How to Grow Potatoes In Bags - The Easiest Way Ever!
Freshly harvested red potatoes from a 15 gallon fabric “Grow Bag.”
I never grew potatoes before moving to the PNW. Honestly, I think I was a little intimated before. But now that I know how easy it is, they’ve become a regular in the vegetable garden. At first, I planted them in the raised garden beds in furrows, adding soil as the plants grew to encourage more tuber growth. All well and good, but a real pain in the you-know-what to harvest. No matter how carefully I tried to dig them up, invariably I would damage a few. In addition, there would always be some accidentally left behind, popping up the next year and interfering with my crop rotation plans. Plus, enterprising rodents sometimes tunneled in for surreptitious feasts. I like to share, but not that much :). So a few years ago, I decided to try growing potatoes in bags, specifically some used horse feed bags. What a difference! No unintended sharing with local critters, and all tubers easily and successfully harvested. By simply turning the bags over a screen set over a wheel barrow, I collected both the potatoes and the potting soil for revitalization and reuse! Another plus: The bags allowed each plant to produce more tubers, for their root systems could grow longer in the bag than in the ground. Last year I trialed these new wider bags found on Amazon so I could place more plants per bag and use less soil overall. Happy to say, they worked quite well, allowing for a bigger harvest while using fewer resources and space!
Here are tips for how to grow your own potatoes in bags:
Purchase certified disease-free seed potatoes from your garden store in the Spring, if you live in a cool climate. Here in the PNW, I like to get mine planted in March or April. If you live in a warmer zone, potatoes can be planted in late summer or late winter.
Cut each seed potato into halves or thirds, with at least two sprouting “eyes” per section. If no sprouting eyes are present yet, it’;s best to wait until they do.
Let cut surfaces of potatoes be exposed to air for 24-48 hours.
Meanwhile, get your bags ready. Options include large burlap sacks, feed bags, empty compost bags, commercial “grow” bags (I’m a fan of these), or sacks you make from weed barrier fabric. Roll down the sides and scoop in 4-6 inches of potting soil or soil/compost mix. Place for growing in full sun.
Lay your seed potato sections eyes up on the soil and cover with another inch or two of soil. Keep moist, and continue to cover the sprouting greens with more soil as they grow, unrolling the sides of the bags as necessary.
Potatoes are heavy feeders, so depending on my soil mix, I’ll give them extra nutrients along the way. My favorite choice so far is Dr. Earth’s Organic Tomato, Vegetable and Herb Fertilizer. Not too much, just a sprinkling with every new addition of soil.
You can start harvesting potato magic after the plants flower for smaller tubers. Or wait until the plants die back in the fall for larger sized ones.
The skin of freshly harvested potatoes is very thin, so if you plan to store them for a bit, be sure to cure them by leaving them unscrubbed in a very dark, cool (50-60 degrees), and well-ventilated place for roughly two weeks.
Cut seed potatoes after 24 hours.
A top down view of newly sprouted seed potatoes. At this point, I added about 2 more inches of potting soil on top to encourage the plants to grow taller and thereby produce more tubers. I repeated this step with each bit of new growth, unrolling the sides of the bag along the way, until the bag was a few inches from full.
A view from the back of the fence of 7 very full bags of growing potatoes.
Here, I’ve overturned a bag of potato plants into a wheelbarrow for harvesting. This is a late fall shot, and you can see in the top left corner a bit of the dried plant stalk that was remaining.