How to Double Your Potato Harvest

After growing potatoes in both a traditional vegetable garden bed and containers, I have learned how to double my potato harvest each and every year. One of the biggest complaints that I come across among first time potato growers, is the space that their potato plants take up in comparison to the paltry yield they dig up at the end of the season. A few easy changes in your home vegetable garden is all it takes to change that though, and by September you will be digging up twice as many potatoes than you did last year.

First, you want to make sure you start out with actual seed potatoes, not old potatoes that you bought from the grocery store and set aside for growing. Yes, these potatoes will sometimes sprout growth when left for too long, but many grocery store potatoes have been sprayed with a growth inhibitor that prevents them from growing the way they normally would or at all. Start with healthy seed potatoes and you are halfway to a better crop in the fall already.

The way you plant your seed potatoes makes a huge difference in the yield come harvest time, and the traditional hill method is not always best for a small home vegetable garden. Large containers that can be added to over time actually work incredibly well for potatoes because not only can you increase the size of the "hill" easier, but you can also regulate how compact the growing material becomes.

Growing in large painter buckets, wooden barrels or stacked tires has all worked really well for me. Overall, stacked tires have doubled my potato harvest each and every time, The gradual stacking of old tires replicates the hilling action that potato plants need to continue shooting up and rooting.

With either container that you use, it is important that you fill with fifty percent healthy, loose soil, twenty five percent compost and twenty five percent loose organic matter such as straw, leaves or grass clippings. This combination has improved the density of the soil used to grow the potatoes in enough so that the soil is not compact and allows for the potatoes to grow at a faster rate. Using just compost in my potato stacks has resulted in the same number of potatoes, both in number and weight, as the traditional hills I have planted.

Another trick that has contributed to a huge increase in the size of all my potato plants is an improved watering system. I used to use soaker hoses spread out around the area where my potato plants were growing and in between hills. The plants were well watered and I did not have to get out there and water the plants myself, but I did not harvest a lot of potatoes by the end of summer either.

Instead, I decided to use a watering trick that I use on my tomatoes, whose roots also grow deep. I planted a thick PVC pipe in the middle of my potato tires and poked holes up and down the length of it. As I buried my potato plant with soil, I also buried the pipe. Every other day I filled the pipe with water and it would slowly leak into the soil from the top to the bottom of my hills. This way, the first potatoes that began to grow would receive just as much water as the new potatoes on the top.

All of these tricks combined have worked to double my potato harvest for three years now, when compared to other growing methods that I have tried.