Apartment Growing Potato methods

I live in the city and it has been rather depressing NOT being able to grow my own food. Herbs are great, I grow them. But conditions are not optimal to maintain small container edibles - lighting, space, good soil access, among others.  I would love to try growing a bakers potato batch of potatoes, as I have not grown these. Living in a very small apartment with four others is hard enough, then to add plants. Are there ANY ideas on how to grow a small batch of potatoes to harvest? And how?

We are potato eating people here: raw, baked, mashed, roasted, in salad, fried, and on and on. We LOOOVVVEE potatoes.  Growing gives me (and my grandson) a sense of purpose, achievement and connection to Nature. But city life is not conducive to growing where I live.  Thanks for any ideas or suggestions! --Tess

Hi Tess,

Many people have grown potatoes in containers such as 5 gallon buckets, garbage cans, burlap sacks etc.  There are various approaches, but they all involve filling the container with a growing medium and planting.

Thanks John!! I will keep doing my research on this.  I am in a very small apartment with family so space is extremely limited for bigger growing goals.  We also have a crawler in the house & need to be mindful of safety for him as well.  I just gotta keep trying for the right method for my current situation.  Hopefully I will have found it within the next week or so and will post some pics soon! --Tess

Do you have a balcony or a spot with a sunny window?

Take a baking potato and cut a few slices where there is an eye.

Put that in a container with potting soil.  Keep moist until the eyes sprout.

If you have a sunny balcony, potatoes can be grown in a cardboard box as a container.

Anne, thank you!  Do you know what the best day of sun is for them?  I only have a westish facing balcony & window. We get daylight, but not really any sun where we face, especially this time of year.  My circumstances are such that I am staying with family at this time. But any suggestions that I can implement either now or for future growing are greatly appreciated. --Tess

I live in sunny Texas in USDA Zone 8a.  West would be good for me as the potatoes would not get the hot afternoon sun that would be on the east or south.

You might try adding some lights or grow light to give the plants more light.

I only grew potatoes in the spring so I don't know about growing them this time of years.

Thank you, Anne!  I am still in the research aspect of this idea. I will likely have to put it off until I am i bit more settled. But nothing wrong in gathering as much info as I can now.  

Tess Misch wrote:I live in the city and it has been rather depressing NOT being able to grow my own food.  --Tess

SO, there is a book you "might" find in your local library, or be able to buy it somewhere - that has an article of "How the Amish Grow Potatoes In Thin Air" - which might just be what you want! They use a 5 Gal. bucket with a lid, some PVC plumbing, and grow their potatoes "in thin air" as it says. The PVC pipes allow the sprinkling of water on the potatoes inside the bucket. But, you should read the full article as I've forgotten the whole setup. AND I have never grown potatoes this way yet!

IF you do this project, HAVE FUN!!!

I lost my last attempt..lol.  
Just sharing my experience.    I evaluated the space taken in garden and the value of the harvest.  For me it was a better use of time and space to buy a 50 pound bag of potatoes at the farmers market and to use the garden space to grow a crop that costs more to buy.  I am growing sprouts, tomatoes, herbs and green onions inside this year.  I preserved a wide variety of other garden veggies.... and i have bag of 'tators in the cupboard.

Jesse Glessner wrote:

Tess Misch wrote:I live in the city and it has been rather depressing NOT being able to grow my own food.  --Tess

SO, there is a book you "might" find in your local library, or be able to buy it somewhere - that has an article of "How the Amish Grow Potatoes In Thin Air" - which might just be what you want! They use a 5 Gal. bucket with a lid, some PVC plumbing, and grow their potatoes "in thin air" as it says. The PVC pipes allow the sprinkling of water on the potatoes inside the bucket. But, you should read the full article as I've forgotten the whole setup. AND I have never grown potatoes this way yet!

IF you do this project, HAVE FUN!!!

Thank you Jesse!!  I will look into this as well.  Sounds very interesting!  --Tess

Tess, to keep the potato project out of the crawler’s reach maybe one of the bucket ideas, and hang the bucket out of reach.

Thekla McDaniels wrote:Tess, to keep the potato project out of the crawler’s reach maybe one of the bucket ideas, and hang the bucket out of reach.

This could be an option. It would be small, due to space, but could be doable!! Thank you, Thekla!!

We had some small purple potatoes from our garden that I wanted to save to plant this year, but they were starting to sprout & shrivel, so we went to Habitat for Humanity & got a black storage tub that people donated that held their Christmas decorations for 2 bucks. Then we bought an opaque plastic one that the black one could sit in. We drilled some holes in the black one for drainage & set it inside the more clear plastic tub to see when water sat in the bottom of it. We started to fill the black tub with our aged compost & planted the purple potatoes in it. So far, so good. The sprouted ones were leggy but growing. They are under a grow light. The leaves are small compared to outdoor summer garden growing. The purple potatoes that were not sprouting yet have stronger & thicker stems & are just starting to come up. I think I will have to be careful not to overwater, altho the black tub is draining. My hope is that I have tubers to plant in our outdoor garden this year instead of letting the sprouted, shrivelled potatoes go bad. I kept filling compost on top of the stems so far to hold them upright.

The food value of potatoes lies mainly in the carbohydrate, derived from light - the optimum source being sunlight. Ensure the leaves are fully ready for the bonanza of June (N hemisphere) and the rest of summer (it's good that most cultivated spuds are daylength neutral).
Given Sondee's sprouting shrivelling spuds, I'd plastic bag them and keep in the fridge. Those that aren't so shrivelled can have their shoots rubbed off and just kept cool - they'll have fresh sprouts by March.

A lot of good suggestions have already been made, let me add a few:

- in your settings, potatoes might not be the best choice of growies, since they require quite a big container to get a one-dinner-harvest. There are better choices for growing on windowsill, starting from culinary herbs, through chillies, micro-dwarf tomatoes, chives, etc.

- if you insist on growing potatoes, wise thing would be to stick to super early varieties that grow fast and are smaller in size.

- thinking out of the box, I would examine possibilities to grow potatoes actually outside the appartment - on any roof available in vicinity, someone's lawn, or I would join a community garden in my city perhaps. All you need is to ask someone "may I place this bucket here?" - and there you go, you have an instant growing place ;)

- there is a separate category of potato growing techniques - growing them from seeds. So called True Potato Seeds (TPS) can be sown in a very small pot, and at the end of the season you will get a few very small potatoes :) Normally, you would use these as seed potatoes in the following year, but they are perfectly edible of course.

A picture shows early variety Charlotte, grown in 5 gallon bucket, in the city, on the terrace.

We grew our most productive potatoes ever using the no-dig method out in the yard this year. I wonder if the same could be adapted for indoors.