Make a Garden Pallet Container

A DIY potato box from pallet wood can be a great space saver in your garden for growing potatoes.

A few years ago we made our own DIY potato box and I’ve been asked a lot since how it worked out.

Grow Potatoes in a Pallet Container

Tips for Using Pallet Potato Boxes

  • Choose potato varieties that are late season not early. To increase depth and yield you need grow to tall potato plants. Early potatoes, and even some mid-season potato varieties (determinate) don’t grow very tall. Late season (indeterminate potatoes) do. We made the mistake of using an early season potato and thus our container didn’t yield much at all and there was wasted space.
  • Make sure you use good soil and compost. If you have poor soil your plants can’t grow well.
  • Don’t cover the plants too much. As the crops grow you want to keep mulching with more soil, compost and straw. Make sure you don’t cover all the plant matter as it needs sunshine to keep growing. We mulched one pallet with wood chips instead of soil and that one failed compared to the straw mulched container. I’d also recommend not using wood chips.
  • Make sure your pallet containers get enough sunshine. There are a lot of potato container designs in which you add wooden boards while the plant grows to allow for adequate light. The pallets can block sunlight so make sure it’s situated in the right place.

Grow Potatoes in a Pallet Container

Pallets for Potato Boxes

Pallets are readily available and a free source of building material. There’s been a trend of re-purposed pallet projects the past decade for this reason.

There is mixed information online however in terms of whether or not pallets are safe to use because they are often treated with a chemical (Methal Bromide) to kill insects.

If they’ve been chemically treated they’ll be stamped MB. Other times they are heat treated and will be stamped HT.

Make sure you check your pallets and choose HT stamped ones.

The idea with growing potatoes in large containers is that as the plant grows you keep adding soil and mulch to increase the depth thus the yield. Does this work? It depends on a couple of things.

Grow Potatoes in a Pallet Container

Conclusion

I would grow potatoes in pallet containers again and not make the same mistakes that we did the first time around as I am curious to know if the yield is higher with the increased depth.

Have you grown potatoes in a potato box? How was the yield difference?

3 thoughts on “Make a Garden Pallet Container”

    • No I haven’t, in our location sweet potatoes need extra heat because of our shorter season and people tend to grow them under fabric for added heat retention. They also tend to sprawl out like a vine, not sure how much depth benefit you’d get growing them in a container. Sorry I haven’t grown them yet!

      Reply

Leave a Comment

shares