Hi gardeners today we are planting potatoes in grow bags the nice thing about growing potatoes in a bag is that once they are planted, they are pretty low maintenance, so the basics of growing potatoes in a grow bag is you’re going to fill the bottom you know a third of the container four to six inches with some potting soil and you’re going to place a few potatoes sprouts up on top of the soil and then another four to six inches of soil on top of the potato so you’re gonna have ten inches to a foot of soil.
You’re gonna go ahead and place this bag in the sun somewhere where the leaves when they do appear can get some sunlight and then you’re gonna water it it’s pretty easy from then on not gonna have to do traditional hilling you’re not gonna have to do much weeding and when it comes time to harvest them you don’t have to take them out of the ground so that’s really nice.
The first thing you’ll need are seed potatoes so sweet potatoes are just normal potatoes except for they haven’t been treated with any kind of like coating to keep them from sprouting because unlike in the grocery store. we do want these ones to sprout so either buy seed potatoes or look for you know farmer’s market organic potatoes that haven’t been treated with any kind of sprayer coating to keep them from sprouting in the store.
This is a blue variety of potatoes that i got from west coast seeds the thing with sea potatoes is you want them to have sprouted a little bit before you plant them so if you buy your sweet potatoes and they don’t have sprouts yet just leave them in the house summer they’re going to be exposed to air and light and let them sprout a little bit you want the sprouts to be you know a half inch to maybe an inch potatoes are neat because you can see the sprouts coming out of the top right so those are going to be the stems of the new plant after we plant them, but also if you look at the very bottom you can see it has a little like potato belly button this root is where it was connected to the mother plant.
So potato grow bags these are really cool just little fabric bags this one’s almost like a tarp like material i’ll put a link to this one and some other really excellent potato grow bags, but basically what you’re looking for is like a large kind of planter something that’s maybe five gallons maybe 20 gallons you want to be more than a foot deep so like a foot would be minimum but you know preferably 15 to 18 inches deep in terms of how much soil it can hold that’s going to give your potatoes lots of room lots of soil to grow in while still keeping them shielded from the sun the other thing to look for in potato grow bags is drainage so drainage holes.
Make sure that the potato grow bags that you pick have drainage holes you can see the little metal grommets on this one that’s where the water is going to be able to drain out this one has ones on the bottom and on the side so when you’re choosing your potato grow bags make sure that you’re checking that there’s some way for water to drain out of it grow bags are such a fantastic way to grow potatoes you know you can grow them in a small space you’re not digging you can move them to safety if you’re going to get bad weather like hail or something they’re definitely easier to harvest and it makes the whole process of planting and growing potatoes easier for gardeners.
Step one is to put a layer of potting soil on the bottom of the grow bag so i like to do like four to six inches so for this bag it’s about a third full of potting soil before i even put the potatoes in i’ve planted potato grow bags with only like an inch or two atthe bottom and it’s been totally fine though too so if you don’t have a ton of potting soil you want to skimp somewhere i would skimp on the bottom i really think potting soil is one area.
Where it’s worth spending the money to get good potting soil you know potatoes are roots they want like an airy soil so that there’s room for them to grow they’re going to be taking up that space this particular pro-mix potting soil that i’m using is a mix of peat cocoa perlite compost and some organic fertilizer i like to use potting mixes that have the organic fertilizer in them already i also do like one that’s omri listed so you can look for the armory label to make sure that it’s listed for for use in organic gardening.
All right so i’ve got about five inches of potting mix in the bag here now it’s time to put in the potatoes so in a bag like this you could plant one potato if that was all that you had or you could probably plant like four or five so here’s a potato with some nice sprouts coming out of the top this one looks good it doesn’t have a lot of eyes so it looks like it’s putting most of its energy into those two sprouts at the top so that’s perfect.
If it had up like a bunch of other sprouts i might like knock some of the ones on the side off but it looks like it’s channeling all its energy into those two happy sprouts so i’m going to just tuck it into the soil here you want to put this little potato belly button down onto the soil so that the sprouts are facing up to the sky i think the rule of thumb is you’re gonna plant one seed potato for every like two or three gallons of container so in a five gallon container you’d be perfectly fine to plant two.
You know i think you could probably get away with more you could just plant one it would be fine potatoes are super forgiving anyway you’ve gone and turned a compost bill and seen potatoes growing out of it and they’re just like in a pile growing all these crazy potato plants out of it you know what it means they’re gonna be fine where they put in one potato two four or five it’s gonna be all right.
I do like to plant at least two potatoes in each grill bag just in case one isn’t happy but yeah you could easily put four or five in one of these and they would be fine too now if you don’t have enough sweet potatoes you wish you had more instead of just like knocking off the extra eyes
What you can do is actually cut up your seed potatoes just make sure that you’ve got two eyes two little chitstems coming out and also some of the bulk of the potato to where the roots are going to get their energy all right now i’m going to cover them with another four to six inches of potting soil so the seed potatoes are kind of sandwiched in the middle of the potting soil after planting potting soil is not actually going to go the top of this bag.
Which is kind of meat potatoes you can just keep kind of adding a little bit more soil up to them so don’t worry if there’s extra space at the top first of all it’ll help you with watering but second of all you can add more soil as the plants grow as long as the leaves are able to access sunlight so once your sweet potatoes are planted in the grow bag.
Then it’s time to water it this is also a great time to label the grow bag if you’re growing different kinds of potatoes probably only going to have to water this once or twice a week in the springtime
When it gets really quite hot here it’s going to need to be watered more often just check it sometimes the soil on the top will be dry and crusty but the soil like an inch down will be totally fine so don’t be afraid to check out the soil and see what’s going on in the grow bag before you water i wouldn’t take this project too seriously i mean potatoes grow happily in compost heaps and pantries if you’re using good seed potatoes you can see they’ve sprouted.
You’re using a high quality potting soil and you’re keeping it moist but not like overly wet making sure that your grow bags are draining you should get a decent crop of potatoes in about three months leave your favorite kind of potatoes to go in the comments below and we can all learn from each other and maybe get some ideas for next year i’ll let you guys know how these are growing throughout the season.