Grow potatoes in pots

How to grow potatoes in pots

Potatoes are easy to grow, even if you have a small garden

Potatoes are one of the easiest vegetables to grow – you simply plant one tuber and a couple of months later you dig up dozens. Yet gardeners, and particularly allotmenteers, have always made heavy weather of potato growing, with all that trenching and earthing up, and problems with soil pests and diseases.

Well, forget the hard work. Whether or not you have space for a veg plot, you can have the satisfaction of eating your very own home-grown new potatoes from your patio, simply by filling a couple of pots with compost. Follow our advice and enjoy a healthy crop of the freshest and best-tasting new potatoes ever.

Step-by-step potato growing guide

• Buy seed potato tubers in February (see Planting tips). Put them on a cool window sill to sprout. This isn't essential, but gives them a head start when planted.
• Plant them outside in April, or earlier in a frost-free greenhouse or porch if you have one.
• Take a pot of at least 25cm diameter. Black plastic pots like the ones we used may not look the best, but do the job perfectly well.
• Half fill the pot with multi-purpose compost (see our compost review for Best Buys), or save money by using the contents of a growing bag.
• Bury a seed potato just below the surface of the compost.
• As shoots grow, cover with more compost until the pot is full.
• Cover the young plants with garden fleece at night through April and May if frosts are forecast.
• Water regularly to keep the compost moist but not wet. If the leaves start to turn yellow in June, feed regularly with a general-purpose or tomato fertilizer.
• By late June or early July your potatoes should be ready. Push your hand gently into the compost and feel for tubers. Tip the contents out, or carefully remove any of eating size and leave the rest to continue growing.

Planting tips

Your potatoes should be ready by late June or early July

Old sprouty tubers may be infected with viruses or diseases. Give these a miss and use proper 'seed' tubers instead, which are grown from disease-free stock.

Garden centres generally sell seed potatoes in 3kg bags, although Unwins offers 1kg packs of some varieties. As a rough guide, 1kg should contain 12-15 tubers. But even this is too much if you want just a couple of plants. 

A few enlightened garden centres sell loose tubers by weight, and some even sell single tubers. Garden Organic hosts an annual Potato Day in January, when individual tubers of dozens of varieties are on sale, giving you the chance to try growing several different varieties on even the smallest patio.

Potato varieties

Earlies

The best choice for growing in pots are early varieties, which produce eating-sized tubers in early summer. They generally have less top growth, so make neater container subjects. We grew 'Accent' and 'Lady Christl', which have done well in previous taste tests. 'Rocket' and 'Swift' should be the first to crop, and 'Red Duke of York' is often mentioned as the best tasting. New varieties we tried were 'Cherie', 'Orla' and 'Operle'.

Baby earlies, such as the red-skinned 'Mimi' (see picture) and white-skinned 'Shelley', have been bred to produce lots of cherry-tomato-sized tubers for cooking and eating whole. A pot is the only sensible place to grow such tiny tubers.

A small crop of the early baby variety 'Mimi' 

Salad potatoes

Second earlies crop a few weeks later than earlies. Many are salad varieties, which have a waxy texture and are good boiled to eat hot or cold. We grew the British variety 'Maris Peer', the French 'Charlotte' and the red-skinned 'Roseval'. 'Anya' is an interesting newcomer - a cross between the ubiquitous 'Désirée' and the late, knobbly but tasty 'Pink Fir Apple'.

Later varieties

'King Edward' is a main crop, usually lifted in the autumn and renowned for its flavour. 'Edzell Blue' is a late second early with purple skin and a floury texture.

Potato blight

Look for brown patches on the edges of leaves and on the stems. Gradually leaves and whole shoots die off. If the fungus washes into the compost, the tubers will be affected, turning soft and smelly. To minimize the effect:

• Keep the foliage dry by watering the compost only.
• Pick off infected leaves.
• When a plant is badly affected, cut off the top growth and burn or bin it - don't compost it. If the tubers are unaffected, they can be eaten.
• Grow early varieties - these can be started early and harvested before mid-July.

Check out our greenhouse for more.

Want to grow other types of fruit and veg? Read our guides to growing edible plants, growing soft fruit, growing your own winter salad, growing your own herbs or growing tomatoes in hanging baskets.