Pot Grown Potatoes – 2023

It seems to be all the rage about grown pot grown potatoes. As we have never done this, we thought we would give it a try.

We choose ‘Charlotte’ as the potatoe variety. This being a 2nd Early, which is a popular salad variety, and full of flavour. With the main reason being its high resistance to foliage and tuber blight.

Only 4 potatoes were chitted for 4 weeks before planting. A 35 litre tub as used, a thin layer of compost added about 10cm. The 4 tubers were set into this compost and covered to top of shoots.

The compost we used was standard garden centre stuff.

Then every week we topped up the compost, to just cover the shoots, until we got to the top of the tub. On each layer we used a small amount of potatoe fertiliser with an N:P:K formulation of 14:14:21 with the addition of trace elements. In some of the photos you can see the pelleted fertiliser.

Do not forget to keep watering, and plenty of light.

After 21 days, we got to the top of the tub, so no more compost. The amount of stalk and leaves I think is too great. So next time we must lower the Nitrogen content of the fertiliser, but bear in mind one does not know the exact NPK content of the compost. Some composts that are based on green waste or slurry, can be extremely high in Nitrogen.

Keep watering as required. Harvest your potatoes when the plants start to flower. Hopefully we will have a follow up to this post.