Found a Sprouting Potato in the Cupboard? Plant It & Grow Potatoes

You know the one. Shoved at the back of the pantry, gone a little soft, pushing out pale little tentacles. You were about to toss it.

Don’t. That potato is trying to become more potatoes. Let it.

One forgotten spud can hand you a whole bag of new potatoes, for the price of a potato you’d already given up on.

Let me show you the lazy way. No garden needed. No digging. Just a bag of dirt on the patio.

Can you grow potatoes from store bought potatoes?

Short answer: yes. Those sprouts are the plant waking up. (It’s Solanum tuberosum, the most popular vegetable on earth, and one of the easiest things you’ll ever grow.)

Now the honest part, because I don’t do hype. Two things to know before you plant a grocery store potato:

• Some get sprayed with a sprout inhibitor so they don’t chit on the shelf. If yours is already sprouting, you’re golden. If it stubbornly refuses to, it might be treated. Grab an organic one, or just use whichever potato is already sprouting on its own.
• Garden centers sell certified “seed potatoes” that are guaranteed disease-free. Store potatoes carry a small risk of passing on disease to your soil. For a fun free crop in a bag on the patio, I don’t lose sleep over it. If you’re planting a big permanent bed, spring for seed potatoes.

For a free bag of new potatoes out of your cupboard leftovers? Plant the sprouting one. It works.

How to grow: step by step

Here’s the whole thing. It’s almost too easy.

1. Let them sprout first. Leave your potatoes in a cool, dark spot until they push out short, stubby shoots. An old egg carton holds them upright nicely. Gardeners call this chitting, and it gives the plant a head start.
2. Set up a container. Grab a big pot, a sturdy trash bag, or an old potting mix bag. If you’re using a bag, poke drainage holes in the bottom and roll the sides down about halfway. Add roughly 4 inches of peat-free, general-purpose potting mix.
3. Plant them. Sit three sprouted potatoes on the soil, shoots pointing up. Cover with another 4 inches of mix.
4. Put it in the sun. Set the container somewhere sunny outdoors. Water about once a week if it hasn’t rained for a few days.

That’s the planting done. Now you wait, and you do one slightly weird but important thing as it grows. Hilling. More on that next.

How to grow potatoes in a container or bucket

Growing in a container is hands down my favorite way to do potatoes. I’ll grow potatoes in a bucket, an old tub, a big pot, a bag, anything that holds dirt and drains.

You can grow potatoes in a pot on a balcony just as easily as in a yard. Hardly any space, zero back-breaking digging, and harvest is a dump-and-sort instead of an archaeological excavation.

There’s one rule you can’t skip, though: hill up.

As the shoots and leaves climb, keep burying the lower stems with more soil, stopping just below the top leaves. In a bag, unroll the sides as you go to make room.

Stop once the soil reaches the top of your container.

Why bother?

• More buried stem means more places for tubers to form, which means more potatoes per plant.
• It keeps the spuds in the dark. Potatoes exposed to light turn green, and green potatoes are mildly toxic, so you don’t want to eat those. Hilling keeps them covered and safe.

Two more notes for container growing. Pots and bags dry out faster than open ground, so water more often. And container potatoes usually run a touch smaller than ground-grown ones, which is fine.

Pull them as new potatoes and they’re outrageously good.

When do you dig them up?

This is the best part.

When the plants flower, you’ve got early new potatoes ready. Reach in and root around for a few, or just tip the whole bag onto a tarp and go treasure hunting.

Want bigger potatoes? Leave them longer. The tubers keep sizing up until the foliage yellows and dies back, then they stop. That dying foliage is your signal the crop is done.

One timing tip

Potatoes come from the mountains of South America, so they’re tough and they like it on the cool side. Start them in mid-spring for a full season of growing.

And if you’ve got the room, plant a few more every couple of weeks into midsummer. Stagger them like that and you’ll be pulling fresh potatoes from midsummer all the way to late fall.

So next time a potato sprouts in the back of the cupboard, don’t feel guilty about it and don’t throw it out. Drop it in a bag of dirt on the patio and walk away.

A few months later you tip the bag over and a pile of new potatoes rolls out across the ground. Free food from something you’d already written off.

Hard to beat that.