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150 square feet

~ Apartment-scale agriculture

150 square feet

Monthly Archives: April 2013

Growing potatoes in containers

14 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by Scott in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Container gardening, Potatoes

Seed potatoes ready to get in the ground

Seed potatoes ready to get in the ground: All Blue and Yukon Gold

Cashier at Lowe’s: You’re buying all these five gallon buckets, but no lids? [Funny look]
Me: Yup. I’m going to use them for container gardening.
Cashier: [Blank stare]
Me: I’m going to plant potatoes in them.
Cashier: [Blank stare]

True story. Apparently she didn’t know you could grow potatoes in containers!

Why grow potatoes in containers?

  1. It makes harvesting much easier. If you plant in the ground, you run the risk of puncturing some of your precious tubers when you harvest them. But if you plant in a container, harvesting is easy – just tip over the container, pour out the dirt, and pick out the potatoes. Simple!
  2. It may decrease your risk of garden pests and diseases. If you grow potatoes in a container (especially in compost that was produced from a hot pile), you should (at least theoretically) have a lower risk of disease than if you plant them in the ground. Some folks argue that pest problems are also less of an issue. From my own experience last year, I would argue that seems to be the case. Many community garden plots had infestations of Colorado potato beetles on their potato plants, but the plants I grew in a bucket were left untouched.
  3. Different varieties of potatoes do well in containers than those grown using conventional methods. Most commercial potatoes set tubers very low along the stem, but some heritage varieties produce potatoes much higher along the stem. This will give a higher yield when grown in a container. Some discussion of this can be found in this video, which is a documentary about the Kenosha potato project.
  4. Finally, it may be the only option if you want to grow potatoes in a small space or in an urban area. If you have room for a bucket or two in an area that gets good sunlight, you can grow potatoes! They’re an excellent choice for home gardeners, as potatoes are one of the most nutritional and highest yielding crops in terms of the space they require.

What kind of container should you use?
That’s up to you. I use 5 gallon buckets, but I’ve heard of people using trash cans, bushel baskets, wooden boxes, old tires*, or even specially made potato growing bags. (I thought these were pretty unique, until I saw potato growing bags for sale at my local Walmart and Wegman’s on the same day).

*NOTE: I personally would not be inclined to grow potatoes in old tires. While I’m not certain you’d have chemicals leaching out of the tire, why risk it with your food?

Being a grad student, I decided to go with the economical option, and purchased several 5 gallon buckets at Lowes. The awkward conversion above ensued.

Potatoes in 5 gallon buckets - Chieftain and All Blue

Potatoes in 5 gallon buckets – Chieftain and All Blue

How do you grow potatoes in containers?
To grow potatoes in containers, you first should make sure your container has proper drainage. I drilled maybe a dozen holes in the bottom of each bucket using a 5/32″ drill bit. Last year I also added gravel to the bottom of the bucket. This year I was feeling lazy, and didn’t want to go find gravel, so I did without.

Next, add about 6-8″ of soil to the bottom of your container, lay a few seed potatoes on top of that, and cover them with a few more inches of soil. If you can plant them in pure compost, this is even better, since it’s rich in organic matter and because potatoes don’t like heavy soil. These two buckets are on the patio at my apartment, so I used potting soil, which was all that I had on hand. But I’ll be planting a couple of similar buckets in my community garden plot using compost. As the potatoes grow, you’ll want to keep adding compost/soil to “hill” up over the potatoes, so you only leave 6-8″ of the stalks above the surface of the soil. Keep going until you reach the top of the container. But this isn’t the only option – some folks grow potatoes in straw.

This year I’m planting Chieftain, Yukon Gold, and All Blue – Red, White Yellow, and Blue potatoes! I ordered the Yukon Gold and All Blue for this year. I grew the Chieftain last year, and forgot that I had a few potatoes left, until I found a few neglected tubers sprouting in the paper bag where they were being stored. Free seed potatoes!

Can you save potatoes from your crop for next year’s seed potatoes?
The simple answer is that if you couldn’t, no one would be eating potatoes right now! The more complicated answer is that it depends.

Many of the sources that say you can’t save your own seed potatoes are (not surprisingly) companies that want to sell you seed potatoes. If the customer saves seed each year, the company won’t make money. It’s a similar to how many companies sell F1 hybrids rather than open-pollinated varieties (which breed true to type), even when the OP varieties may be of equal or greater quality.

However, because potatoes are propagated vegetatively, if one generation develops a disease, it will be passed down to the offspring, then plant health and general vigor will decline steadily over time. For this reason, tissue culture is typically used to develop and maintain disease-free seed potatoes. In spite of this, some folks (e.g. in Seed Savers Exchange circles) save and share tubers to plant from year after year. I even know of one SSE member who is working with the USDA to perform tissue cultures in order to restore some rare heirlooms to health.

