growing potatoes in an empty compost bag? (Merged Thread)

tanith

I had a root around in my bags yesterday and found several egg size pots and also some teeny tiny ones so I guess I could just take enough for a meal at a time and let the others carry on growing... I will defo do this every year from now on.... mine have been flowering for around 3wks or so...

tripleh_2

HELP!!!!! My potato leaves are being devastated by slugs. I can actually see some of them, even small ones in the bags. What is the best way to get rid of them? I don't fancy trying to pick them out individually

jfennell

Hi
I have tried growing potatoes in bags for the second time this year and I this year I have tried some in my very small veg patch. The problem I have is that there is so much foliage. I have earthed up as much as possible but they are flopping all over the place. What am I doing wrong?

worto03

A couple of months have passed since the last thread, so I thought I would find out how people are doing! I have one dustbin and about 6 compost bags on the go, first earlies arran, but yet I have no flowers, although plenty of green leaves. Should I be seeing flowers yet?

I think it depends what type of pots they are - ours didn't flower at all they just died - we were thinking oops - oh well if they are all dead for some reason we may as well dig them out to plant something else - found 75 potatoes

still eating them now! So if they don't flower I wouldn't worry about it just wait for the leaves to die back then have a look.

Tierce

Hi Everyone,

I hail from old Ozland here so my season's are a little off kilter with most of you..not to mention timezones <tries to hang on to my Sunday evening for as long as possible>

I've been growing potatoes in a bucket, and they seemed to be growing as expected, however, over the last week, we had a lot of rain and sunshine and before I knew it, the stalk/stem (with few leaves) had shot up dramatically, now about a foot above the soil line.

I've filled the bucket up with soil now leaving about 3 inches of stem uncovered. I was just wondering if this seemingly excessively rapid growth will effect my yield/size of potatoes?

Any advice would be sincerely appreciated. Thank you.

Justamum

I grew some potatoes in bags this year. To be honest I was very disappointed with the result. With the earlies I planted three potatoes to each bag and ended up with about 1lb 8oz in each!

My maincrop haven't flowered yet, but all the foliage has gone yellow and is dying, so this morning I harvested them. The yield is slightly better, and from two bags I've got just over 4lb. I decided to pick them now because we are going away on Monday for three weeks and wasn't sure if they would survive that long.

I'm not going to bother growing them like this again because they work out more expensive than buying from the shops when you take into account the cost of the compost. However, we have just got an allotment (which is completely waist high in grass and weeds so needs lots of work on it!) so I'll be growing some spuds in there.

Does anybody know why the foliage would have gone all yellow? The leaves were lovely lush green with no brown spots or anything, then suddenly they started dying off

Plasticman

Mine have started to die off too and today I emptied the first bag. A grand total of 10lb of potatoes. Not bad for a first attempt but they probably costs as much to grow as if I'd gone and bought them from Tesco!!

tanith

They start to die off when they are ready to harvest.. I emptied two of my bags today and got approx 3lb from each... had some for dinner tonight along with some runner beans I had picked and they were much tastier than the usual tesco ones, but I am not sure if its worth it for 3lbs of spuds to be honest even though they were nice..