how many potatoes?

[aquilegia]

... would you expect to get per plant for Charlottes?

I grow mine in bags and have so far been getting 1-1.5lb per plant. It doesn't seem like a lot, especially after I say on GW that Toby said a bucketful per plant.

I have been watering them well.  ???

[aquilegia]

[antipodes]

A bucketful per plant? you must be kidding. I usually get about 5 potatoes from each plant of varying sizes. so a pound sounds right to me. But it depends on where you are. I feel that in Britain it is wetter and you get better spud yields than we do here.

[Chrispy]

I saw that episode of 'everything perfect' GW, I think they have a large selection of different size buckets.

I don'y know how many you should get, but I grow a few spuds in small containers and the crop is a lot smaller then on the plants in the ground, so clearly the size of the bag will affect your crop.

[richardglobal]

I'm just about to lift my Charlotes grown outdoors. I lifted one plant a few days ago and it gave about 2lb. It seems to have been a reasonably good year this year so I wouldn't expect more. No idea if bags give you more or less than outdoors.

[cornykev]

I've tried bags, bins and buckets and there never seems to be many in them, a bucket full, full of s##t more like, thats why gw's not very popular.    :( :( :(

[meg_gordon]

Emptied a barrel of Vivaldi last night and from 3 seed potatoes I have got five and a half pounds of potatoes, most are a reasonable size.  Best crop I ever got from growing in a container was using Wilja - got about 2 to 2.5 pounds per seed potato.

Meg

[Flighty]

I've just dug up my Charlottes and the potatoes from five plants might just about fill a (small) bucket!
I reckon that he was talking about one of these buckets.  :)
http://www.intplay.com/productdetails.aspx?pid=3672

[Trevor_D]

This year the yield here in the dry south-east has been a disaster! Charlottes are normally good croppers in my soil, with plenty of decent-sized ones. There were seven of us to lunch on Saturday and I used about a third of my total crop in one meal!

And I agree about containers - in my experience, the yield is always lower (normally much lower).

And TB doesn't seem to know what he's talking about on quite a few matters. Did anyone read his article in "Amateur Gardening" the other week on hormone weedkiller damage? There were so many schoolboy howlers in it as to be untrue! He couldn't even get the name of the chemical and the name of the weed it was used against right!

[aquilegia]

Thanks for replies. I thought a bucketful was a bit, well, far fetched!

Although I could get a bucketful from a plant, if I used my son's noddy bucket!

I do find the container crop is smaller than the ground crop (I have grown a charlotte in the ground before!) but I don't have room for all of them in the soil, unfortunately! I've got 12 desiree in the ground, which takes up a bit too much room anyway!

[Spudbash]

I'm in Hampshire and my first few diggings and harvests from pots were pathetic, even though I left well alone for an extra fortnight, because the plants had been affected by a late frost. Since the season's gone on and we've had some rain, yields have gone up to something closer to normal.

Every year, there are a couple of crops that do badly, and this year, it's the turn of the spuds! Having said that, my local gardeners' club had a grow-a-potato-in-a-pot competition (with a given variety) and the range of yield was huge, with the biggest being something like ten times the smallest. So Toby Buckland's 'bucketful' seems a bit of a generalisation.  :)

Gardener's World, please can we have quality, detailed information, as requested by the President of the RHS?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/7871022/BBC-must-end-dumbed-down-gardening-shows-says-new-RHS-chief.html

[willconkerer]

Best yield ever off charlottes this year - at least 5 lbs per root now that the spuds are getting bigger. The thing we did differently this year was to use a granular potato fertiliser rather than muck. We live rurally so have access to plenty of manure, and usually dig loads in when planting spuds, but may have overdone it in the past leading to enormous topgrowth and not much crop.

[longalot]

i am harvesting between 5-10lbs per plant since mine are mains season variety.
I would like to harvest more and one have some good info on increasing potato harvests.

[Flighty]

longalot what variety and whereabouts are you?

[longalot]

Penland crown

[Flighty]

longalot and whereabouts in the UK, or indeed world, do you grow your Pentland Crowns?

[Mme Muck]

I've no idea if this harvest is good, bad or indifferent, but I've grown Charlottes this year for the first time and had about 6-8 potatoes per plant (goodish size).  I don't really care if that's a poor yield because they are very tasty and we wouldn't get through any more! 

[botanicman]

I grew Vales Emerald (cross between Charlotte and Arran pilot i think) in a big pot. 5 seed potatoes. I reckon I got enough to feed a family of five for three meals. Maybe 4/5 lbs in total. Had a wee bit scab on them. Next year I'll clean the pot thoroughly before using.