- Welcome back to "Jacques in the Garden".
Today we're going to be talking
about three different ways to plant potatoes
from containers to in ground.
Before we plant a potato, let's talk a little bit
about what's going on.
If you take a close look at the potato,
you could see it has these little bumps.
These are called the eyes.
That's where the sprout emerges.
So right here is an example
of a sprout that's going to be the potato plant itself.
So when you're planting your potatoes,
you have a few different options
on how to deal with this, and I'll show you
really quickly how you would split the potato
and how you would actually get the sprout to form.
So the way you actually get these potatoes
to sprout beforehand, which is optional technically,
is you wanna put them in a semi sunny spot.
I put them in my mudroom on the windowsill
where they get a little bit of sun throughout the day.
That was just enough to get these guys to sprout.
Now, if you have a big potato
with many eyes, I'm talking one, two, three, four, five,
six, at least six different eyes on it, you can
actually split this potato to get double the amount
of potato from your potato.
So I'm gonna take a knife, cut it down the middle
and now I have at least one, two, three eyes
on this potato here.
And on this one I have quite a bit.
So those eyes will now form new plants
and I've now doubled my harvest from that same potato.
What I have in this dish here is a little bit of wood ash.
You wanna take your potato and just dip it in there.
This is also optional, not really needed
but that little bit
of wood ash has potassium, which helps it root.
It also will just help it just scab
over a little bit faster.
So now we can actually go plant these potatoes out.
(upbeat music)
I've prepared the soil now, and all it is is a mixture
of basically 50/50 potting mix with a nice compost.
That'll provide it enough nutrients to grow
throughout the season and the water retention that we need
for growing in a container.
So the first way we're gonna plant these potatoes is
in this 10 gallon grow bag.
So let's go ahead and fill this with soil first.
To fill my containers, I actually like
to push my wheelbarrow backwards.
This allows me an easy way to fill my container up
with soil without having to sort of guide it in
with the little front end.
So what I'm gonna do here is I'm going
to just put maybe three inches or so of this soil mix
and then I'll bring you in a little closer
to show you exactly how I place these potatoes in.
I'll take this moment as I'm laying out these potatoes
to mention that they are technically indeterminate
and determinate potatoes, but really they're just
a long season versus short season potato.
So this potato in here that I'm putting
in is the Baltic Rose and this is a mid-season potato.
A mid-season potato is one that develops earlier
on in the season and actually doesn't
really require any hilling.
So I filled this up to three inches and now we're going
to just backfill it.
In this 10 gallon bag I have three potatoes.
Realistically, I should probably only put one to two
but I'm going to be actually running
a few different trials here where I have this bag
with three, another bag with two, and another bag with one
of the same variety to see what difference it really is.
So again, this is a mid-season.
Any earlier mid-season potato,
you could just plant all the way in.
You don't have to worry about hilling up.
So I'm just going backfill it entirely
and then we'll mulch it at a later time.
But now let's go to method number two.
Method number two pretty much starts
off the same way with a 10 gallon grow bag.
We're gonna fill it with about three inches of soil here.
Now that we have our three inches of soil
in, we're going to put in our next potato.
This is actually a different variety
that's called Charlotte.
This is a potato that does really well
in containers as a favorite of Elliot Coleman
who is a very well known organic gardener,
slash farmer I should say.
Now what you want to do is the exact same thing.
We're gonna take our three potatoes.
You're gonna place them at the bottom here.
And now the difference is, is that we're going
to actually bury them but we're only going to bury them
with about two inches or so of soil.
As those sprouts emerge and start poking themselves out
of the soil and get about two to three inches up
above the soil, I'll go ahead and bury it so there's
only one inch remaining and I'll keep doing this
until I get to the top of the container.
Let's go ahead and use this plant tag
as an example of how you would hill the potato.
So if you see up to here,
that's about three inches of growth.
What you're gonna do is just get your soil
and literally just fill it up
until that last little bit of plant is actually poking out.
And then you wanna let it grow again,
and then the cycle repeats until you get
to the top of the pot.
This works well for potatoes that are mid
to late season because they grow
for a longer period of time and can actually benefit
from setting more tubers from hilling up.
The earlier potato, which was the mid-season potato,
wouldn't really develop any new tubers
by continuously hilling up.
So it's really just fill it up once and you're done.
So for method number two, we're going to be hilling up.
Now let's move on to method number three
which is probably my favorite.
This next method is probably my favorite
because of its beauty and its simplicity
and it's called the root staff method for growing potatoes.
All you'd need is a hay bale of straw or hay.
And the best thing about it is it can even be a spoiled sort
of rotted hay product like this one
which are straw bales that were left
over from a pumpkin patch
and they're just not really suitable for much anything else.
So I was able to get these
for only like $8 each, which was quite the bargain.
So all this involves is spreading out your straw.
I'm gonna go ahead and break this up
and then we'll talk about what the next step is.
(upbeat music)
One of my favorite things
about this method is it's actually entirely no dig
and we'll show you exactly what that means in a moment.
But for now, I'm gonna finish breaking up the straw.
The next potato we're planting is Sarpo Mira.
This is actually a potato that's very popular in Europe.
Apparently it's a heavy setter and it's extremely delicious.
It was originally reserved for royalty,
so that's how you know it's good.
So the roots out method, this is
where the beauty really comes in.
We've laid down that first layer of straw on top
of this bed, which just had some compost on top of it.
I haven't really grown anything in it for about a month.
So all I'm going to do is take my potato,
make a little gap in the straw here
and just put it right there on the surface of the soil.
And that's it.
All we're going to do
after that is take a bunch of straw and bury it over.
And as that potato grows,
we'll keep adding straw on top of it.
In this case, it's not necessarily to hill it up,
to develop more tubers, but as the potatoes grow,
they will begin to start setting outside the straw
and you don't want any sun
on your potatoes cause then they turn green.
That technically makes them toxic.
So what we're going to do is right now lay
out all these potatoes right onto the surface.
Here are the first potatoes we put down.
So they're about roughly a little bit close to a foot apart
and that's all we're going to do is we cleared the straw.
I'll show you right here.
You clear the straw until you get down to the dirt.
You grab your potato
and then you simply just put it right on the surface.
Now, you could dig it in slightly
if you're a little bit concerned, but it's not
really necessary because the straw is going to be acting
as the entire growing medium for this potato.
The beauty of the straw is
that once we harvest these potatoes,
all this straw will be very broken down
and it's going to be create this wonderful rich soil
and also make it very easy to collect the potatoes.
In all other methods where you bury the potato
in the ground, you then have to dig it all up,
ruins the soil structure and it also just is really hard
to find all those potatoes.
If you plant them once, you're probably gonna have them
forever because you're never going
to find every single seed.
So this is the really beautiful thing about it is
that once you're done putting it in the ground,
you just take your straw, I have another sheath
of straw right here and you're just going to bury it.
Now as this potato emerges, you'll start seeing it grow
and create leaves.
You're just wanna continuously add more straw
to make sure that none
of those potatoes are exposed to any sun and you'll have
the easiest potato harvests you'll ever have.
And you'll also be left with incredibly rich soil
for in this case spring for me.
We've got a couple more potatoes to plant,
but that's it for these methods.
I will be running
all these different experiments I mentioned
such as burying them entirely, putting multiple potatoes
versus only one potato in a grow bag.
So if you wanna see what the results
for that is make sure you subscribe and follow up
because I will definitely be posting a follow up video
to these three methods to show you guys exactly
what you get in the end.
Thanks for watching and I'll see you guys next time.