Grow Potatoes In Tires

Learn How to Grow Potatoes
in Very Small Spaces

An increasingly popular way to raise a potato crop in limited space is to grow potatoes in tires.

Here are the simple steps to growing your potato crop:

• Choose a sunny spot in your yard, garden or on a patio or balcony.
• Stack two or three tires and fill them with damp earth and compost to just over half the depth of the stacked tires.
• Place 4 or 5 seed potatoes in the stack, about 2 inches deep, with the eyes or shoots facing up.
• Cover with a couple of inches of soil.
• Water well.
• Make sure that there is good drainage below the tires. Potatoes don't like to get water-logged.
• As the plants grow to about 2 to 4 inches, add another tire to the stack. Add more soil around the young plants as well to support them.
• Continue mounding up the soil around the emerging plants until your stack is 3 tires high. Young potatoes will be forming all the way up the stack of tires.

Enjoy the rewards of growing your own potatoes.

Your potatoes will thrive in the warm environment of soil filled tires! In most areas of the U.S. early potatoes can be planted at the end of March. Your main potato crop can be planted in April or early May. If conditions are right, you will see healthy potato plants growing after about 6 weeks. If there is a late frost, protect the young plants with straw or mounded earth.

You will be able to harvest early, "new" potatoes when the flowers on your potato plants have opened or their buds have fallen off. Just dig around in the soil and check. The young potatoes should be about the size of a hen's egg. Wait to harvest your main crop of potatoes until the potato plant foliage has turned brown. Then cut off at the stems, wait a few days and pull up the plant with potatoes attached!

A stack of four or five tires that you have progressively filled with some good soil and compost, and a couple of pounds of seed potatoes, should produce around 25 pounds of potatoes. Create several tire stacks and grow a winter’s supply of potatoes with ease.

Now use your very own, home grown potatoes to create dozens of tasty potato recipes that you have found right here.

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How to Grow Potatoes