A Gardeners Forum Forums Gardening Reference Gardening in 2004 Potatoes in barrels of hay?

I have a plastic barrel that a neighbor gave to me and I am interested in trying to grow potatoes in there. I have heard that you need to fill the barrel with hay and plant the potatoes in it but I am not sure of the particulars. Can you help me fill in the blanks?

We used to do this years ago, only not in a barrel. We took a 4' tall piece of fence about 6' long, and connected the sides...like a barrel made out of fence! It's really been a long time ago, but I'm thinking we put some soil and compost and a little straw in the bottom and planted the potatoes. When they grew and we could see leaves, we'd add straw on top of it. Don't remember if we mixed any soil or anything with the straw, but we just kept doing that over and over. We could just dig into it from the sides of the fence wire and pull out taters! It was really easy. Maybe someone else will post the particulars!

Thanks for the idea. Going to do some "experimenting" with it. I enjoyed the potatoes I grew in Italy but the ground here is too hard and full of rocks. (Should have some photos posted later this week - to show what I mean by rocky. )

I've got used tires and was thinking about growing potatoes in them, but I think it gets too hot here for that - so haven't tried.

Again - thanks for the idea.

Jon

About how many potatos will you get out of a barrel? How many barrels are needed for a fair amount of potatos?

I just found this info on a search engine. Give the tires a try.

A variant of the barrel method is to use stacked car tires. Start with one tire and add tires and soil as needed. Eventually you have a small tower of tires with the green part of the plant still growing out the top one. Harvest of the potatoes is simple: just knock over the tires and pick up the potatoes.