a grow bag, I would stand it upright, cut off the top and then plant the potatoes in it so that they have a deep root run which they would not get in a conventionally used grow bag.

Using grow bags seems to be a little bit harder, so I think I should use container first. Thanks for the answers, wish all of you a good crop

I grow earlies in tubs most years this year I’ve only done 1 I must say the ones planted in my raised bed are growing just as fast I keep the tubs in the pollytunnel the idea is to have some earlies really early last year I did well four tubs averaging 36 tubers per tub all an edible size