The interesting thing is that potatoes actually can and do produce seeds (often called true potato seed, or TPS to distinguish them from seed potatoes – the tubers saved to plant the following year). However, not all potatoes set seed, and not all of them do it consistently – this depends on the variety and the environmental conditions. You can plant TPS to grow a crop of small tubers the first year, which then can be saved as seed potatoes to grow full-sized tubers the following year. However, TPS will not necessarily give you potatoes that are true to type. This is because most (but not all) potato varieties are tetraploid (having four sets of chromosomes) rather than diploid (having two sets of chromosomes) as most vegetables are. The process of inheritance in tetraploid plants is something of a mess compared to diploids, so even if a potato is self-compatible and has the right environmental conditions to set seed, it still may not breed to type from TPS.

The point, however, is that growing potatoes from TPS circumvents many of the disease issues with saving tubers to plant. But the catch is that you don’t know exactly what you’re going to get when you grow out the seed! This can be either a good or a bad thing, depending on your gardening goals. It also is a good way to get into vegetable breeding. I’m certainly no expert, and I’ve never tried breeding potatoes – that’s a project that will have to wait until I have a larger garden – but here are a couple of links to check out if you’re interested in learning more:
Potato Breeding
Growing Potatoes from True Seed

Saving your own potatoes for seed makes sense, unless you start seeing a decline and plant health and vigor, which may indicate your potatoes have a disease. Then it’s probably time to purchase new seed potatoes, if you’re growing a common variety. If this happens when you’re growing a rare heirloom, you may have to consider the possibility of propagation using tissue culture, or growing plants from true seed. However, tissue culture requires special equipment and skills, and potatoes grown from true seed may not be true to type. Still, better to propagate sick tubers than to lose heirloom varieties entirely.

Any other tips?
Well, not from me, since 2012 was my first time to grow potatoes in containers. However, an excellent resource to check out is the Kenosha potato project. They grow hundreds of different heritage varieties in 15 gallon growing bags, and have a number of cultivation tips on their website. They also are very involved with Seed Savers Exchange, so this is a great place to find rare potato varieties. They also have a page dedicated to growing potatoes from true seed.

An All Blue potato sprouting

An All Blue potato sprouting

Here’s one of the All Blue potatoes. Isn’t it cool looking?! I’ll be very interested to see if the plants have any of the blue color on the foliage, or if it’s confined to the tubers.

Opening Day at the Community Garden!

13 Saturday Apr 2013

Posted by Scott in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Community garden, Garden, Workday

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Working on the new compost system
Working on the new compost system
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Spring must be here, because today was the opening day at the PSU Community Garden. We had an amazing turnout: about 75 people! That’s the most I’ve ever seen at a garden workday. After breakfast and orientation, we had put everyone to work. We put up birdhouses, cleaned up trash on site, rearranged our compost system into smaller bins that should be easier to turn, weeded garden paths and the perennial beds, woodchuck-proofed our fence, and got to listen to some live music while we worked. We had an awesome crew of workers. I’m super excited! If today was any indication, we’re in for a great season!

A view of the garden

A view of the garden

Working on the new compost system

Working on the new compost system

Spring planting, and seed starting update

07 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by Scott in Uncategorized

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Tags

Cold frame, kale, Peas, season extension, Seed starting, tomatoes

Planting in the cold frame

Planting in the cold frame

In the last few days, the never-ending winter weather has finally started to break. (Punxatawney Phil gets an F in meteorology this year!) With the warmer weather, I’ve been thinking a lot more about my garden. Two days ago, I was able to get out and plant seeds in my cold frame. I’m going to try to get an early start on Beets (Crapaudine), Carrots (Dragon), Lettuce (Spotted Aleppo), Radishes (Saxa 2), and Arugula. This is the first time I’ve planted in a cold frame, so I’m still learning. The last several nights we’ve had nighttime lows in the upper-20s, and daytime highs in the mid-50s with plenty of sun, so I’ve been stopping at the garden twice a day to open and close the cold frame, to keep it warm enough at night, but to make sure the germinating seeds don’t cook during the day.

The seeds that I started indoors (6 days ago now) are germinating! Here’s a couple of little tomato seedlings coming to life! These are Opalka tomatoes, which are supposed to be a very good processing variety. I’ve never grown them before. I’m hoping it’s a good year for tomatoes this year, and we don’t have problems again with late blight.

Tomato seeds germinating

Tomato seeds germinating

My Kale seedlings germinated within 4 days – super quick! Here are the Dwarf Curled Blue Scotch, and Lacinato kales. I was in the Home Depot today, and I was amazed to see that they were offering Lacinato transplants. Two years ago, I couldn’t find transplants anywhere. Last year, I found them in limited supply at a local nursery/CSA. It’s cool to see some of the heirloom varieties start to become more accessible, especially as more people plant gardens. The Dwarf Curled Blue Scotch is supposed to be hardy enough overwinter in Zones 4-5, so I’m hoping it will survive the winter here in Zone 6a. I’ve started to become more interested lately in season extension. I think this year I’ll try to get a late fall/early winter harvest of lettuce and green using my cold frame, and anything I can be harvesting in the winter is worth trying to grow.

