One of the more satisfying harvests we've experienced has been potatoes from our potato barrel. It's like digging for treasure. Unfortunately we yielded a very small harvest compared to what we've seen elsewhere online. Why? We're not 100% sure. It could be the black barrel retaining too much heat, the starter potatoes we purchased (and probably kept too long before planting), not enough/too much water, or not a good ratio/quality of potting soil and peat mix.
We're definitely going to try container potatoes again next season and play around with some of those variables. The potato barrel saved us some space for other crops, and prevented us from thinking about pests or diseases common with potatoes. We've heard from our friend Rachel at Elemental Green that a version has worked extremely well in her small urban garden in Somervill, MA. Here are pictures of what treasure we did get to harvest.
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We found a great how-to make a potato barrel article in Scott Meyer's The City Homesteader. We wanted to use a bit less space, experiment with the idea and hopefully prevent something from eating them. This is how we did it for about $20 from a local garden store (we already have a drill). Materials:
Step 1: Drill holes in the bottom of the barrel Step 2: Set up a brick or cinderblock platform for air flow and drainage outside in an area that gets at least 6hrs of sunlight daily. Step 3: Fill the barrel with 6" of a 1/3 potting soil/compost mix 2/3 peat moss mix Step 4: Plant the potatoes eyes up as deep as they are large. We cut ours into small 1" x 1" chunks right before planting. Step 5: Water well. Keep moist but not too damp. Step 6: As they grow, continue to fill the bucket with the same mixture up to the potato's top leaves, until the bucket is full. Step 7: Harvest. We've read that in general that you should wait until after the leaves die back to harvest. You can just tip over the barrel if you have a place to lay them or dig them out. We haven't done this so if this changes significantly we'll let you know.
We just wanted to give you the quick run-down - it only took less than an hour to put together once we had all the materials. For further reading, Mother Earth News provides the City Homesteader from the book here. |
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