growing fresh potatoes in your home garden is easy and also very rewarding
let's look at growing potatoes in containers so we will be starting our
potatoes from seeds these seed potatoes can be bought at any gardening store and
we are planting our seed potatoes in January which is the ideal month for
planting seed potatoes in Southern California
and the reason is that the plants will then emerge in about 6 to 8 weeks which
is when the spring weather sets in which is nice and warm for growing potatoes
very well the method that we are using to plant our potatoes is the trench
method where we are digging a large hole in this case since it's a container we
will be digging to about half the size of the container so right about in the
middle of the container is where we will be planting the seed potatoes
and you can plant about five seed potatoes in one whiskey barrel container
as you can see here
potatoes just love warm weather and they do not like extremely hot weather so
while the spring season through the summer season is a good time to grow
potatoes you do not want to delay your potato planting too much later into the
season and that is because while potatoes grow very well during the warm
spring months they struggle to grow in the extremely hot summer months that we
get here in Southern California now I used to plant potatoes twice a year
however I have noticed that January is the ideal time to get a good crop of
potatoes so I would recommend planting your potatoes in January and harvest it
around summertime now the container mix that we are using is a mix of peat moss
compost and vermiculite and this potting mix has remained over from a previous
plant that we grew so we are not making a lot of changes to the soil but we did
add some organic fertilizer and just to remind everyone you do need to keep
adding organic fertilizers every time you plant a new crop in your container
and that way over a period of time it builds good soil and 49 days since
planting you can see that the plants have emerged and they're looking quite
healthy and at about 75 days they've developed strong leaves and I've used up
almost all nutrition from the containers and this is when you need a liquid
fertilizer every 10 days or so and you can use compost tea you can use warm tea
you can even use a salt based liquid fertilizer it just depends on what you
want to go with 93 days since planting you can see that the plants have grown
quite large leaves and if you have not used a fertilizer while planting you can
always use an all-purpose fertilizer the all-purpose fertilizer will cause the
plants to grow larger leaves which in turn will cause the plant to produce
more potatoes and at 165 days you can see that we are
harvesting our potatoes and we planted two sets of crops two containers and
this is a mix of Yukon Gold potatoes as well as the red potatoes
and the Yukon Gold potato is especially susceptible to blight which is a disease
that affects the potato plant and if it does affect your plant I would recommend
just remove those leaves and stems and your plant will be okay now here's a
harvest and it doesn't look like a big harvest but remember that homegrown
potatoes are fresh delicious and even if you don't get a big harvest don't be
disheartened because you're still growing organically and you're getting
potatoes that are free from growth inhibitors and all the other chemicals
that go into the grocery store potatoes and this is our harvest looks like and
we will be harvesting our potatoes from the second container as well
and in this container have you planted the purple potatoes and some other
varieties of potatoes
especially very delicious I was pleasantly surprised at the taste of the
purple potatoes and as you can see they look beautiful
extremely easy to grow and you can mix and match different potato varieties
when you are growing potatoes in containers
and once again here you can see we are continuing to harvest our potatoes and
they look absolutely amazing these are the red potatoes that we planted next to
the purple potatoes and we're going to be removing some of the soil from the
top so that we can start seeing how many more potatoes are here in this container
now remember that across containers you may see a variance in how many potatoes
are being produced and that's just because of the fertilizers in nutrition
that's present in the soil some may have a little bit more than the other and you
can see here these potatoes they look amazing
and make sure that you dig up the entire container soil and make sure that you
harvest all the potatoes because some of these potatoes may be hiding deep within
the container and this is one of the benefits of
growing with the trench method the potato not only produces at the bottom
but also on the sides as the plant grows up and these are all the potatoes we
harvested and as you can see here it looks quite good and that extremely
delicious you can wash them if you want to use them right away
or you can leave them as is if you want to store them so there we have it folks
that was our episode on growing potatoes in containers if you like this video
don't forget to give us a thumbs up and if you have any questions or comments do
put them in the comments box below see you again soon happy gardening