Polypots

Now I am going to give you all a top tip that I have learned about growing potatoes. Grow potatoes in polypots and you will find it so much easier. There are some videos about this on my potato blog and youtube channel and I found the results to be excellent.

The idea is simple really. In the cold months when you have nothing to do you mix up your compost mix. For this I would recommend a good general purpose compost available from any good garden centre.
Now my mix is 16oz of TEV4 added to 100 litres of compost. A builders bucket is around 15 litres and I use one to measure the compost out.

You may also wish to add 12oz of Nutrimate to this mix which will give you the ultimate growing medium for your potatoes. The TEV4 and Nutrimate can also be used throughout your garden with great results and I am doing them at bargain prices because you are buying in bulk that will last for years. The results I had from one seed potato in a polypot that contained 17 litres of my compost mix were tremendous.

I averaged 2.5kg of eating potatoes per bag and when I wanted to eat some you just went out to the garden and lifted a bag then simply emptied the bag out and tucked in to some delicious fresh potatoes. My maincrop ones were just as easy but I decided to store them so all I did was chop the haulms off and place them into my greenhouse and they are still there perfectly fresh in the dry compost. If you are going to store them this way then ensure that the compost is as dry as dust.

This method was so simple for me and my pregnant wife who could harvest potatoes easily when she needed them. The only preparation I had to do was mix the compost, work the soil where the polypots were going and add fertilizer to that area and I added some extra holes to the bags with the aid of a paper punch so that the roots could absorb the nutrients from the soil that the bags sat on. I also purchased a white marker pen from an arts and craft shop so that I could write the variety name onto each bag and avoid mix ups. Again watch the polypot videos and see how easy it is.

If you have no garden then simply use the compost mix in the green potato planters. A top tip for the green potato planters is to only use 2 or 3 potatoes and you will actually harvest larger crops of potatoes because there is less competition for space.