Kale seedlings

Dwarf Curled Blue Scotch and Lacinato Kale

I put up a rabbit fence today around my community garden plot, and I also planted peas. Here’s what I’m growing this year: Desiree Dwarf Blauwschokkers – a blue shelling pea, Sugar Snap, and Kent Blue – an English heirloom with beautiful blue flowers (grown as either a snow or a shelling pea). I’m going to do some crossbreeding between these varieties to see what I get.

This year's pea seeds: Desiree Dwarf Blauwschokkers, Sugar Snap, and Kent Blue

This year’s pea seeds: Desiree Dwarf Blauwschokkers, Sugar Snap, and Kent Blue

Blauwschokkers pea seeds

Blauwschokkers pea seeds

Happy gardening!

-S

Seed starting setup

03 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by Scott in Uncategorized

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Tags

heirlooms, kale, peppers, Seed starting, seeds, tomatoes

Seed starting trays

Seed starting trays

This year I decided to grow all of my tomatoes and peppers from seed. We have a number of local sources to buy transplants here in Central PA, and some of them have a pretty impressive selection of heirloom tomatoes, but heirloom peppers are hard to find. Also, I absolutely love Lacinato kale, and it’s not always easy to find transplants.

I also want to start saving more seeds from my garden, so I decided it was time to make some improvements to my seed starting setup. I’ve had a rough time with starting seeds indoors the last few years. I only have North-facing windows in my apartment, so there isn’t enough natural light to start seeds. Last year I used a small fluorescent “plant light” that apparently wasn’t bright enough, because my seedlings got very spindly.

This year, I’m starting my seeds under a 48″ fluorescent shop light. I built a simple stand for it out of 1″ pvc pipe. Unfortunately I didn’t have the foresight to take pictures during the assembly process, but here’s a look at the finished product:

Fluorescent grow light stand made out of 1" pvc pipe

Fluorescent grow light stand made out of 1″ pvc pipe

To build something similar, you’ll need:

  • 1 x 52″ length of 1″ pvc pipe
  • 2 x 18″ lengths of 1″ pvc pipe
  • 4 x 8″ lengths of 1″ pvc pipe
  • 2 x 1″ pvc elbow joints
  • 2 x 1″ pvc T-joints
  • 4 x 1″ pvc end caps

In total, it adds up to a 10′ length of pvc pipe, which is pretty cheap. The 52″ section makes the crossbeam, and the 18″ pieces are used for the vertical legs. The 8″ sections are used to make the feet. Here’s a link to something similar, although I didn’t make the stand with an adjustable height; I adjust the level of the light just by raising or lowering the chain. The total cost was probably not much more than $40 for the stand, shop light, and fluorescent bulbs.

I also purchased a seedling heat mat, since peppers like warm temperatures for germination, and usually keep my apartment relatively cool. Here’s a list of what I’m starting indoors this year:

Basil
Genovese

Kale
Lacinato
Dwarf Curled Blue Scotch

Peppers
Joe’s Round
Maule’s Red Hot
Jimmy Naradello’s
Chinese Five Color

Tomatoes
Paul Robeson
Black Cherry
Black from Tula
Opalka
Pink Brandywine Cherry (from SSE member OR TR R)
Bosu (from SSE member WI LO M)
Sleeping Lady (from SSE member WI MI B)

So, I set out my cold frame today…

03 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by Scott in Uncategorized

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Tags

Cold frame, gardening, season extension

I’ve heard that it’s generally a good idea to let it sit in the garden a few days before planting to give the soil a chance to warm up, and since we’ve still got a nice trough hanging out over the Eastern part of the country giving us a healthy dose of frigid Canadian air (thanks, eh?), it sounded like a good idea.

The cold frame was free, actually. I went to the Pennsylvania Organic Farm Fest in the fall, and one of the exhibitors had the cold frame on their table with a sign that said Free! on it. They told me the first person who carried it away got to keep it, so I did. We’ll see how it works. I’m hoping to plant later this week. I’m planning to plant lettuce (Spotted Aleppo and either Bronze Arrowhead or Red Velvet), arugula, radishes (French Breakfast and Saxa II), carrots (Dragon), and beets (Crapaudine). I hope they do well, because I’m ready for a fresh salad.

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As you can see, there isn’t much growing yet, apart from my cover crop. But my garlic and shallots are starting to peek above the ground, so spring is should be on its way.

I also started some peppers, tomatoes, kale, and basil indoors over the weekend. More on seed starting in a future post…

About Scott

Hi, I'm Scott! I’ve been gardening since 2009, when I first signed up for a 150 square foot community garden plot. This blog is written to share my adventures in vegetable-gardening, seed-saving, plant-breeding, and woodchuck-chasing, and hopefully provide suggestions to others who are interested in sustainable gardening in a small space.

Recent Posts

  • Peas!
  • Spring in the garden
  • Seedling update
  • Growing potatoes in containers
  • Opening Day at the Community Garden!

Archives

  • June 2013 (1)
  • May 2013 (2)
  • April 2013 (5)
  • March 2013 (2)
  • February 2013 (4)

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