You read our first article on potatoes, you have your potatoes planted in your container and a few weeks have passed (You’ve been watering often right?) you should be seeing potato sprouts. Let these sprouts grow until most of them are about 12 inches tall. Now it is time for a process called “earthing up.”

Earthing up is the prime reason I grow my potatoes in tall containers. It makes this process especially easy. Just take your compost mix and add one trowel full at a time - being careful not to damage the leaves. Keep doing this until you have added four inches of compost.

Now is a good time to fertilize. If you can find it, add 10-20-20 fertilizer as the instructions reccomend. I could not find it so I found a slow release tomato fertilizer that is 3-4-6, that should be fine for this application and great for my tomatoes. A fertilizer like this is great for potatoes because it does not focus on Nitrogen (The first of the three numbers.) Nitrogen is what you add when you want the plant to really focus on putting on new leaves. Leaves are not your focus with potatoes.

Water well.

Repeat the earthing up process every time your plants reach 12 inches from the surface of the soil. Stop when you have four to six inches remaining in the container.

Now that you are an expert, let me tell you how not to plant your potato box.

I made a mistake. There, I admitted it. My first real mistake of the year. I mean, aside from not netting my strawberries soon enough, planting radishes too close to the soaker hose, planting old spinach seeds that only germinated 50% of the time, forgetting to start seeds indoors this year, not clearing the maple tree seeds before they sprouted, failing to get my lemon cucumbers to germinate, not having my tomato cages ready yet, losing a piece from my EarthBox and underfilling both of my self watering planters. Other than those things, this is my first real mistake of the year.

When I bought my seed potatoes this year I was tempted by variety. I bought four varieties of potatoes. Three varieties went in one box and the remaining variety went in to the other box.  With most crops you can plant this way with no reprocussions, but since potatoes require the addition of more soil over time, this is a bad idea.

What happened to me is that some varieties shot up to 12 inches tall in no time while others were just sprouting. That meant that for one plant it was time to add 4 inches of soil and for another it would be a week or more before it’s turn.

Everything turned out fine as I earthed up, I was just not able to add soil as consistantly as I had hoped to. That means I may not get quite as many clutches of potatoes.

In the box with one variety I am seeing even growth and it very easy to keep things growing. (Pay no attention to the blue container, my 2 year old garden helper likes to throw things in the potato bins.)

Side note: Potatoes can take a beating from 2 year olds. Look at him looming ominously gazing in the background of the picture below. What is he going to throw in next? Tennis ball? Toy shovel? A bucket? His bubble mower? Could be anything.