I grow potatoes very successfully in containers.
I started out with those white plastic buckets with the bottoms cut out, so we call them bucket potatoes, but after mr. mm replaced some culvert pipe, he cut that into sections and I use them, too. They are bigger in diameter than the buckets.
Our garden happens to be pretty wet and a few years ago, a friend told me that they grew potatoes by laying them on the ground and covering them with wood chip mulch they got from the DPW. So I decided to try doing something similar with the potatoes.
First I fertilize the ground and stir it up so as not to burn the potato pieces. Then I lay the potatoes on the ground inside the bucket or pipe and cover them with a few inches of wood chips. As the potatoes grow, I add more chips to bury the stems and about halfway through the year, add a little more fertilizer.
It is important to keep the buckets watered though. In the fall when the tops have died down, I just lift and bucket or pipe sections and dig through the wood chips and pick up the potatoes, which tend to be much cleaner than those in the dirt. I have also discovered that I was having problems with potatoes in the dirt being chewed up, like the slugs got to them. That never happen ed with the bucket potatoes.
One year I also had great success with bucket carrots, using a peat moss and sand mixture, but last year, I could not get the carrots to grow at all, But it was a VERY wet year for us and a bunch of stuff did not fare well.
Onions are another good crop to grow and aside from weeding are fairly low maintenance. They, too, do better in a drier year than a wet one.
Turnips grow like weeds. I grew a few and they went to seed last summer and I found turnips growing in strange places all over the garden. They are also a very good storage root crop.
The thing I need to learn is how to properly store the carrots and turnips so they last as long as possible.
Squash and pumpkins also store fairly well. You can get several moths out of them, too, but do have to fight off squash beetles ands quash vine borers.
“In the fall when the tops have died down, I just lift and bucket or pipe sections and dig through the wood chips and pick up the potatoes, which tend to be much cleaner than those in the dirt. I have also discovered that I was having problems with potatoes in the dirt being chewed up, like the slugs got to them. That never happen ed with the bucket potatoes.”
what a great idea - I’m saving it 8n a file ;)