Anyone growing Garbage Can Potatoes?

[love2read]

I'm going to give it a try this year. Anyone care to join me or maybe you tried it last year?

http://gardentenders.com/projects/261

[Julie in CA]

I'm going to give it a try this year. Anyone care to join me or maybe you tried it last year?

http://gardentenders.com/projects/261

We planted ours last week. We'll see how it goes!

[Brigitte]

We planted ours last week. We'll see how it goes!

 

What size garbage cans are you using?

[love2read]

I'm not Julie, but I'm using a regular size can that we would put by the side of the road for trash pickup. I think it's 25-30 gallon. I paid .59/pound for seed potatoes and only bought about 7 pounds. Probably they won't be enough, but it's a start. None of the sites I viewed told how many potatoes to put in the can.

[Renthead Mommy]

Okay, I just looked at this and it is interesting.

 

Last year I helped my neighbor with her potatoes. She did plant them in the ground, but then we built up sides with wood and cardboard. It worked similar to the garbage can idea.

 

However, instead of piling on more dirt as the plants grew, she piled on straw. They of course started out in dirt, but adding the straw as the plant grew gave her cleaner potatoes, and it is so much lighter it allowed her to build the sides from cardboard.

 

It worked great. Almost too great, as the plants were overflowing the boxes we built and she just couldn't make them any higher. She said she got a good yeild of potatoes, and that they were quite tasty.

[tricia]

Cool idea. We are going to look into this.