Why I'm Not Growing Potatoes in Raised Beds

All right, I'm just gonna say it. Potatoes do not belong in my raised beds. I know, I know. Raised beds are perfect for growing pretty much everything. Well, not potatoes. And trust me, I've got my reasons. I've been growing potatoes ever since my very first season in the garden, and my family and I, we've tried just about every single method. I have a few favorites that I'll tell you at the end of this video, but one way I will never try again is growing potatoes in my raised beds. The first reason I won't use raised beds for my potatoes is because potatoes just simply take up too much room. Every single potato you grow in your garden is going to need at least one to one and a half square feet of space to grow to maturity. And potatoes are big, both underneath the ground and above, meaning it gets really hard to plant other plants around it. Your raised beds are the most expensive real estate in your entire landscape. Raised bed materials, they cost a lot of money. So soil and raised beds, that also costs a lot of money. And if you've got irrigation running, that even makes it more expensive. So I try to grow the plants that give me the highest ROI for my investment in my raised beds. Things like tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, peppers, eggplants. I also focus on all my leafy greens, my cabbages, all the things that I can harvest from again and again. Those are the plants that I want to focus on for my raised beds so that my return on my investment is as big as possible. Potatoes are definitely worth growing yourself, but they're not worth sacrificing the space that you want to give to your more expensive produce. The second reason I will not grow potatoes in my raised bed is because of their nutrient needs. Potatoes are heavy feeders, meaning they take a lot of nutrients out of the garden soil and that you really need for the rest of your plants in the raised beds. They also have very specific nutrient needs that are quite different from all the other plants I grow in my raised beds. In fact, I thought you might enjoy me looking up all the nutrients that are necessary to grow just this one potato. So check out this long list of nutrient needs. Nitrogen to first get the leaves and stems growing on your potatoes. Phosphorus, so that you have a strong root and tuber development, and and potassium to get a really large tuber size and also prevent disease. Now, so far, those are the three basic needs that almost all your kitchen garden plants are going to have, but the list goes on. Potatoes also thrive in slightly acidic soil. They want to have a PH that ranges between 5 and 6, which is different than what you'd want the rest of your vegetable garden's PH to be at. Add that up with all those extra nutrients that potatoes require, and it just makes sense to grow your potatoes in a different place than you're growing all those other great vegetables and fruits from your kitchen garden. And the third reason that I don't grow potatoes in my raised beds is because they make such a mess of everything else. If you've seen the way that I plant my vegetable garden, you know that I pack in the plants. I want to have my gardens packed with all those different plants in each and every raised bed, both for the ecosystem and for the production and, of course, for the beauty. With potatoes as they grow, you want to hill the plants as they start to produce more and more leaves. So every four to six inches of leaf growth, best practices show that you add a little bit of compost or mulch around the base of those plants so that more tubers form all along the stem as it starts to grow taller and taller. So first you have that mess you're going to make in the raised beds. If you're hilling this soil, compost or mulch around your plants, you're going to be making an uneven soil level for the rest of the plants you've companion planted with it. Next, when you harvest those potato plants, you're going to be literally digging around the entirety of each and every potato plant. And potatoes tend to roam. So for each stem that comes down underground, you'll have tubers extending 6 inches, 12 inches, maybe even 15 or 18 inches from each plant. This means major disturbance in your raised bed as you dig around and pull the tubers up from each and every plant. If you're just growing potatoes in one raised bed, this isn't a problem. But the way I recommend recommend planting the garden is including all the types of plants in each and every bed. With this type of method, if potatoes were thrown into the mix, they would disrupt all the other plants growing in each and every raised bed every time I needed to pick one. So now that you know where I won't be putting my potatoes, let me tell you where they do go. My favorite place to grow potatoes is actually right in the ground, directly in the ground outside of my raised bed kitchen garden area. I started doing this in my Chicago garden. In fact, some of my most popular videos are about potatoes growing in the ground in my Chicago garden. So you can check those out after you watch this video. But I have native plant and flowers growing right around my kitchen garden. And I simply use that loose soil as the perfect place to grow some potatoes right alongside my flowers and perennials. Potatoes grow up and look like these pretty green bushes that literally seem like they belong in a flower garden. They grow to full maturity. I dig up the tubers, and then I have space to plant another plant, plant or some flowers for the rest of the season. The next place I've really enjoyed growing my potatoes is in these. These wine barrels that I got from the local hardware store. I simply added a few drainage holes to the bottom, Filled these things with a nice rich compost soil mix, and then plant the potatoes about six inches down right at the start of spring. This makes it convenient to add a little bit of soil to hill the plants as they grow. They have plenty of space here. I think these barrels are about two feet wide, so I can grow about two plants per barrel. And I end up with tons of potatoes without having to disrupt any other plants in my garden space. So now you know not to plant your potatoes in your raised beds, but you definitely still should grow some potatoes. These are one of the most fun and rewarding things to grow in the garden. And during a season when all of us need to be saving money on groceries, this is excellent way to do it. We can make so many delicious meals from our freshly harvested potatoes. And there is nothing more important to grow that's organic than one that's so close to the soil. Whatever you want to grow this season, I want to help you. If you're starting your vegetable garden or you want to make it better, I've got an incredible workshop that you should watch right below this video. You can find the link to watch that workshop right after you subscribe. And like this video, which you're definitely going to do, right? Don't forget to share this video with somebody you want to grow potatoes with and I'll see you next time.