mokih

Hi We are growing potatoes in old garbage cans this year. Our village got new automatic garbage trucks, and we now have the special garbage cans that the truck lifts up. Instead of having the village pick up our old cans to put in the landfill, we are recycling them. We cleaned out the old cans, my husband drilled holes in the bottom, put a couple bags of dirt and some compost in the bottom, and planted a few seed potatoes (kennebec) in each one. Then we filled them with straw as the plants grew.The plants are now way over the top of the cans. We stuck them up against the fence in an out of the way place in the yard, and basically forgot about them, except to water occasionally from the rain barrel and top off with straw when needed. (Our neighbor is impressed and will try it next year!) We are still waiting to harvest these, the plants are still going strong. If they produce well, we might add more trash can potatoes next year. We also planted some yukon gold in an big older, cracked rubbermaid tote that I used to store fabric in. We already harvested those - we put in about 6 seed potatoes, and harvested about 2 dozen small potatoes. I guess it wasn't a great return, but it was fun for the kids. The potatoes were yummy roasted with rosemary, and my kids loved eating the potatoes that they grew!