Potatoes suck to grow. There, I said it. There’s a laundry list of problems with them:

• You can’t really grow anything in the spot you grew potatoes in last year for fear of disease.
• You have to dig them out of the ground when they are ready so you usually break a few potatoes just harvesting.
• The foliage can get quite large for the size of the harvest.

But after reading about a couple of other methods like this one I decided to try them out.

I found a 36 gallon Rubbermaid storage container on sale for $9 and thought it would be a good fit. The nice thing about containers for potatoes is that you can dump the soil on a tarp at the end of the year, separate out your potatoes and you are done. No shovels involved!

36 Gallon Rubbermaid storage container

Here’s what I have done:

Bought a few pounds of seed potatoes and left them on a sunny windowsill until sprouts were coming out of the eyes.

Drilled holes all over the bottom of the container every few inches to make sure water could drain.

Here are the holes when I finished.

Put a layer of landscaping fabric to make sure the soil does not seep out of the box.

Mix some soil for the box that is half compost. Put 4 inches of compost in the bottom and distribute your seed potatoes as seen here.

Now when you cover the potatoes with a thin layer of soil you are all set for a while.

Soon the plants will sprout and start growing quickly. When they are 12″ tall, add 4 more inches of dirt. Repeat this step until the container is full, add some fertilizer a couple of times throughout the season and you should have more potatoes than you know what to do with.

As my crop grows I will share pictures and add a second post about the harvest.

How do you grow potatoes?

Click here to read part two of our series. Growing Potatoes in Storage Bins - Part Two: Earthing Up