So I decided this year as new little gardening adventure to grow potatoes in a garbage can.

Yes, you can do that! Who knew?

Apparently all you needed was a garbage can, a bag of seed potatoes and some dirt...

Okay, a lot of dirt.

Now seed potatoes are not your average supermarket variety. Apparently the ones you get at the store are sprayed with a chemical so they don’t sprout. I am now also rethinking eating supermarket potatoes...

Ideally the ones you want to pick up at your local gardening center are potatoes that have already sprouted. If they haven’t yet you may want to start this project early (January) because you cannot plant them until they little shouts sprouting. (Thankfully mine did.)

So with a bag of sprouted potatoes I was ready to go.

I drilled a series of holes for drainage in the bottom of my plastic garbage can (metal work but keep in mind they get HOT! And you don’t want baked potatoes too early) and put a layer of dirt on the bottom. On top of that I placed several potatoes and covered them with a bit more dirt – I did not fill the can to the top with dirt!  Just a few inched to cover the spuds and that’s it... for a week or more. (Remember to water them!)

(Now I happened to buy a BIG bag of potatoes and only had one garbage can, so to use all of them I also filled two tires with some dirt added potatoes to the center.)

As the days went on the potatoes started to sprout green leaves and believe me they grow quickly. So every time the leaves became 4 – 7 inches high I covered them with more dirt. (For the tire potatoes I would add another tire on top of the bottom one to increase height). Over several weeks as the taters grow you keep covering them with more dirt until they reach the top, and then you just let them go. But keep watering them, they get thirsty.

So this is where I’m at. My spuds are all lovely and green is billowing out the top of some tires and a garbage can. It’s quite impressive really. And as the summer passes (hopefully) the potatoes will grow.

When the purple flowers start to fade and grow what looks like berries you can dig your little hand in a pull out a few new potatoes. Those puppies spoil quickly! So enjoy them right away.

For the storing potatoes wait until the green plants die back and dump the can out onto a tarp, or lift up your tires and reap the rewards...

The real exciting part is that you are not limited to tires or garbage cans, you can even test this out on your balcony in a bucket. The taters will grow!